Gainesville, Florida Financial State
The City of Gainesville, Florida and the Strong Towns Finance Decoder
We wanted to find a way to view the health of the City of Gainesville's finances over time using the Strong Towns Finance Decoder.
Strong Towns has a vision - “Your community needs you to be an effective advocate for change. We can help you get there” which is something that we relate to.
Strong Towns recently released the Finance Decoder, a tool to “visualize your city’s financial trajectory, and understand whether your city is on track to keep its development, service and growth promises.”
The tool is fairly straightforward: 1) you collect your city’s yearly, publicly available audited statements, 2) wade through the audited statements to find a dozen key numbers and input them into the Decoder tool (a Google Sheet), 3) review to make sure you did the data entry correct. What do Audited Statements look like? This is an example of Gainesville's Audited Financial Statement for 2024.
We like the Strong Towns’ Finance Decoder for a number of reasons. You don’t need to be a CPA to input the data, you only need some patience to find key numbers such as the City’s total liabilities, or yearly interest payments. The tool presents the City’s data using 7 basic charts which are relatively easy for a layperson (like us!) to visualize and understand. The story presented is high level and does not get into the weeds; having read through a number of the Audited Statements it is easy to get overwhelmed with accounting details.
In the remainder of this article we will speak to our high-level process, we will describe one of the biggest caveats when looking at the data, we will show the 7 charts with their descriptions, and, lastly, we will provide a more detailed account of our process for those who want to know and/or validate what we did.
The Google Sheet that shows the full Finance Decoder for Gainesville can be found online here.
Gainesville's Government Activities versus Business-type Activities
We had a decision to make when creating a Finance Decoder for our City - what should we measure? We wanted to measure Gainesville's "Governmental Activities" which includes our public safety, human services, recreation and other departments, and includes our debt as well. Gainesville also has "Business-Type Activities" which includes our Gainesville Regional Utility, gas, water, wastewater, Ironwood golf course and regional transportation system.
Gainesville's governmental activities represent over $200 million of revenue in 2024, while business-type activities represent over $530 million in revenue. We could build out our Finance Decoder for both governmental activities AND business-like activities, or built it out solely for governmental activities. In this first pass we decided to create a Finance Decoder for just the governmental activities to understand our fiscal position on the core elements of our City government. We also didn't know if the business-like activities and their goodness or badness would overwhelm the governmental activities picture. In the future we may create a Finance Decoder that covers both categories of activities.
GASB 75 and Increasing Liabilities in 2018
Other articles that use the Strong Towns Finance Decoder talk about GASB and how the city or county reflected this important change in accounting practice in the 2010s. This is an example of how Saratoga Springs reflected this accounting change. We are only studying the years 2019-2024 for Gainesville and the GASB 75 accounting change took place prior to these years.
7 Charts that explain Gainesville Florida
Sustainability Indicator - Net Financial Position
What it is:
The difference between the city’s financial assets (like cash and receivables) and its liabilities (like debt and pensions). This is the cumulative surplus/deficit that the city has accumulated through successive budget cycles.
What it tells you:
A positive net financial position suggests the city has more financial assets than obligations and is in a better position to weather downturns, invest in infrastructure, or respond to emergencies without resorting to borrowing or service cuts. If this number is negative, the city has spent more than it has saved and is relying on future revenue to pay past bills.
What the trend shows:
A downward trend means the city is growing more reliant on borrowing or deferring payments. An upward trend means it’s becoming more financially secure.
Our view:
Our financial position for our core governmental activities is very strong. We reviewed the Finance Decoders for other cities and it is rare to find other governments with positive Net Positions.
Sustainability Indicator - Financial Assets to Liabilities
What it is:
The city’s financial assets—such as cash, receivables, and other short-term holdings—divided by its total liabilities. This is a different way of presenting the Net Financial Position.
What it tells you:
This ratio shows whether the city has enough liquid financial resources to cover what it owes. A ratio below 1 means it would not be able to pay off its liabilities using only its financial assets, which is a sign of financial stress.
What the trend shows:
A rising trend means the city is improving its financial buffer. A falling trend suggests the city is becoming less able to handle its obligations without borrowing or cutting services.
Our view:
Recent betterment of our ratio is driven by a shrinking of our Total liabilities between 2022 and 2024, with our liabilities decreasing by $112 million ($503m to $391m).
Sustainability Indicator - Total Assets to Total Liabilities
What it is:
The value of all the city’s assets (including infrastructure) divided by its total liabilities.
What it tells you:
A ratio above 1 means the city owns more than it owes (solvent). Below 1 means it owes more than it owns (insolvent).
What the trend shows:
A downward trend means the city is becoming less solvent. An upward trend shows improving financial resilience.
Our view:
Similar to the ratio above where a shrinking of our Total liabilities between 2022 and 2024 is driving the performance of this metric, additionally our Total Assets have grown by 10% between 2022 and 2024 ($610 to $674 million).
Sustainability Indicator - Debt to Total Revenues
What it is:
The total liabilities the city owes compared to how much revenue it collects in a year.
What it tells you:
This shows how many years of income it would take to pay off all debts if every dollar went to debt repayment.
What the trend shows:
If the ratio is rising, debt is growing faster than income—this is unsustainable. If it’s falling, the city is gaining control of its obligations.
Our view:
Our Net Debt to Total Revenues metric has dramatically improved. Our Net Financial Position - which was $-150 million in 2022 is now slightly positive ($3 million) and that is the key component of this metric.
Flexibility Indicator - Interest to Revenues
What it is:
The percentage of annual revenue spent on interest payments.
What it tells you:
This shows how much of the budget is consumed by past borrowing. The higher the percentage, the less room for services, maintenance, or investment.
What the trend shows:
An increasing trend limits future choices and can crowd out basic services. A decreasing trend improves flexibility and budget health.
Our view:
Our interest payments on our debt as a percentage of revenue are reasonable. We want to make sure this metric does not creep back above 7 or 8%.
Flexibility Indicator - Value to cost of tangible assets
What it is:
The current value of the city’s physical assets compared to their original cost.
What it tells you:
This indicates how well the city is maintaining its infrastructure. A low value means assets are aging and wearing out.
What the trend shows:
A declining trend means the city is falling behind on maintenance. A stable or rising trend suggests it is keeping up
Our view:
If there is any concerning metric it is this one. Other high performing cities that are managing and maintaining their infrastructure at the highest levels will have ratios around and above 65-70%.
Results - Government Transfers to Total Revenue
What it is:
The share of the city’s income that comes from state or federal aid.
What it tells you:
High dependency on outside funding makes the city vulnerable to political or economic shifts beyond its control.
What the trend shows:
If the trend is rising, the city is becoming more dependent on outside help. If it’s falling, the city is strengthening its local revenue base.
Our view:
In 2024 our City received nearly $24 million in Federal and State grants for operating and capital projects, down by $8 million from the prior year.
Data
For this study we used the City of Gainesville's Audited Financial statements from 2019 through 2024. This gives us 6 years of Audited data to input into the template. We collected the Audited Financial statements from the City’s website.
As noted in the introduction, we decide to create a Finance Decoder for the governmental activities, and did not include the business-like activities.
While we have made every attempt to ensure that we have done the data entry correctly, and we believe that we have input correct information into the Finance Decoder it is possible that we have made one or more mistakes. We appreciate readers noting any issues that they see.
Note that we are making a copy of the completed Finance Decoder available here. This document is a Google Sheet and you will have read-only access to the Finance Decoder. We recommend saving a copy (File > Make a Copy) if you want to analyze, change, recreate, etc.
Process
In this section we will provide details on how and where we drew information from the Audited Financial Statements. Using the 2024 audited financial statement as a guide, the individual data elements can be found on the following pages (pdf pages, not document pages), using the "Governmental Activities FY24" columns:
- Page 25 - Current assets, capital assets, deferred outflows, total liabilities, deferred inflows
- Page 26 - Program revenue, interest on long term debt
- Page 83 - "Note 8 - Capital Assets" - assets not being depreciated, assets being depreciated, Total capital assets
For next steps, there are a few:
- Create a Finance Decoder that combines governmental and business-like activities
- Extend the years for which we have data back to 2015 or 2016
- Review the State of Florida's systems for benchmarking local governments and identify if there are additional metrics that we can use to test our City. The starting information is on the Florida Auditor's website.
Credits
This data story and its content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
Persons or organizations that Share or Adapt this content should provide Attribution that provides appropriate credit, which includes:
© Copyright 2025
Tyche Insights, P.B.C.
For example, a data product or service that utilizes this article could include attribution such as:
"Portions derived from 'Gainesville FL Financial State', © Copyright 2025 by Tyche Insights, P.B.C., Sage352 & licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license"