Kansas City and St. Louis City ranked poorly in Truth in Accounting’s Financial State of the Cities 2021 report, meaning they are in bad fiscal shape and have high amounts of debt. While this might not be surprising, we should certainly be concerned about these poor scores. The fiscal health of our cities can have real negative impacts on taxpayers.
Truth in Accounting’s report ranks the country’s 75 most populous cities by their taxpayer burden (or surplus for a few cities), a number calculated by dividing the money needed to pay the city’s bills by the estimated number of city taxpayers. A larger taxpayer burden means a larger rank number.
According to the report, Kansas City went into the pandemic in poor fiscal health, with a $1.7 billion debt burden. This equates to a taxpayer burden of $11,300 per person and lands Kansas City at 57th in the country. St. Louis City is in even worse shape. Financial decisions have left St. Louis with a debt burden of $1.3 billion and a taxpayer burden of $14,600 per person. St. Louis ranks 63rd out of the 75 cities in the report. Missouri’s two largest cities both received a D grade for fiscal health.
All the cities on this list, including Kansas City and St. Louis, have balanced budget requirements, meant to “prevent elected officials from shifting the burden of paying for current-year services to future-year taxpayers.” As explained in the report, “if a city has a balanced budget requirement, then spending should not exceed earned revenue brought in during a specific year. Unfortunately, in the world of government accounting, things are often not as they appear.” Cities can do things such as keeping pension and other employment compensation costs out of the budget to give the illusion of a balanced budget. For example, Kansas City has $870 million and St. Louis has $380 million in underfunded pension benefits for city employees, so they each clearly need to be contributing more each year to the city pension funds to achieve true financial stability (as well as moving forward, not backward, with pension reforms).
Times are tough for individuals, businesses, and governments, but we shouldn’t forget the importance of accountability and balancing the budget. Truth in Accounting has released this report in previous years, and St. Louis and Kansas City have continuously ranked in the bottom third of cities. Show-Me Institute researcher Patrick Tuohey wrote this years ago and it still holds true: Instead of chasing shiny new projects and schemes, policymakers “should focus on the less glamorous but more important task of regaining sound fiscal footing.”
