Folsom is the most interesting city in Sacramento County. Here is why | Opinion
The ink was barely dry on Folsom’s new annual budget when the new city manager, Bryan Whitemyer, all of four months on the job, wasn’t sure the city could afford hiring 10 new firefighters it had recruited. He placed the matter on Tuesday’s City Council agenda and initially recommended against their hiring.
More firefighters descended Tuesday into the council chambers than if there were a five-alarm blaze in the historic district. In the end, Whitemyer was comfortable hiring the eight who intended to start work, with future retirements ultimately lowering the department’s size.
The city manager could have come to the same conclusion privately and never bothered the council or the public. But he wanted a very public reality check on what spending Folsom can actually afford.
Folsom’s finances, in Whitemyer’s words, are in “a crisis mode.” The sooner the city confronts its structural deficit and eliminates it, the better.
Yet Folsom, in the spectrum of financial health of California municipalities, is hardly an outlier. In terms of its unfunded pension obligations or estimates of future deficits, it is in the same ballpark as a city like Sacramento.
This would never happen in Sacramento
But in terms of politics, Folsom and Sacramento are world’s apart.
Sacramento’s political microclimate, tilting ever leftward, could not tolerate such a meeting as what happened in Folsom, where firefighters had to scratch and claw for some hires. The Sacramento council’s nine Democrats, beholden to public employee unions as a cherished stakeholder base, would never take on city firefighters as the first difficult budget conversation, or even the last.
The Folsom electorate closely mirrors that of the nation. As far as party registration, roughly a third of residents are Democrat, Republican and independent. Without any ideology asserting dominance, a manager like Whitemyer has more latitude to lead with some provocative ideas.
Folsom’s political microclimate is bipolar. Residents are forever demanding top-notch city services while repeatedly rejecting the local sales tax increase necessary to pay for them. This has resulted in a council, stuck with impossible expectations, hiring a city manager courageous enough to attempt a form of community shock therapy to force his city to get real.
While it’s too soon to tell whether Whitemyer will succeed, Folsom is arguably the city most interesting to watch anywhere in the region right now. It is trying a whole new approach to budgeting to balance the city books and make the excruciating choices that councils normally prefer to put off as long as possible.
Council members seem to know what they were getting in hiring Whitemyer, a 12-year veteran of running the city of Oakdale. And so far, they have his back.
‘We are going to have to make tough decisions’
“This is exactly why we hired him,” Mayor Sarah Aquino of District 3 said at the end of Tuesday’s meeting. “We hired him to get our finances in order. We are going to have to make tough decisions.”
Reached Thursday, Whitemyer said that Tuesday’s grueling four-hour council meeting was just what he wanted. “It’s important that the community is aware of what’s going on.”
The council last month had approved a budget for the coming year that projected $120 million in general fund revenue and $123 million in spending, including these 10 firefighter positions. Digging into reserves concerned Whitemyer. The larger concern, looking a half-decade into the future, is how the city will run out of those reserves, “basically being out of cash,” he told the council on Tuesday.
Rather than wait five years, Whitemyer’s attempt at a course correction started Tuesday.
“We will never get there unless we start to make some very critical and important decisions.
The city’s fire chief, Ken Cusano, wanted to hire the firefighters and maintain a city with six stations and three ambulances. “I don’t believe in reducing services in a community for public safety,” he said.
By meeting’s end, Whitemyer was convinced that even after hiring these firefighters, retirements could drive down the size of the force by fiscal year’s end in June 2026, and that turning away these recruits would send the wrong message to future ones. Technically, the council unanimously voted to reject his initial proposal to table these hires. But in calling these hires to question because of Folsom’s structural problems, Whitemyer had won.
“Our new city manager has demonstrated tonight something we have needed to do for a long time,” said Councilman Mike Kozlowski of District 1.
Folsom is heading towards a cycle of decisions throughout the year. Whitemyer considers the 2025-26 budget recently approved by the council to be merely “preliminary.” A “final” budget will get approved in perhaps October, when better information on expenses and revenues is known. And yet another checkup will happen by March before discussions commence on next year’s budget in May.
Will this work? If it does, it will stand in stark contrast to the city of Sacramento, where former City Manager Howard Chan recommended raises for employees that he called “unsustainable” just a month later. Liberal Sacramento politics did not allow an honest discussion about what the city could afford before the raises were approved.
That’s what makes Folsom so interesting.
This story was originally published July 14, 2025 at 8:15 AM.