Burlingame’s proposed 2026-27 budget looks stable: City continues to invest in capital projects, balance revenues and expenditures

Its $96.1 million in projected revenues is also more than enough to cover $92.6 in projected expenditures.

The decision to transfer $5.7 million from the general fund into capital projects, giving the fund a total of $46.8 million for the 2026-27 fiscal year, will save Burlingame more money in the long run, Councilmember Desiree Thayer said. That’s because general construction costs will rise in the future and because allowing infrastructure to further dilapidate will cost more money to fix.

“When we do have extra there, we invest now, when the cost we anticipate would be higher later with some of those important projects,” she said.

Should the city run into economic issues, it has the capacity to turn off that funding and invest it into basic services, Councilmember Donna Colson said.

“Those are numbers we can control. In the event we couldn’t spend that much on capital, like during COVID, where we couldn’t even work on capital projects, we could minimize that transfer,” she said.

The city will use its unassigned fund balance to cover the net deficit of $3.1 million, Finance Director Helen Yu-Scott said, leaving the unassigned balance at $293,000.

As the city grows in capacity and builds more housing, it has a more pressing need to invest in its physical infrastructure. At the same time, increasing mandates and requirements from the state have necessitated the hiring of new staff and creation of new positions. This fiscal year, the city is expected to hire a senior tech analyst and a recreation coordinator.

“There’s just reasons staff expands over time and needs to expand,” City Manager Lisa Goldman said. “So both our physical assets and our people assets expand as new things come our way.”

Burlingame’s five-year forecast shows revenues continuing to exceed expenditures, with a similar projection for net deficit as the upcoming year.

For the 2026-27 year, the city’s greatest revenue sources continue to be property taxes and hotel taxes — which are slowly bouncing back after the pandemic — and its greatest expenditures are police and dispatch services, fire and disaster preparation and parks and tree maintenance.