San Ramon's Budget Looks Balanced. The Numbers Tell a Different Story.

The San Ramon City Council approved a preliminary $85.3 million General Fund budget for fiscal year 2026-27 on May 12th. City staff called it a balanced budget. Finance Director Jennifer Wakeman, in the same meeting, called it something more honest: evidence of a "continuing deficit and growing dependency on Measure N revenues."

Video Credit : City of San Ramon Youtube Channel

Both descriptions are technically accurate. That tension is the fiscal story San Ramon residents need to understand.

Here is the reality underneath the balanced headline.

Remove Measure N, the temporary 1% sales tax voters approved in November 2024, and San Ramon's budget shows a $13.7 million structural deficit. That means the city spends $13.7 million more per year than it brings in from its permanent, recurring revenue sources. That figure grew from $12.1 million the prior year. The city is not closing the gap. It is widening it.

Measure N was sold to voters as a 10-year bridge to give the city time to fix a structural problem that had been building for at least six years. It expires in 2035. In year two of that bridge, the city is leaning on it more than year one, not less.

To reach a genuinely balanced operating budget by the time Measure N expires, the city's own 10-year financial model requires expenditure growth to average no more than 2% annually from now through 2035. This year, expenditure growth came in at 6.6%. That is three times the target.

Because year two fell short, the required discipline in every remaining year must now be steeper than the original plan called for.

The city's Finance Director said this directly: "Efforts on the financial resilience framework need to continue in earnest." That framework, published as an attachment to the May 12th staff report, lists six policy areas that still require council action: infrastructure maintenance policy, reserve policy, pension funding policy, other post-employment benefits funding policy, department programming review, and revenue generation strategy.

The last two have not been addressed in any public meeting this budget cycle.

That final item, revenue generation, is where the conversation needs to go and has not.

Attached is the budget presentation provided along with meeting.

At the May 12th meeting, the discussion of how the city plans to grow revenue centered on the possibility of another voter tax measure. That answer is incomplete.

San Ramon is one of the few cities in California without a business tax. The city manager acknowledged that comparable cities with business taxes generate $4 to $9 million annually from that source. San Ramon also has a hotel tax set at 7.25%, while neighboring Dublin, Pleasanton, and Livermore charge 8%.

The city has no published commercial vacancy rate, no business recruitment scorecard, and no targeted grants strategy to replace $523,000 in federal grant funding that expired this year.

None of these options are silver bullets. But none of them have been seriously studied, costed, or presented to the public. Telling residents that another tax measure is the only path forward, without first exhausting other options and showing the analysis, is not fiscal leadership. It is fiscal resignation.

To be clear: city staff is doing serious work. Finance Director Jennifer Wakeman and Budget Manager Yuliya Elbo have brought more transparency to San Ramon's finances in the past year than existed in the previous five. The city's new financial norms, budget guidelines, and 10-year modeling represent real progress.

That work deserves recognition.

But progress on process is not a substitute for a plan.

San Ramon has more than 60 parks, a landscape maintenance contract baseline of $16.5 million annually, and is adding new park obligations each year without publicly presenting their lifetime operating costs before approving them. The city has $50.8 million in long-term debt including pension obligation bonds requiring fixed payments regardless of investment market conditions. Parks and Community Services expenditures grew 24.75% in the FY27 preliminary budget, the largest single-department increase in the budget.

There are cost-side ideas worth studying too. A tiered park maintenance approach, full service for high-use parks and reduced frequency for lightly used ones, saves money without closing anything. City Administration contract services grew from $187,000 to $2.48 million in four years.

That warrants a public line-by-line accounting. A number of city parks sit on school grounds maintained through an arrangement with the San Ramon Valley Unified School District whose cost-sharing terms have never been presented publicly in a budget context.

The full 10-year financial model from outside consultant Russ Branson goes before the council on July 14, 2026. That presentation will, for the first time, give the public a detailed look at the assumptions, scenarios, and trade-offs the city faces between now and 2035.

Every San Ramon resident with a stake in city services, which is everyone, should watch that meeting. The decisions made in the next two years will determine whether Measure N was a bridge to something sustainable, or simply a delay.

Yohannes Tilahun is a San Ramon resident whose family has been rooted in the community for over a decade.