San Francisco’s sluggish recovery puts its top-grade credit rating at risk

You are mostly right with your post, but when analyzing SF’s budget you have to remember that San Francisco isn’t just a city it’s a consolidated city and county. The way that this affects the budget is that in addition to you know, municipal services that cities are expected by their residents to deliver, San Francisco is also the unit of government that implements the local services mandates that California uses the counties as a vehicle to deliver.

That’s not to say it isn’t needlessly large even given all of that, but there’s another important variable in play that would already set the floor of the budget for a city in California given its population sky high before taking into account the local political environment.

I think SF suffers from its own type of 'resource curse' [1] where like Venezuela and its oil, city leadership takes incredibly for granted the continued presence of tech in the city and just runs it into the dirt.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

I very much doubt that nearly rounding figure expense has anything to do with this.