If you’ve never read a city budget
This site has more than twenty pages and no obvious front door. Here is the order I’d read them in — five pages, about forty minutes, each one assuming only what the one before it established.
You do not need to live in Berkeley for this to make sense. The structure is the same in most American cities; only the numbers change.
The path
In order — each step builds on the last
The whole problem in one metaphor: an envelope, four levers, and a recurring gap of about $29 million a year. No jargon, no tables.
After this you know
What “structural deficit” means, and why it is different from a bad year.
The same story with the actual numbers attached: where every tax dollar comes from, where it goes, and the roughly $2.1 billion of infrastructure the city owns but has not funded.
After this you know
The shape of a $905M budget, and that the deficit is small next to the unfunded liability behind it.
This is where most outsiders’ intuition breaks. A city is not one bank account — Berkeley runs about 110 separate funds, most of them legally walled off from each other. A city can be broke and flush at the same time, legally.
After this you know
Why “just move the money” is usually illegal, and why the General Fund is the only number that behaves like a household budget.
Having established that the walls are real, this page asks where they legally have doors: six mechanisms by which savings in other funds could relieve the General Fund. The constructive half of the argument.
After this you know
What can actually be done, as distinct from what is merely complained about.
The accountability loop, or its absence: each adopted goal traced to the City Auditor’s 384 recommendations and then to the FY27–28 budget. 76 recommendations were dropped along the way.
After this you know
Whether anything the city promises is checked, by whom, and what happens when it isn’t.
How to read this site
Two things to know before you start
Every non-obvious claim carries a confidence label — High, Moderate, Low, or Unknown — and the counterargument is published alongside the analysis. Where a figure could not be verified against a primary document, it says so rather than rounding the uncertainty away.
This site is maintained by a candidate. Steve Kromer is running for Berkeley City Council in District 1. The analysis is built from primary documents — agendas, adopted budgets, audits, the ACFR — and is meant to survive being checked, but you should read it knowing who wrote it and why. Corrections are welcome and get made.
Where to go next
Once the five are done