Mayor's Corner

By: Mayor Will O’Neill

I started my public service in Newport Beach 10 years ago by serving on the City’s Finance Committee. Identifying ways to incrementally improve how our city stewarded our residents’ fiscal trust helped convince me to run for City Council. This past June marked the end of my sixth year as our City’s Finance Committee Chairman, which has been humbling and a true honor.

Our City’s overall revenue has grown dramatically since I first joined the Finance Committee, all without a single tax increase. Thanks to the procedures of Proposition 13 (which limit property tax increases to 2% per year unless the base resets, often due to sale), the City’s revenue growth has been driven mostly from property taxes.

We re-invest this tax growth back into the core services that people expect. When I first joined City Council, our public safety budget stood at $101.5 million. We are now spending $144 million. Over the past eight years, we have replaced two fire stations, will start on the Balboa fire station next year, and added the Junior Lifeguard building plus the site purchase for our next Police Station. All this occurred without sacrificing any other portion of our budget.

In fact, we just began a five-year rehabilitation on our parks that will raise them to the standards we all expect.

One area that we don’t discuss often enough is our debt reduction and pension paydown. Thankfully, former Senator John Moorlach wrote a column recently for the California Policy Center highlighting our extraordinary efforts in that department. Between the years 2017 to 2023 (largely while I was Chairman), we improved in his rankings of “unrestricted net position” from 32nd out of 34 cities to 17th. While there is more to do, the path we have charted stands out.

With my term on City Council coming to a finish in December, I passed the baton to Mayor Pro Tem Joe Stapleton as Chairman of our City’s Finance Committee starting on July 1, 2024. Our City is fortunate to have his leadership!

Mayor Will O’Neill is serving his second term as Mayor of Newport Beach, having previously served in 2020.

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