City Finances
This past year has seen a nice rebound in city income, although a lot of work lies ahead to get us to where we need to be. Hotel taxes are up as business travel expands and property taxes, the largest component of Burlingame’s budget, are flat whereas in many other communities they have fallen. This is a strong testament to the vibrancy of our community and the attraction of Burlingame, its great schools and parks, to families looking for more space or quality of life.
One of the initiatives I encouraged in my first year on the Council was to create five year budget forecasts as well as more indepth historic trend analysis. We now have financial plans for a 5 year horizon rather than the one year that I found we had been doing in the past. With this longer horizon, in which the significant debts we owe on pensions and retiree health become obvious, the Council agreed at last year’s budget session to set a spending growth limit of 2 percent (the City used to plan on 3% cost increases) and to bank the surplus revenues into reserves and against some of these debts. I will expand on this in the next letter.