The City's budget, its growing deficit, and where the money actually goes — tracked from Long Beach's own adopted budgets and public reporting.
Three years running, Long Beach adopted a budget promising the shortfall was under control. This year, for the first time since the pandemic, that promise ran out.
Proposed by Mayor Rex Richardson and City Manager Tom Modica on July 30, 2026. The City Council is expected to adopt a final FY 2027 budget on Sept. 8, 2026.
The size of the General Fund gap the City had to close each fiscal year — first with reserves, now with real cuts.
Click any bar for what happened that year and a source to read more.
Figures aren't all the same kind of number — FY24-26 are gaps the City closed after the fact, mostly with reserves; FY27 is the structural deficit built into the proposed budget itself. We show them together because each one represents the same underlying question: how big was the hole, and what filled it.
Net positions eliminated in the proposed FY 2027 budget, after Mayor Richardson restored 70 of the City Manager's original proposed cuts.
A job cut from the budget's org chart — combines filled roles and long-vacant ones the City was already not paying for.
A job someone currently holds. The City works to reassign or transfer people first — layoffs are meant to be the last step.
A budgeted job with no one in it, often due to hiring difficulty. Cutting these saves money on paper without anyone losing a job.
LBPD's FY 2026 budget is over $383 million — the single largest piece of the General Fund. Here's what it's made of.
Plus smaller line items — intrafund support, operating transfers, and utilities — that together add up to less than $500,000. This breakdown covers LBPD's core $344 million operating budget; the remainder of its ~$383 million total is structural and one-time Measure A funding, shown separately in City budget documents.
A sample of the concrete service reductions in the proposed FY 2027 budget, after the Mayor's restorations.
Scaled back — the program funds free summer activities for Long Beach youth during school break.
Reduced as part of Parks, Recreation & Marine's 142-position cut, the largest of any department.
Activities scaled back at the West Long Beach cultural facility.
All branches return to a five-day operating schedule as Library, Arts & Culture loses 14 net positions.
The Colorado Lagoon-area engine stays eliminated, and rotating closures continue among six engine companies citywide — though the Mayor restored one rotating engine that was slated for cuts.
Cut from 8 officers to 2 in the original proposal; the Mayor restored it to 4 — still half its prior size.
Weekend outreach scaled back except emergencies, the Mobile Access Center drops from two vehicles to one — even as our Homelessness page shows the Point-in-Time Count climbing.
Like our Homelessness page, there's no live feed to pull this from — every figure here is compiled by hand from the City's own budget documents and public reporting.
This page focuses on the General Fund — the roughly $760 million portion of the City's $3.7 billion total budget that pays for day-to-day services like police, fire, parks and libraries, and that gets renegotiated every year. The rest is restricted to specific purposes (the Harbor Department, utilities, grants, bond proceeds) and isn't part of the annual budget fight described here. Deficit and reserve figures come from City Council budget presentations as reported by the Long Beach Post and NBC Los Angeles; department and position figures come from the City's own proposed and adopted budget documents. The City does not publish an open, downloadable dataset for its budget, contracts or vendor payments the way it does for crime or collision data — Long Beach Buys and Contracts Online, linked above, are the closest public tools, but neither offers a live feed, which is why these figures are updated by hand rather than in real time.