01
Is Petaluma on a sustainable path?
The short answer, in three numbers.
The question has a real answer, and it can be computed from the city's own audited financial statements — the same documents the council and its auditors work from.
The rest of this page explains what those numbers mean and how they fit together. It takes about ten minutes and assumes no accounting background.
02
Where the money comes from
General Fund revenue, broken down per resident.
Real per-capita revenue, inflation-adjusted to 2018 dollars
03
Where it goes
Spending by category, compensation, and real per-capita growth.
Real per-capita spending, inflation-adjusted to 2018 dollars
04
The budget is a plan; the ACFR is what happened
Budget vs. actual, and where recurring overruns show up.
Each year the council adopts a budget — a plan for the year ahead. The audited record of what was actually spent appears roughly a year later, in the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR). This page uses ACFR figures wherever they exist.
05
A city is a corporation
What the city owns, what it owes, and unrestricted net position.
An annual budget shows one year of money in and out. A balance sheet shows the accumulated position: everything the city owns against everything it owes. Cities publish one; few residents ever see it.
06
The obligations already on the books
Pensions, OPEB, interest burden, and the tread-water test.
07
The infrastructure bill coming due
Net book-to-cost, depreciation, and reinvestment.
Remaining book value of depreciable capital assets
08
The verdict: trajectory, not snapshot
Decoder indicators, full-cost gap, and the computed verdict.
| Indicator | Trend | Latest | Band |
|---|
Full-cost gap over time
The verdict is recomputed every year the data updates.
09
What you can do
Turning what you just read into questions and civic action.
Reading the numbers is the first step; acting on them is the next. These decisions get made by your own city government — so that is where to start.
Questions worth asking
Where to raise them
Your city adopts its budget once a year, usually in late spring — the highest-leverage moment to weigh in. Most council and committee meetings also include a public-comment period, and a clear question on the record carries weight even if you are not an expert.
Go deeper
These are from Strong Towns, an independent nonprofit whose Finance Decoder framework these indicators are based on. They are outside resources, not affiliated with your city.
10
Check our work
Provenance, source documents, and the explorer hand-off.
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