The Sacramento City Council spent the week making painful tradeoffs as it works to close a $66 million budget deficit. Council members hiked hundreds of fees, restored some youth and pool funding, and debated the future of a key homeless shelter.<\/p>\n
Key takeaways<\/p>\n
The council approved hundreds of fee hikes<\/a> Tuesday covering fire prevention, animal licensing, theater rentals and parking violations, with the changes taking effect July 1.<\/p>\n Sacramento\u2019s general fund could grow by $7.4 million under the new fee structure<\/a>, though City Manager Maraskeshia Smith vowed not to raise parking meter rates.<\/p>\n A unanimous vote restored $1.3 million<\/a> for a gang prevention and intervention taskforce grant, plus $100,000 for four wading pools and $500,000 to keep 10 neighborhood pools open five days a week.<\/p>\n To pay for the restorations, the council cut vacant parking enforcement officer positions and reallocated homelessness funds<\/a> originally planned for 2028, though a separate $800,000 grant for critical incident response remained unfunded.<\/p>\n The 2026 Point-in-Time Count found unhoused numbers rose 13% across Sacramento County but dropped about 20% within the city of Sacramento.<\/p>\n This report was produced with the assistance of a proprietary tool powered by artificial intelligence based on our own originally reported, written and published content. Before publishing, journalists reviewed this content in compliance with McClatchy Media\u2019s AI policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Sacramento City Council spent the week making painful tradeoffs as it works to close a $66 million…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320725,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[16476,107708,133758,121,15950,123,122],"class_list":["post-320724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sacramento","tag-budget-deficit","tag-council-members","tag-parking-enforcement-officer","tag-sacramento","tag-sacramento-city-council","tag-sacramento-headlines","tag-sacramento-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}