California’s high-risk dashboard is gone but help is on the way

Last October, California’s State Auditor took down a dashboard that had been tracking the financial health of high-risk cities in California since 2019.

Just another loss for transparency in the Golden State.

Providing important public data and key financial metrics for over 470 California cities, the dashboard was an essential tool for holding local governments accountable for their substantial financial problems. Now all evidence of the dashboard’s existence has been scrubbed from the state auditor’s website.

When the dashboard was originally removed, a quick Google search for the dashboard took you to a landing page with a message that the state auditor was shifting resources to prioritize the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR), a key audit of the state’s financial position.

Today, a search for the dashboard will only lead to reports on the removal of the dashboard. Links to the previous dashboard site return a “Page Not Found” message.

The erasure of this critical tool should concern all California residents, but it should be especially troubling to policymakers, who need to be aware of how their cities are performing overall and in comparison to others, and to journalists and analysts, who track and report on concerning financial trends.

The dashboard contained historical municipal data of cities which was invaluable for analyzing historical trends of the financial health of cities. That’s not the kind of information that requires continuous updates — in other words, leaving that information up wouldn’t have taken any staff time away from the ACFR.

So why did the auditor’s office feel the need to remove this data? While technological challenges in maintaining the website may have played a small role, political pressure from state and city officials who resisted public accountability frameworks from the state auditor’s corrective action plans could have contributed. Other possible factors include a desire to avoid negative publicity, and a perceived public apathy toward data transparency. Or, it could have been connected to a leadership change when longtime State Auditor Elaine Howell retired and was replaced by Grant Parks in December 2022.

Regardless, it’s unlikely the dashboard will return any time soon or ever. And if you’re waiting for city officials to call for a return to public accountability for their cities’ financial status, don’t hold your breath. 

Yet California has over $1.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities (debt) at both state and local levels. Tracking financial metrics, such as local liabilities, is crucial.

The truth is the auditor’s office clearly has problems that shutting down the dashboard won’t solve. The California State Controller has been late on the last five ACFRs; they have yet to produce the 2023 ACFR; and they only recently released the 2022 ACFR in March of this year. When the 2022 audit was finally published it revealed a massive coverup attempt by California’s former Secretary of Labor, Julie Su, to forgive about $33 billion in unemployment money lost to fraud. California residents waited two years for late ACFRs to learn bad news they can do almost nothing to fix.

In contrast, the dashboard offered timely, actionable information. Marc Joffe, a policy analyst at Cato, explained how through the dashboard’s 2021 audit process, the city of El Cerrito in the San Francisco Bay Area was determined to be engaging in poor budgeting practices which created expenses the city could not afford. The city was able to course correct, and the 2023 dashboard data revealed that the city had improved its fiscal health.

The California State Auditor’s Local Government High-Risk Dashboard was a high mark in government transparency and accountability. What can be done to fill that void?

Here’s the good news: California Policy Center is creating a similar tool to provide invaluable insights into the financial health of our cities, empowering policymakers, journalists, and residents to hold local governments accountable. The new local fiscal transparency dashboard will be launched in the coming weeks.

Californians can’t allow government officials to sweep bad fiscal news under the rug. The public must have access to the tools necessary to ensure government budgets are transparent and government officials are held accountable.

Thankfully, help is on the way.

A version of this op-ed by Andrew Davenport, a Policy & Research Associate at California Policy Center, originally appeared in the Orange County Register. Davenport is a research contributor to the new CPC Dashboard, which will be available soon at californiapolicycenter.org.