Corporations, organizations, and government institutions draft budgets to control their cash flows, sales, expenses, and assets. The image of the financial health of an organization is built by the financial budget at that particular time (Telvin, 2020). Any organization which makes profits in the form of money or spends money in its operations must have a financial budget. This paper analyses and evaluates the budget of the city of San Diego for the last three years. San Diego is among the major cities in the United States, with a projected population of 1.5 million people residing in the town, as by the statistics of 2019 (Balac & Hörl, 2021). The city of Los Angeles is the only city that outdoes San Diego population-wise.
San Diego is in California state, and it is the second-largest inhabited city. The city is a trading center that serves the region and the metropolitan area of San Diego-Tijuana. The leading financial drivers of San Diego include; operations of the defense forces and the military, travels, domestic and foreign trade, and industrial manufacturing (Telvin, 2020). The budget for San Diego covers the financial years that run from day one of July to the last day of June of the following financial year. The municipal budget planning has the burden of engaging the committee members to engage and pass the priorities that are within the budget. When the assembly face has been passed in conjunction with the agencies, the mayor, the chief administrative officer, and the chief financial officers work hand in hand to develop a budget plan.
After a budget has been drafted, the committee then holds public budget proceedings in various parts of the town, preferably in selected town halls. The move is to make the public aware of the new budget, and if possible, they are allowed to make any possible changes by preferring what is suitable for the budget. There has been significant improvement in the economic growth of San Diego; the adopted budget must therefore focus on meaningful income-generating activities across the city. Property tax, sale tax, transient occupancy tax, and franchise fees. The budget that is yet to be adopted amalgamates the growing trends of the positive, primary economic data with a similar softening in the year over year in most revenue resources (Faulconer, 2020). The table below indicates fund revenues for the fiscal year 2020 overall fund revenues.
Table1: Fiscal Year 2020 General Fund Revenues (millions)
The budget for the 2020 fiscal year general revenue fund was $1.55 billion, a growth of 7.8% or $112.7 million from the financial budget of the fiscal year 2019. The general fund is drawn from the four primary income sources for the city of San Diego: sales taxes, property taxes, franchise fees and transient occupancy taxes. The 2020 budget has the four major income-generating sources accounting for 72.2% of the city’s general fund revenue. It is expected to increase by a further $69.4 million, or 6.6%, than that of the previous financial year (Faulconer, 2020). The 2019 fiscal year recorded an improvement in the local economic trends; however, the improvement rates were less than the previous years.
Even though the budget by the government does not presume a fiscal recession, the proposal touches on the possible and future recession impacts. The assumption made for the present downturn by the administration shows a significant slowdown than the recession that occurred nearly a decade ago, but a lesser slowdown than the one witnessed in 2009. A recession of one year between 2019 and 2020 could lead to almost 70 billion in revenue losses and a further deficit of 40 billion dollars. In the first and second years following a recession, the loss in revenue could be $25 billion, to $15 billion, and $20 billion for the third year (Faulconer, 2020). San Diego has a robust financial policy regarding taxes, fees, and how residents are charged.
San Diego’s policies aim to ensure that every citizen can pay taxes, charges, and costs. The number of city inhabitants who are likely to violate the guidelines is significantly reduced through the policies. In a bid to ensure that the citizens were not overwhelmed by the burden of paying excess taxes, the government built recreation centers. The state also imposed limits on particular expenses and permits to ensure that citizens were relieved on expenditures and protected them from exploitation by the city officials.
The code of ethics dictates that officials declare their likely conflicts of interests; this is a move taken to ensure that officials do not impose fines and taxes on expenses made by the citizens that will directly benefit the officials imposing the tariffs. The Act stipulates that the senior officials must report their conflict of interest to the committee (Telvin, 2020). Since taxable revenue grew from $15 million in 2018 to $18.6 million in 2019, the internal change signifies that there are opportunities for revenue advancement.
References
Balac, M., & Hörl, S. (2021). Synthetic population for the state of California based on open-data: examples of San Francisco Bay area and San Diego County. In 100th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB).
Faulconer, K. (2020). Adopted Budget Fiscal Year 2020. City of San Diego Official Website. Web.
Telvin, A. (2020). Office of the independent budget analyst (IBA). City of San Diego Official Website. Web.