City of Bakersfield department heads told the City Council that the rising cost of personnel, insurance and other expenses is driving up budgets even amid efforts to make cuts.
In a series of presentations Monday, department leaders said that despite their best efforts to keep budgets flat and find reductions for the next fiscal year, budget requests are rising, largely driven by costs outside the departments’ control.
“Even if we were able to stay absolutely the same and not change anything, with the generous cost of living (allowance) that the council recently authorized and the increase in operational costs, insurance, et cetera, it would still increase by 9.6%,” City Attorney Virginia Gennaro said of her department’s budget.
That was a message largely echoed by the six department heads who presented their proposed 2026-2027 budgets to the council Monday. The departments were the city manager’s office, city attorney, finance department, parks, police and fire.
The council won’t vote on the city’s budget until June, and Monday’s presentation was one of two that council members are set to receive from department heads.
The next budget presentation meeting is at noon Monday, May 18 in council chambers.
Driving up costs for all departments are across-the-board increases to salaries, pensions, insurance, fees and the general cost of operations.
Department heads were asked to find ways to decrease personnel costs by 5%, but even then, most departments’ budget requests included an increase.
The only department that presented Monday that was able to reduce its proposed budget was the Finance Department, which identified a roughly 0.5% reduction, or about $23,000.
Ward 2 Councilman Andrae Gonzales noted the city’s spending on insurance alone increased by $4.6 million.
“So same delivery of services as this current year for next year and yet all of our expenses have grown just for insurance costs by $4.6 million,” he said.
Recreation and Parks Director Darin Budak said his department requires a large number of people to maintain all the city’s assets, and while the department has sought to keep its staffing levels constant, the number of acres the city is responsible for keeps growing.
“Each and every year we acquire five to 10 acres of streetscape because of new development,” Budak said.
“The city of Bakersfield is very developer friendly and we encourage that but every single one of those streetscapes, we get those and we have to maintain them and that’s happened every year for the last several years,” Budak said.
That does not include parks, he said, noting at least three new parks are in the works.
The Bakersfield Police Department’s budget request reflected an increase of 2.4%, but Chief Brent Stratton said he hopes new technologies can help the city find more efficiencies.
Stratton said he anticipates growth in the department’s real-time information center, a data collection center able to tap into the real-time feeds of roughly 400 public and private cameras.
The city is investing in additional Redflex traffic monitoring cameras, which can identify traffic violations, and is looking into measures such as a drone as a first responder program.
“I anticipate you’re going to see an explosion of it this year. We’re essentially doubling the amount of cameras we have in our city and it’s probably still not enough,” Stratton said.
“I don’t know that California law has caught up with (technology) and going to allow for some of the AI-based traffic cameras and things, but it’ll be interesting to see where the laws go with that in the next couple years.”