Students will be provided with four financial plans for local governments via Blackboard. These plans outline the challenges that each government is facing over the next few years. The cities selected for the project are:

• San Francisco, CA
• Oakland, CA
• San Bernardino, CA
• San Diego, CA

Each student will be expected to select one of these cities for their project. Each city is experiencing unique challenges that will provide for a variety of problems and solutions to be analyzed and recommended in your essay, depending on which city you choose.
The essay is to consist of the following three sections:

1. An overview of the chosen city (demographics, recent fiscal history, governance, etc.). Take care not to devote too much of your essay to this section. It is the least important to the goal of the project.
2. An overview of the chosen city’s financial plan and the student’s assessment of the city’s financial condition.
3. Identification of three fiscal challenges being faced by the selected City and discussion of hypothetical ways to address these issues.

Using the example of the City of Fresno presented in class during Session 2, three issues that might merit selection would include restoring staffing following a 25% reduction in employees, decreasing the reliance on volunteers to operate and maintain facilities, and beginning to replace older equipment. The student would then make proposals to address these issues, as the City of Fresno did in their recent plan, such as negotiating salary reductions, revising work rules, and franchising government services.

All of these changes would free up existing revenues or generate new revenues that would in turn facilitate addressing the three issues. There may be a one-to-one relationship between a problem and a solution, or solutions may not be directly related to problems but would still generate revenues that could be used to address the problems. While there is no right answer in terms of how the identified challenges might be addressed, students should take care to analyze their chosen city carefully. The problems in each city are different as are the appropriate solutions, and the degree to which these nuances are understood and communicated in the essay will be a component of the instructor’s evaluation of each essay.

Essays are expected to be at least 10 pages in length when typed double spaced in 12 point font.
Essays will be scored based on comprehensiveness, effectiveness of the analysis, reasonableness of the
recommendations, and writing mechanics.

11 Pages

APA – 6 References