The More Sacramento Fails, The More Money the City Spends

Sacramento is a city in decline.

The City of Sacramento claims a $66.2 million budget deficit in February 2026. Inquiring minds believe it is much higher.

The Sacramento City Unified School District now admits to a $171 million budget deficit, up from earlier estimates of $43 million. That’s a $128 million swing.

And that’s $237 million total budget deficits for Sacramento. That’s a lot of gross mismanagement.

First, the Sacramento City school district:

The Sacramento City Unified School District, which has teetered on the cliff of insolvency for many years, announced it would cut 60 administrative positions in November as the district deals with a ongoing and quite looming financial crisis.

That is a good place to start. This is the same school district which renamed several schools in 2023, including Sutter Middle School and Kit Carson International Academy, costing $550,000 that they admitted to. Yet more than half of SCUSD students do not meet basic state English standards, and nearly three quarters fail to meet basic state math standards.

“The district was already facing fiscal woes when a September report showed that the district spent $43 million more than expected last year due to a ‘flood’ of costs that popped up later in the year,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “Officials estimate that the district could end up $88 million in the red by the 2027-28 school year if they do not come up with a strict plan.”

The school district got into $43 million worth of trouble with “unbudgeted spending.” A September report included unauthorized contracts and spending on special education. Sounds like fraud that needs Nick Shirley’s attention.

“During the 2024-25 school year, unauthorized contracts across Sacramento City Unified totaled $62 million worth of spending. The special education department represented 98% of those purchases,” Abridged reported in October. They reported that special education department heavily uses outside contractors because of staffing shortages.

But $43 million to $62 million worth? This is the same type of fraud we are seeing reported by Los Angeles Unified School District whistleblowers. Stay turned.

The Sacramento County Office of Education told the SCUSD that to become solvent, it needs to cut $50 million in spending for the 2026-27 school year – or risk state intervention and takeover.

The board approved a fiscal solvency plan back in November that included reducing the number of full-time administrators from 328 to 270 by the 2026-27 school year, saving the district about $14 million.

Wow. Those are well-paid administrators! I calculated 58 administrators at $150,000 salary each plus $50,000 in benefits totals $11.6 million. But it appears they were making about $241,379.31 each in salary and benefits.

270 is how many administrators the district had prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a district spokesperson. So, during the pandemic, the already-fiscally mismanaged school district added 58 additional administrators while all schools were shut down.

They deserve to go broke.

The administrative bloat in California’s public education system is blatant, and didn’t just start.

The Sacramento Bee just reported Why Sacramento City school finances keep worsening monthly, “Earlier this month, the budget services department projected that the district’s fiscal solvency plan for this year, which identified about $63 million in savings, put it halfway toward its goal of addressing the deficit, which stood at $135 million at the time.”

“But new estimates show that the deficit projection should have been closer to $171 million, meaning the district is still $108 million short,” the Bee reported.

Despite district financial officers projecting the district would remain cash solvent through the end of the school year — avoiding a state takeover in that period, district officials said more spending cuts are needed.

Ya think?

I’ve been covering the Sac City Unified School District for years, and they’ve always been insolvent, and grossly mismanaged.

The last Sac City Superintendent Jorge A Aguilar, had a compensation package totaling $646,652.28, for running the schools district into insolvency, according to Transparency California.

Somewhat anecdotally, my son, now 36, attended high school in the Sacramento City Unified School District. We noted even in 2003-2007 his high school years, the high school had 6 Vice Principals on staff, complete with all of their administrative support staffers. No one really knew what they did.

My husband also attended that same high school several decades earlier. They had one Principal, one Vice Principal, 4 school counselors, a school nurse, a librarian, and the same number of students.

Multiply that by all 81 schools, and that’s some administrative bloat, and many were added during the COVID school lockdowns.

The district spend tens of millions of dollars on unauthorized, non-budgeted contracts. Discussions around insolvency aren’t new; the district narrowly avoided a state takeover in 2019 after a shortfall of more than $20 million. We remember and wrote about it then:

Sacramento City School District At Tipping Point: Insolvency Next Year

and the Superintendent gave himself a big pay raise during the COVID school shutdowns:

Sacramento City Schools Superintendent Aguilar Takes a Big Pay Increase While Schools Closed

Yet, in all of the articles about the SCUSD fiscal crisis, not one explains in detail the $43 to $66 million in unauthorized, non-budgeted contracts.

The Bee reports that number got four times larger because according to Interim Chief Business Officer Lisa Grant-Dawson the increase reflected a more accurate accounting, not a sudden spike in costs.

Oh. Sac City Unified hired someone qualified to do the school district accounting.

“Part of the discrepancy stemmed from the financial department’s correction of errors in the first interim budget, including double-counted savings and items that were never implemented.”

Did I already say the school district deserves to go broke. They aren’t teaching children basic math and English, as test scores show. They deserve to go broke.

The more they fail, the more money they spend.

That is the same for the City of Sacramento Mayor and City Council.

The more they fail, the more money they spend.

City Express: City of Sacramento announces $66.2 million budget deficit.

This is in addition to the $12.35 million “Encampment Resolution Funds grant” in 2025 from the California Department of Housing and Community Development “to purchase and construct additional tiny homes for homeless vagrants.

McCarty’s plan includes locations across the city with a variety of solutions to meet homeless residents where they are, he claims. But City Council members aren’t as crazy about the plan.

The first such micro-community — on city-owned land in Councilwoman Lisa Kaplan’s North Natomas district — has received opposition from some area residents, who flocked to City Hall recently with posters to oppose the site, the Sacramento Bee reported. Councilwoman Kaplan has said she would “stand beside” any lawsuit blocking the site’s construction and did not know how the temporary shelter had been picked by city staff.

A dubious city ordinance grants the city manager unilateral authority to approve homeless temporary shelters contracts worth up to $5 million. That’s unmitigated power.

Under the ordinance last year, then-interim City Manager Leyne Milstein selected 4 micro-community sites, one in Kaplan’s district.

So these city-funded micro communities are certainly one way to spend money the city doesn’t have, especially when there are much lower cost, high results programs which actually work when rules and accountability is involved.

But as James O’Keefe just reported in Los Angeles, the homeless are being paid cash, cigarettes, and marijuana in exchange for signatures on California ballot petitions. Maybe Sacramento is as creative, and needs a large homeless population to accomplish this gross voter fraud.

Sacramento Taxpayers are also paying for a “Mobile Veterinary Clinic” for Homeless Drug addicts’ and street people’s pets. The City of Sacramento has decided that rather than pay for drug and mental health treatment for homeless drug addicts,  they will use taxpayer funds to vaccinate and spay/neuter the pets of the City’s homeless.