The groan-inducing examples of dubious city spending are plentiful. For what they pay in taxes, are San Franciscans getting a good deal?Despite the obvious ways in which San Francisco’s spending habits raise eyebrows, there’s no easy, holistic way to compare The City with its siblings. Nor is there an easy means to quickly gauge how effectively it spends its residents’ payments, according to experts consulted by The Examiner.
“The city’s budget has ballooned over the past decade, and yet, the progress in addressing critical issues like crime, drug dealing/use, and homelessness, among others, has been frustratingly slow, costly and ineffective,” said Rufus Jeffris, a spokesperson for the business organization Bay Area Council.The median annual property-tax payment in San Francisco County was $8,042 over the five-year period ending in 2021, according to a study published last year by the Tax Foundation.
For example, as a single city and county, San Francisco funds both a municipal police department and a sheriff’s department. The city of Los Angeles funds a police department, while Los Angeles County — a separate entity — maintains a separate sheriff’s department.Regardless of how it raises revenue to balance their budgets, the bulk of a city’s spending tends to be on people — in salaries and benefits — be they teachers, police officers, or garbage collectors.
“I hear you, I feel you, but a really easy way to make them not go up is to live in a really undesirable place,” Auxier said.If just one of San Francisco’s largest employers decided to stop paying The City’s relatively high business taxes by relocating or busing its employees to offices outside county limits, it could save tens of millions of dollars a year — while blowing a hole in The City’s budget.
However, achieving consensus on a proposal that would lower taxes for The City’s largest companies while raising them on others is proving to be challenging. Businesses across the board have been pushing for a tax cut. Still, city officials want to keep overall tax collections the same — or “revenue-neutral” — while at the same time giving small businesses a tax cut, which could mean tax hikes for some midsized companies.
Meanwhile, a business representative close to the negotiations, speaking on condition of anonymity because the talks were ongoing, said that some of The City’s biggest companies are studying the potential for moving operations somewhere close to San Francisco and busing employees to work.
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