34 Cities, One County, Very Different Balance Sheets
Orange County looks uniform from the freeway — sun, stucco, strip malls — but its 34 cities are running on wildly different financial engines. Some are flush. Some are quietly draining reserves. A handful are staring down structural deficits they’ve papered over with one-time cash and sales-tax measures. Here’s a fact-checked tour of how they compare and where the money actually stands as of mid-2026.
Two kinds of cities
The first thing worth knowing is that not all city halls play by the same rulebook. Ten of the county’s cities are charter cities — Anaheim, Irvine, Santa Ana, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Buena Park, Placentia, Cypress, Seal Beach, and Los Alamitos — which gives them more autonomy over local affairs, including some taxing and spending powers. The other 24, from Fullerton down to tiny Villa Park, are general law cities that operate under the state’s default framework.
The split doesn’t neatly predict fiscal health. Some of the biggest budget holes (Anaheim) and some of the cleanest books (Newport Beach) sit on the charter side, while the general-law group includes both a city posting a surplus (Garden Grove) and one in a full-blown budget crisis (Fullerton).
The sales-tax map
Most Orange County shoppers pay 7.75% — the state-and-county base rate — because their city hasn’t added a local district tax. But a growing cluster has: Santa Ana, Westminster, Seal Beach, and Los Alamitos top the county at 9.25%, while La Habra, Buena Park, Garden Grove, Placentia, Stanton, Fountain Valley, and La Palma sit in the middle at 8.75%. Across all 34 cities, the average lands around 8.1%.
Those extra fractions of a cent are doing real work. Seal Beach credits Measure GG (0.5%) with wiping out its structural deficit. Los Alamitos leans on Measure Y (1.5%). Fountain Valley points to Measure HH (1%), and Stanton to its own Measure GG penny. In city after city, a voter-approved sales tax is the difference between a balanced budget and a shortfall.
(One note for the detail-oriented: a few cities show scarier rates on ZIP-code lookup tools — Cypress at 10.5%, La Palma at 9.75% — but those reflect ZIP boundaries spilling into neighboring districts like Hawaiian Gardens and Cerritos, not the cities’ own rates, which are 7.75% and 8.75%.)
Who’s actually in the red?
Strip away the accounting maneuvers, and five cities are carrying genuine deficits or gaps heading into fiscal year 2025–26:
Anaheim has the county’s largest hole.
The Disneyland city projected roughly a $50.5 million deficit for FY2024–25 and about $63.9 million for FY2025–26, driven by hotel-tax revenue that hasn’t kept pace with rising police and fire costs. It closed the gap without service cuts by tapping leftover 2021 bond proceeds, the sale of a convention-center parking structure, and set-aside debt funds — one-time money that won’t be there forever.
Fullerton is the cautionary tale.
What began as a planned $9.4 million structural deficit in FY2024–25 has ballooned; the city now projects roughly a $13.7 million shortfall for FY2026–27, and officials have warned reserves could crater to around 2% without action. Two different half-cent tax measures are under discussion, and outsourcing police to the county sheriff has been floated as a way to close the gap.
Costa Mesa reported spending about $7 million more than projected in FY2025–26, with pressure carrying into the next budget.
Placentia absorbed a smaller $1.4 million gap that cost two staff positions, put a 15% hotel-tax hike on the ballot, and faces more strain as an earlier sales-tax increase sunsets.
Irvine, unusually, is arguing about whether it even has a deficit: council members were privately briefed on a possible ~$9 million worst-case shortfall next year, though city leadership insists those are conservative multi-year projections, not adopted deficits.
The “balanced, but…” club
Four more cities are technically balanced while sitting on structural pressure.
Santa Ana adopted a roughly $778 million budget balanced with about $10.5 million in one-time funds, but projects a $30 million cliff when Measure X — its 1.5% sales tax approved in 2018 — begins sunsetting from 2029.
Huntington Beach ended FY2025–26 about $1 million in the black, but only after roughly $3 million in program cuts and $9 million pulled from reserves; without those moves, it would have been about $4 million short.
Orange balanced its books by cutting more than $30 million, leaving a residual gap of nearly $2.6 million.
Westminster held off a roughly $2 million deficit by privatizing city festivals and raising its hotel tax.
And everyone else
The remaining two dozen cities report no deficit — some comfortably (Newport Beach, with the county’s highest median income; Mission Viejo; the Laguna cities), others because a sales-tax measure got them there. Garden Grove stands out as the lone city actively reporting a surplus, around $5.4 million, despite having one of the county’s lower median-income profiles.
A word on the numbers
A few figures in circulation deserve caveats. Deficit numbers move fast — the Fullerton example, where a $9.4 million figure quietly became $13.7 million, is a reminder that any budget snapshot ages quickly. The demographic figures here (population, median age, housing, income, poverty) are rounded U.S. Census / American Community Survey estimates and lag reality by a couple of years. And the sales-tax rates are current to 2026 CDTFA schedules; the one worth flagging is Laguna Beach, whose actual rate is 7.75% despite an 8.75% figure that has floated around.
Orange County cities at a glance
Sources: sales-tax rates from California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA) 2026 schedules; budget figures from city budget documents and Voice of OC / local reporting, mid-2025 through spring 2026; demographics are rounded U.S. Census / ACS estimates. Budget conditions change quickly — treat the status column as a snapshot. Figures for cities not independently re-verified in 2026 (most of the “no deficit” entries) are carried from the original compilation and are worth confirming against each city’s latest adopted budget.
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