Former State Senator John Moorlach's op-ed in the OC Register today laid out how devastating COVID has been to municipal budgets.
Moorlach lays out his metric for determining a municipality's general fiscal health thusly:
The metric I use is the Unrestricted Net Position, or UNP, in the Statement of Net Position, but only for Governmental Activities. I then divide that number by the city’s population to get a per capita number.
For example, Costa Mesa’s 2020 CAFR yields a negative UNP of -$251 million. This city has a quarter-billion-dollar deficit. For uniformity, I use the 2019 population number on Google, based on U.S. Census data, which is 113,159. So the City of the Arts’ per capita UNP is -$2,222. That’s the worst of all 34 OC cities. Put another way, the city has run up debt on each resident of that amount, or -$8,888 per family of four.
Read full op-ed by clicking HERE
I am proud to report that the City of Tustin made the top five in Orange County and the council leadership over the last several years deserve the credit for preparing Tustin for rainy days.
