Transparency

One of the things I've learned in life is that if you want a group to make progress in solving problems, they need to have reliable information before making key decisions. I learned this working with the Peace Corps. I learned this in helping cities and nonprofits fund affordable housing and community development. And I convey this to my university students.

I understand budgets and finance

In my work, I crunched numbers and analyzed the finances of cities and counties who were bank clients. The bank's aim was to understand financial risks and make good investment decisions as they issued loans, provided letters of credit and underwrote municipal bonds. We simply wanted to make sure the municipalities were financially strong, fiscally well-managed and able to repay their loans. The cities and counties sought bank financing for affordable housing and other community development projects. Curious about our city's dire situation, I decided to use my skills to take a look at El Cerrito—not because it was a client (it wasn't), but because it was my home. I wanted to understand why the state auditor deemed El Cerrito to be at risk of bankruptcy. I didn't have my eyes on political office.

I began by downloading financial reports presented to the city council and immediately noticed that they lacked the details necessary to see a clear picture. I noticed some month's ending balances did not match the next month’s beginning balances, which is not necessarily alarming. I equate it with balancing my personal checkbook. Mistakes happen. It just takes a bit of time to figure out if a decimal point was misplaced, a number was accidentally reversed, or a line item miscategorized.

A puzzling fiscal situation

In so much as accounting can be “fun,” forensic accounting is like solving a puzzle. I find satisfaction in going through the numbers and figuring out how the pieces fit. I like reading the footnotes where important information is often hidden in fine print. I began the El Cerrito “puzzle” by asking city management for more detailed financial statements—requests that were repeatedly denied.

I was initially given three excuses. First, I was told the data was in a “proprietary computer program” for which I did not have a license. I offered to buy a license but was ignored. Next, I was told the public could not be given detailed financial reports because they might “manipulate the data”—which, ironically, was exactly what I wanted to do. Not manipulate to misrepresent, but rather to move and analyze numbers to better understand what was going on. Then I was told that no other city would give me the detailed reports I requested, which I found surprising because I regularly looked at such reports in my work.

Giving the city the benefit of the doubt, though, I sent written requests for detailed financial reports to most of the roughly 100 cities that make up the nine counties of the greater Bay Area, from small cities like Colma and Piedmont, to the big three of San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. I also sent requests to the bottom 10 cities on the state auditors’ report, including El Cerrito. Nearly every single city gave me exactly what I requested. There were a handful of notable exceptions—El Cerrito and Fremont (who denied my request) and a few that simply didn't reply or had less frequent reporting periods. Neighboring Albany—who we often like to compare ourselves with—was completely transparent and offered an entire data dump.

Financial Advisory Board (FAB) 

In 2020, I joined El Cerrito’s Financial Advisory Board (FAB) with the encouragement of councilmember Paul Fadelli, who asked that I go through the monthly financial reports and produce summary bullets for the city council highlighting important trends and areas of concern. I readily agreed to do it, naively thinking that as a member of FAB I could get more complete financials. I was wrong. I was told by the city’s then-finance director that it was “not FAB’s role to look into the weeds” but rather it should look only at the finances “from a high level.” I was told FAB “didn't have have the time” to pour through the details. After I explained that I did have time and would be happy to do it alone if I could just get the data, the finance director angrily shot back that he did not work for me. I regret not reminding him that as a public official, he indeed did work for me—and for every resident of El Cerrito.