Opinion: This Is What I Have Been Saying. The County Budget Just Confirmed It. By Marc Hunter Lewis

The Marin Independent Journal reported this week that supervisors are reviewing a proposed 902 million dollar county budget with 8.25 million dollars in one‑time spending, including 1.5 million to cushion the blow from House Resolution 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Budget Director Josh Swedberg told supervisors the county remains balanced over the coming three years “given our current assumptions,” then warned that those assumptions could change. County Executive Derek Johnson described Marin’s roughly 30 million dollars in reserves as a glide path that “ultimately kicks the can down the road.”

This is exactly the situation I have been describing to District 5 voters from the day I entered this race.

I have been saying that roughly 37 percent of Marin County’s budget flows from state and federal sources, that this dependency is our central fiscal vulnerability, and that no Sacramento relationship or letter‑writing campaign is going to fix it. The IJ story and the numbers behind it confirm every piece of that. Property tax growth, which funds most of the county’s discretionary spending, has been revised downward from the historical 5 percent to 4 percent for the next two fiscal years, with only a modest uptick assumed later. HR 1 puts more than 6,700 Marin residents at risk of losing Medi‑Cal and about 1,500 at risk of losing CalFresh, and California counties are by law the healthcare provider of last resort for adults. CalFresh administrative changes alone are projected to cost Marin an additional 4.2 million dollars.

At the same time, the governor’s May Revision includes no specific allocation for counties’ acute‑care obligations and maintains a proposal to transition mobile crisis response from a mandatory Medi‑Cal benefit to an optional one in 2027. The Legislative Analyst’s Office still projects roughly 35 billion dollars in annual state structural deficits beginning in 2027‑28, and California’s Safety Net Reserve has already been drained. At the federal level, interest on the national debt is now above 1 trillion dollars a year and projected to more than double again over the next decade, meaning every level of government above us is under pressure to pull back on the transfers counties rely on.

That is the context in which we are now talking about “tightening our belts.” If we get this wrong, we will end up cutting exactly the front‑line programs that keep people out of the emergency room, out of jail, and out of encampments, while calling those cuts “savings.”

We are not saving. We are just moving the bill.

As a candidate for supervisor and a policy advocate who has spent years working on municipal budgets, I think we need to start with a simple distinction that is missing from the conversation: savings and cuts are not the same thing.

Savings are structural changes that reduce the cost of delivering a service without reducing the service itself. If we consolidate redundant payroll and HR platforms across our tangle of local agencies into a shared system with clear service‑level agreements, that is a saving. If we modernize parcel taxes so revenue grows with the number of units on a parcel instead of staying flat while density rises, that is a saving. If we put publicly owned land to work through shared‑equity workforce housing that generates mortgage interest and a long‑term public equity stake instead of leaving it idle, that is a saving. These kinds of moves create recurring fiscal space that makes future budgets easier to balance.

Cuts are reductions in what the county actually does for people. When we cancel a behavioral health contract, that is a cut. When we eliminate Medi‑Cal eligibility positions so workload per staff member spikes just as HR 1 makes documentation more complex, that is a cut. When we defund domestic violence crisis intervention because the contract is small and politically quiet, that is a cut. None of those choices erase the underlying needs. They show up later as uncompensated emergency care, more jail bookings, larger encampments, and longer, more expensive involvement with child welfare and the courts.

This year, the major pressure points are obvious. HR 1 is likely to increase churn in Medi‑Cal and CalFresh and drive up county administrative costs. Proposition 1’s restructuring of the state’s behavioral health financing will shift more Mental Health Services Act dollars to Sacramento and push counties to retarget what remains, in some cases away from prevention and outreach. State analysts are warning that structural deficits and competing obligations will limit the ability to backfill counties when federal support erodes.

In that environment, my commitments are these.

First, protect the front‑end systems that keep people from falling into crisis in the first place. That means Medi‑Cal eligibility and navigation, CalFresh and CalWORKs administration, behavioral health and substance use treatment, domestic violence and sexual assault services, and homelessness prevention and supportive housing. These programs are not where you look for “savings.” They are the investments that keep pressure and cost from exploding elsewhere in the system.

Second, adopt a budget process that forces us to be honest about the downstream price of cuts. When the Board of Supervisors considers reducing a safety‑net program, they should see, at the same meeting, a five‑year projection of the expected impact on ER visits, jail bookings, shelter bed‑nights, and child welfare caseloads. If we are cutting a behavioral health contract to save 3 million dollars in 2027, the public deserves to see what that is likely to cost in crisis response by 2031. If we are not willing to show our work, we should not be making the cut. That is what target‑based budgeting means in practice: starting from a realistic multi‑year forecast that assumes flat or declining intergovernmental revenue, then forcing real trade‑offs into the open.

Third, chase real savings where they actually live: in duplication and outdated structures.

Marin has more than 70 independent local agencies. The Central Marin Police Authority consolidation showed that we can reduce cost and headcount while maintaining service levels across Corte Madera, Larkspur, San Anselmo, and parts of Greenbrae. We should be applying that lesson to back‑office functions. Targeted functional consolidation in payroll, HR, IT, and procurement across District 5 entities, the City of Novato, the Novato Fire Protection District, North Marin Water District, Novato Sanitary District, Bel Marin Keys CSD, and the county’s dependent districts can generate real recurring savings. Those savings should be explicitly dedicated to stabilizing safety‑net programs.

A District 5 General Managers Forum, chaired by the supervisor’s office, costs nothing to convene and starts that work immediately. A LAFCo‑initiated Municipal Service Review focused on overlapping fire, water, and sewer functions is the formal mechanism for moving from coordination to structural reform.

Fourth, modernize our revenue tools.

Marin’s flat‑rate parcel taxes collapse as density increases. NUSD’s Measure A charges the same 251 dollars per parcel whether it holds one home or fifty units. With 14,405 new units mandated countywide under the Regional Housing Needs Allocation, per‑household revenue from flat parcel taxes will decline sharply even as service demand rises. Meanwhile, the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority has already shown that a per‑square‑foot structure with a per‑unit floor can generate about 19 million dollars annually in a way that scales with the built environment, and Belvedere’s fire measure charges per dwelling unit, not per parcel. Every jurisdiction in District 5 should audit its parcel tax structure against actual growth projections before each renewal cycle.

On the capital side, every city, the county, school districts, fire districts, and water agencies currently run their own nexus studies and set their own impact fees on their own timelines. Western Riverside County’s Transportation Uniform Mitigation Fee, a regional impact‑fee JPA, has already funded more than 150 transportation projects and is expected to raise over 3 billion dollars for infrastructure across its member jurisdictions. Marin can adapt that model. A regional development impact fee JPA here would consolidate studies, standardize collection, and channel revenue toward shared regional priorities like State Route 37 resilience, Hamilton wetland restoration, and Novato Creek flood control. The Central Marin Fire Department JPA already proves that joint powers arrangements can work in this county.

Fifth, treat public assets as public investment, not just line items.

The county owns land. With a median home price around 1.6 million dollars, most of the county’s service workforce now commutes from outside Marin, which degrades every program the county operates through turnover, vacancy, and recruitment costs. A joint powers authority acting as lender on seller‑financed mortgages to public employees on publicly controlled land earns the county mortgage interest, retains a 20 to 25 percent equity share that compounds with appreciation, and recycles that equity into the next generation of homes. Across even 50 homes, that structure would generate more than 1 million dollars annually in interest revenue alone. The initial public investment never leaves the balance sheet. It grows. This is simultaneously a housing policy, a workforce policy, and a fiscal policy, and it costs the general fund nothing.

Finally, deploy district‑scale tools like Enhanced Infrastructure Financing Districts.

The most powerful near‑term revenue tool available to District 5 is an EIFD at the Fireman’s Fund and Hamilton redevelopment corridor. Demolition of the 58‑acre former Fireman’s Fund campus began in 2025 under Bay West Development. An EIFD would capture property tax increment from new development without raising tax rates and without requiring voter approval. The formation timeline is 12 to 18 months. Acting in mid‑2026 aligns EIFD adoption with Bay West’s entitlement applications and produces an estimated 3 to 8 million dollars in bond capacity for infrastructure that the general fund will otherwise have to absorb. The supervisor’s role is to bring the City of Novato to the table, negotiate the tax‑increment split, and engage North Marin Water District, Novato Sanitary, and Novato Fire on capacity planning. The institutional relationships already exist. What has been missing is a supervisor willing to convene them around a coherent revenue plan rather than another round of advocacy for Sacramento backfill.

Some will ask whether Sacramento and Washington can simply fix this. We should absolutely maintain strong relationships with our state delegation, work through CSAC, and show up with hard numbers on how HR 1, Proposition 1, and state budget choices land in Marin. Our legislative affairs staff are right to track how the governor’s May Revision left counties without specific acute‑care backfill, and how federal changes could shift billions of dollars in risk onto counties.

But we cannot build our long‑term strategy on money that higher levels of government increasingly need to cover their own structural gaps. Reserves will help us glide for a while, just as the county executive said. What they will not do is change our trajectory.

That is the choice in front of us. We can keep doing what we have been doing, hoping for federal renewal and state backfill that may never arrive, trimming the safety net in the name of “savings” and watching the downstream costs mount. Or we can do the harder, quieter work of cleaning up duplication, updating how we raise and structure local revenue, and building the regional tools and governance structures that let us protect core programs even when Sacramento and Washington are pulling back.

The budget released this week is not just a plan. It is evidence. The question on the ballot in 2026 is whether District 5 elects a supervisor prepared to build the budgeting discipline, the revenue tools, and the coordination infrastructure that this county needs, or one more cycle of “fight for our share” while the can keeps getting kicked down the road.

That work is what I am running to do.

Marc Hunter Lewis is a policy advocate and candidate for Marin County Supervisor, District 5