Comment by dragonwriter
2 days ago
Seattle is a city, San Francisco is a combined city and county; it literally has a lot of functions that Seattle doesn't. Add a population based pro-rata share of King County’s budget to Seattle’s budget and you get something not all that much less than the budget of the City and County of San Francisco.
Also, California has realigned a number of what were previously (and are still in other states) state functions to counties, including some felony incarceration that would otherwise be in state prisons, so, even compared to out-of-state city and county combined functions, SF has more it is required to do.
"King County provides local and regional services to nearly 2.4 million residents, with a 2025 Proposed Budget of $10.2 billion and nearly 17,700 employees."[1]
Seattle's population is around 755,000. 755,000 / 2,400,000 ≈ 0.315. 10,200,000,000 * 0.315 = 3,213,000,000.
3.2 billion + 8.3 billion = 11.5 billion.
15 billion (San Francisco budget) - 11.5 billion (Seattle budget) = 3.5 billion.
So San Francisco's budget is around 3.5 billion dollars higher.
[1] - https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/executive/governance-leadersh...
It is not that simple. San Francisco budget includes the SFO airport but Seattle budget doesn’t include that. That’s part of Port of Seattle, which is not part of city of Seattle.
Also, sound transit provides much transportation services in Seattle, but it is not part of city of Seattle. On the other hand, SFMTA is a department of city and county of San Francisco.
Since their populations, economies, and geographies are comparable, it seems like the play is to compare cost-to-effect ratios between the two cities on a service-for-service basis. I've done this with my own city before and was surprised to find that there wasn't anything particularly egregious in the budget outside of some cultural events I wouldn't have chosen to support. I suspect you probably find comparable levels of bloat in comparable municipalities, though, so even two municipalities being similar wouldn't necessarily be a good indication that they were using resources effectively.
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