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Article written by Bret Prebula, city manager of Suisun City

Why Half-Measures Will Kill Us, Why Tax Measures Without Growth Plans Are Not Plans, and Why No One in This Region Is to Blame

We have been treating a regional fiscal emergency with individual band-aids, applied with skill and good intent by people doing exactly what their charters and politics permit. The math is unambiguous. The window to act collectively is closing faster than most people want to admit. And the hardest truth in this entire conversation is one almost no one is willing to say out loud:

No city in Solano County is at fault for where we are.

That is the line. That is the frame. Everything else follows from it.

Start with the Scale, Not the Fear

In every strategic planning session I have ever been part of, the instinct is the same: lead with the risks. List the barriers. Identify what could go wrong. It feels responsible. It feels like due diligence. But in my experience, and in the body of research on organizational decision-making, that instinct systematically underserves us. When you open with risk, you anchor the room to scarcity. When you open with the true scale of the opportunity, you unlock a different kind of thinking entirely.

The same principle applies, with enormous urgency, to the fiscal and economic reality facing Solano County’s cities and the County itself right now. If we are ever going to solve this, we have to look at the full picture first. Not what we fear, but what is actually at stake, what is actually needed, and what becomes possible if we act with unity and speed.

The numbers are clear

When you examine the recent budget histories of Solano County’s cities, Fairfield, Vallejo, Vacaville, Dixon, Rio Vista, Benicia, Suisun City, alongside the County itself, a pattern emerges that no individual jurisdiction wants to announce out loud. Recurring structural deficits. Service cuts made not because those services lacked value, but because there was simply no money. Deferred maintenance quietly accumulating into future crises. Positions left vacant to avoid layoffs. Programs suspended. Capital projects indefinitely postponed.

These were not failures of leadership. Read that sentence again. They were not failures of leadership. They were the honest, difficult, responsible choices of public servants trying to balance books that simply do not balance under the current revenue structure. The services cut were needed. The positions eliminated served real people. The infrastructure deferred is now degraded. The fiscal shortfall was not a symptom of excess. It was the gap between what a functioning community requires and what a 1970s and 1980s revenue model can produce in 2026.

I want to be even more direct about this, because I know how this article will be received and by whom. Every city manager, every finance director, every council member who has presented a balanced budget in the last fifteen years has done so with integrity. The problem is not the people. The problem is the definition.

A balanced budget that is balanced by reducing service levels below what residents actually need is not a balanced budget. It is a managed shortfall with better marketing.

That is not an indictment. That is the structural reality of California municipal finance after Proposition 13, after the dissolution of redevelopment, after the steady erosion of property tax share to the state, after the shift of retail to e-commerce that does not generate local sales tax the way a brick-and-mortar storefront did. Every city in this county inherited a revenue model built for a different economy. Every city has done the responsible thing inside that broken model. And the responsible thing inside a broken model is, by definition, not enough.

Estimated Regional Operational Shortfall

Conservative Annual Estimate

Aggregate operational and service gap across Solano County jurisdictions: $76M to $100M+

Annual capital need: roads, parks, public facilities, core infrastructure: ~$100M

Total annual regional need: ~$200M

Add what it would actually cost to bring roads, parks, public facilities, and core infrastructure up to a genuine quality standard, not gold-plated, just functional and dignified, and we are looking at a figure approaching $200 million in annual need. Every year. Not a one-time fix. An ongoing requirement for a region of our size and density to function at the level its residents deserve.

The Sales Tax Lens: What Economic Activity Does $200M Require?

Here is where the framing becomes clarifying rather than overwhelming. California’s local sales tax structure is not simple. Base rates, add-ons, Bradley-Burns allocations, and Prop 172 overlays make it genuinely complicated. But we can use a clean, illustrative benchmark to understand the scale of economic activity required.

At a 1% local sales tax rate, generating $200 million annually in tax revenue requires $20 billion in taxable retail and commercial economic activity per year flowing through this region. That is the simple math. Twenty billion dollars. Every year.

To generate $200 million at 1% sales tax, Solano County would need $20 billion in annual taxable economic activity. That is not an abstraction. It is a clear, measurable target for regional development strategy.

Now consider Travis Air Force Base. By most economic impact analyses, Travis generates approximately $3 billion in annual regional economic benefit through employment, contracts, spending, and induced economic activity. It is the most consequential single economic asset in Solano County, and we are deeply grateful for its presence and its people.

But do the division. Twenty billion divided by three billion means we would need the equivalent economic impact of nearly seven Travis Air Force Bases to close this gap through sales tax alone. Seven. That is the scale of what this region requires to achieve genuine fiscal sustainability, not through a single instrument, but as a representation of the magnitude of economic transformation we are discussing.

Why Tax Measures Without Growth Plans Are Not Plans

I want to address the most popular response to municipal fiscal stress in California, because it is going to be the first thing critics of this article reach for: just pass a sales tax measure. Or a parcel tax. Or a UUT. Or a TOT increase.

I am not against revenue measures. I have supported them. They have a place in any responsible fiscal toolkit. But we have to be honest about what a tax measure is and what it is not.

A tax measure without a growth plan is a thicker straw in a shrinking cup. It pulls more from the same base, faster. It buys time. It does not create a future. In the case os Suisun City, we speak of our Resiliency Plan; tax measure, 14 in fill projects and now exploring expansion. The tax measure was meant to give us time not solve the problem.

And in a region with the demographic, economic, and infrastructure profile of Solano County, time bought without transformation is time spent moving the funeral, not preventing it.

Consider the arithmetic. A typical half-cent local sales tax in a Solano County city, depending on size, generates somewhere between $2 million and $15 million annually. Useful. Real. Worth pursuing on its own merits. Now place that against a $200 million annual regional need. You would need every city in the county to pass a half-cent measure, and the County itself, and you would still be capturing perhaps a fifth of the gap, while imposing a regressive cost on the residents who can least afford it.

A tax measure without a growth plan tells residents to pay more for the same services they are already getting in diminished form. A growth plan without a tax measure tells residents we will figure out the operating gap on faith. Neither one alone is honest. Tax policy and growth strategy are not alternatives. They are the two legs you need to walk.A region cannot hop to prosperity on one of them.

A Word for the People Who Will Hate This Article

I know who is going to push back hardest on this piece, because I respect them and I have worked alongside many of them for years. Fiscal conservatives who believe the answer is always cut more and tax less. Slow-growth advocates who believe any expansion is a betrayal of community character. Residents who have watched promised developments not deliver and are tired of being asked to trust again. Council members who have been burned by regional efforts that asked their city to give and gave little back. Critics who will say I am a city manager carrying water for a developer.

To all of you, i I am not asking anyone to abandon their beliefs. I am asking us to be honest about what those beliefs, applied to a structurally broken revenue model, actually produce over a twenty-year horizon. They produce exactly what we are looking at right now. Cracking roads, depleted reserves, retirements not replaced, programs ended quietly, libraries on shorter hours, parks not maintained, and the slow, dignified, deeply painful experience of watching a region you love decline at a pace just slow enough that no single year ever feels like the emergency.

That is what managed decline looks like from the inside. It does not look like a fire. It looks like a patient quietly losing weight.

How Successful Companies Grew Into Their Revenue

The Right Analogy for the Right Audience

Here is the analogy I want the skeptics to sit with, because I think it answers the deepest fear underneath the criticism. The fear that a regional growth strategy is a leap, a gamble, a bet-the-farm risk that responsible stewards should not take.

Look at the companies that built durable, world-changing economic engines in our lifetime. Not the meme stocks. Not the flameouts. The real ones. Almost every one of them grew into their revenue. They did not balance their books in year one. They built a base, took on disciplined risk, and let the revenue catch up to the strategy.

Costco operated for years on margins so thin that Wall Street analysts repeatedly questioned the model. The company’s leadership held the line: build the membership base, build the locations, build the supply chain, and trust that scale would deliver the returns. It did. Spectacularly.

Even Disney, in the 1950s, bet the entire company on a theme park concept that bankers refused to finance and that family members openly called Walt’s folly. The land in Anaheim was orange groves. The revenue model was unproven. The build-out cost more than the company could comfortably absorb. Disney mortgaged his life insurance to make it happen. Anaheim is what it is today because someone with a long view was willing to invest into a future that did not yet exist on a balance sheet.

Now apply that lens to Solano County.

A region is not different from a company in this one specific respect: you cannot cut your way to prosperity, and you cannot tax your way to transformation. You have to build the engine, and you have to give it time to run.

Every city in this county is being asked, right now, to balance a budget with the revenue base of the early 2000’s while delivering services for the population of 2026 in the cost environment of 2026. It cannot be done. It is not a failure of will. It is an arithmetic impossibility.

What we need is the regional equivalent of what those companies did. Honest acknowledgment that the revenue we need does not yet exist, because the economic base that would produce it does not yet exist. A commitment to building that base, jointly, with the patience to let it mature. And a refusal to let the comfortable language of balanced budgets disguise the uncomfortable reality of compounding decline.

That is not reckless. That is exactly what every successful, durable economic engine in modern history required of the leaders who built it.

The Illusion of Individual Solutions

Every city in Solano County right now is doing what it must. Suisun City is innovating. Vallejo is restructuring. Fairfield is expanding. Vacaville is recruiting businesses. Benicia is thinking about its next chapter. Dixon is looking to grow smartly and Rio Vista is figuring ut its identity. The County is holding multiple worlds together at once. These are not wrong efforts. They are necessary and commendable.

But here is the painful truth that regional finance teaches us over and over: when the underlying economic base is insufficient for the whole, optimizing the parts does not solve the problem. It just determines who loses more slowly.

The medication analogy is precise. A patient with a serious systemic illness who takes half the prescribed course of treatment may feel better temporarily, well enough to believe the crisis has passed. But the underlying condition has not been resolved. It has been given time to adapt, entrench, and return, often more resistant, often more severe. That is not a metaphor. That is the documented history of regional fiscal underinvestment across American municipalities. Temporary relief followed by deeper structural failure.

We have watched this play out in cities across California. Stockton. San Bernardino. Vallejo itself, in 2008. Cities that deferred the hard regional conversation until the options had shrunk to almost nothing. The cuts that feel manageable today compound. The deferred capital becomes critical failure. The service gaps drive out the residents and businesses with options, which further erodes the tax base, which deepens the deficit. It is not a spiral anyone designs. It is what happens when individual solutions are applied to collective problems.

The Opportunity Hidden in the Crisis

I want to return to where I started: scale the problem before you scale the fear. Because when you look honestly at what Solano County faces, the Valero refinery transition, the Anheuser-Busch closure, the ongoing challenges facing Mare Island and regional shipbuilding, the persistent fiscal stress across nearly every municipal government in the county, you are not looking at isolated misfortunes. You are looking at a concentrated regional inflection point. And inflection points, for those paying attention, are the moments when transformation becomes possible.

Emerging large-scale development initiatives in Solano County, the federal investment interest in domestic shipbuilding and naval industrial capacity, the state’s ongoing commitment to regional economic equity, the national interest in climate resilience and clean energy manufacturing. These are not small things. They represent the possibility of economic engines at the scale this region actually requires.

But, and this cannot be overstated, none of that potential can be captured by fragmented, city-by-city, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction strategy. The scale of the opportunity demands the scale of the response. Right now, we are not organized for that.

What Unified, Fast, and Collective Actually Means

I am not arguing for the loss of municipal identity or autonomy. I am arguing for something more specific and more urgent: a shared regional economic strategy, executed at speed, with collective accountability and unified voice. What does that look like in practice?

It means every city and the County operating from the same baseline understanding of the fiscal reality, including the $200 million number, spoken plainly, without political softening. It means a regional economic development framework that allocates roles and advantages by comparative strength rather than competitive instinct. It means infrastructure investment decisions made for regional optimization, not individual political wins. It means going to Sacramento and Washington with one coordinated ask rather than seven competing voices. It means being honest with our communities about what is at stake if we do not move together, decisively, and now.

It also means giving each other grace. No mayor in this county created the post-Prop 13 revenue model. No city manager designed the Bradley-Burns allocation formula. No council member is responsible for the Anheuser-Busch closure or the Valero transition. Blame is the cheapest currency in regional politics, and we have been spending it freely for decades without buying anything. The discipline of this moment is to set blame aside and replace it with a shared, fact-based, growth-oriented plan.

Risk management is important. We will absolutely identify, analyze, and mitigate risks as we build this strategy. But the fatal error would be to let risk analysis become the conversation instead of the frame around the opportunity. We can find and mitigate risks more readily than we can manufacture the land, the talent, the federal relationships, and the economic momentum that this moment has put within our reach. Risk will always be there. Momentum like this, born from genuine disruption and genuine opportunity simultaneously, is rare. Extraordinarily rare.

A Final Word on Time

Time is not neutral in this situation. Every year that passes with the regional fiscal deficit unaddressed is a year that deferred capital becomes critical failure, that workforce disruption becomes permanent displacement, that the window for large-scale economic transformation narrows. The cities that positioned themselves for the next economy in the 1990s and early 2000s, the ones that made bold, sometimes uncomfortable regional bets, are the ones prospering today. The ones that optimized cautiously within their existing constraints are the ones now managing managed decline.

We are not at managed decline. Not yet. We are at the point in the story where the choice is still genuinely open, where the outcome is not written. That is only true if enough of us in regional leadership recognize that this moment demands something different than what got us here. New ideas. New frameworks. New levels of regional trust and coordination. Not slowly. Not after the next election cycle. Now.

The $200 million gap is not a reason to be afraid. It is a precise, honest measure of what prosperity looks like in this region, and therefore, a map to exactly what we need to build.

No city in Solano County is at fault. Every city in Solano County is responsible. There is a difference, and that difference is everything.

Figures cited represent estimates based on publicly available municipal budget documents, reported deficit figures, and economic impact analyses for the Solano County region. The $76M to $100M+ operational shortfall estimate reflects aggregate multi-year structural gaps across Solano County jurisdictions. The $200M annual need figure incorporates capital, infrastructure, and quality-of-service restoration estimates. The $3B Travis AFB economic impact figure is drawn from regional economic studies. All figures are illustrative of scale for strategic planning purposes and should be verifi