• Where Does Wildomar Rank?

If you guessed #476 out of 481 California cities... you were right. 

I created this graphic from stats at ClearGov.com.

The point of this blog is to show how small our budget is, and that without money (funds) there are a lot of things we can't do that our nearby cities can do. 

Is that an excuse? 

If you want to read it that way, then yes, it's an excuse... which is also known as an explanation. Take it whichever way works best for you.

Another thing to note is that these stats do not include increased revenues from Measure AA, or any new businesses that have come online since 2017.

With the aid of a website called ClearGov.com I was able to find some stats about Wildomar that, I'm guessing, most people haven't seen before. These stats are not about crime rates, just tax rates... but there are probably some that would say the two should be listed together. ☺

There is a lot to explore at that website, so I'll leave most of that to you, but I will share some interesting graphics I found there (others I cobbled together for ease of comparison, like above). 

One vexing thing is that the stats are for 2017 instead of through last week... but it's hard to be demanding when using to a free service. 

One of the countless charts and diagrams that can be found at ClearGov.

78% of our households are comprised of families (14% higher than median), with 57% of our households being married couples (15% less than the median according to ClearGov). 

Seems to me like those two numbers would make more sense if they were reversed, but logic and statistics are barely kissing cousins.

This link should take you to this graphic at ClearGov.

We have a 17% higher than median population, and slightly higher than median household income.

Now this is where I can get into trouble because I'm not a statistician (even though I was total baseball stat geek until my late 30's) so I'm not going to pretend to know the nuances of the charts I'm about to share... but I can give my surface level interpretation. Buyer Beware.

In the first graphic you will see Wildomar's 2017 revenues broken into percentages instead of actual values. In the second graphic you'll see Temecula's 2017 revenues and then I'll point to some differences.

Municipal revenues come from several sources. Taxes are usually the lion's share. Taxes generally come from a few sources: sales taxes and property taxes being the biggest. 
Pro Tip: the higher the property tax percentage vs the sales tax percentage means the higher the burden on individual families to pay for city services.

The above pie chart(s) can be found through the following link. (I've enhanced the pie charts for easy reading here, but the data is the same).

Once there, the first pie chart you'll see is "revenues". From there, you can click on any slice of the pie to get further analysis of that category.

You can see that 83% Temecula's total revenues came from various taxes, and of that a 64% comes from sales taxes, with their property tax burden well under 20%. Compare that to Wildomar where we get most of our taxes from property tax, and not even a quarter of the city's revenues come from sales tax.

Let's take another look at the amount of taxes that Wildomar brings in. First will be total taxes, followed by sales taxes.

The per capita take in taxes was $194, which was considered 77% lower than similar towns.
Link to ClearGov revenue page for Wildomar.

In the next graphic you'll see the stark difference between Wildomar and Temecula's sales taxes, both total and per capita.

I looked for similar stats of either Lake Elsinore or Murrieta and I got the old "coming soon" graphic.

Remember, the per capita above is the result of simple math by dividing the the total sales taxes by the number of residents, It is not how much each resident actually pays.

Part of the reason why Wildomar's per capita is so low is not because we don't pay a lot of sales taxes as individuals, it's because most of our purchases are not in Wildomar due to the lack of shopping options. Which also limits how much non residents can spend here too.

Conversely, it's not that Temecula's residents pay so much more than we do, it's that they have a lot of people from out of town contributing to their economy. 

Temecula has a population of 114,000, we have a population of 36,000. That puts us at roughly a third the size of Temecula, but as you can see, our sales tax revs aren't simply a third of theirs, which would have us close to $15M instead of under $2M, they're about 11.5%. A huge difference.

The last two graphics I'll share are Peer Distribution Analysis and our Financial Overview. ClearGov has chosen the following cities as Wildomar's peers and then marked the difference when it came to taxes collected per capita. 

Here is a link to the page with this graphic.

When revenues are about 70% lower than similarly sized towns (see graphic below), it follows that expenses would likewise be off by 70% (Yay!). 

Thing is, when expenditures are down, that is an indicator that maintenance, services and amenities are down too (Boo!).

You may notice that in 2017 there appears to be a large surplus. That is when we received a large, one time, payout to make up for the the many years of having our VLF funds taken by the state. 

Ok, what did we learn here? 

Probably nothing, but these charts and graphs do illustrate how limited our funds are and that has a direct bearing on the number of first responders, code enforcement, street repairs and other city services we can contract.

All in all, though we are sorely underfunded compared to most other cities, we are far better off than we would have been if we'd have stayed in the county (are we really still having this discussion in 2019?). If you're in doubt of that, check out any of the nearby county areas and then let's chat.

I asked city staff about ClearGov and was told, "The City does not contract or have a relationship for services with this company." 

I asked ClearGov about their stats and this was their answer: all figures are verified and we get state reported data and aggregate it in our database.

•                •                •

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. 
– Benjamin Disraeli 

There are three kinds of blogs: worthless, self serving and presumptuous. Wildomar Rap vacillates between the three.

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