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Contra Costa Taxpayers Association

Contra Costa Local Government Spends Over $10 Billion Annually: Who’s Minding the Store?

04 Feb 2025 4:00 PM | Marc Joffe (Administrator)

The Contra Costa Taxpayers Association has been advocating for good government at an affordable cost since 1937. To keep the organization alive and relevant, we need a new generation of Contra Costa County taxpayers to join and take active roles.

Many younger people who might have joined us in the past have instead moved away due to the high cost of living (including the high tax burden) or are too busy struggling to afford to live here. Affluent taxpayers who’ve recently arrived might not know about us or may not resonate with our purpose. Local activists are primarily interested in environmental sustainability and other issues that imply an activist government.

But, as you can see from the this chart, local governments in Contra Costa County already spend $10.9 billion per year in aggregate (based on my analysis of local government financial reports from 2022 or 2023). This is an enormous about of money and it is clear that not all of it is being spent effectively. My message to Contra Costa taxpayers is that whatever you believe the right size of government should be, wasteful and ineffective public sector spending is not in the public interest. While in a past era, we might have relied on local newspapers to exercise oversight and highlight waste, fraud, and abuse, these publications have merged and shrank. It is now up to citizen volunteers to hold government officials accountable.

I hope that this is a message that can resonate across the political spectrum and attract a new generation of concerned taxpayers to join CoCoTax. If you have suggestions about groups and organizations, we should be speaking to about this message, please share their names with me: my email address is marc@cocotax.org.


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