Working closely with the City of Oakland staff, the Blue Sky Consulting Group developed a 5 year forecast for the City’s economy and accompanying expenditures and revenues. These projections formed the foundation for development of the City’s two year budget. 

The COVID 19 pandemic brought about nearly unprecedented economic and fiscal challenges. To help the State of California ensure that it could meet its financial obligations over the spring and summer, we worked with the State Controller to develop projections that accounted for the impact of the pandemic-induced economic effects and the delayed filing dates for income and sales tax payments. The model we developed projected daily cashflows and allowed the Controller to simulate a range of alternative scenarios, including a deeper or more prolonged recession, continued reductions in taxable sales, and ongoing high unemployment rates. Our work helped the Controller determine that the state’s reserves were sufficient to allow the state to meet all of its financial obligations without the need for external borrowing.

The City of Los Angeles Office of Economic Analysis (OEA) sought assistance in addressing one of the most important questions facing any governmental entity: to what extent will a change in tax policy result in increases in economic activity? Working closely with the OEA, we utilized an econometric model of the city’s multi-billion dollar economy to estimate the likely fiscal and economic implications of phasing out the city’s gross receipts tax.

Blue Sky co-founder Tim Gage served as fiscal adviser to California Forward, which sought expertise on how to reform California's budget process. The effort included analyzing various proposals to mitigate the impact of volatile state revenues on budget planning. With this assistance, California Forward created a 6-point platform for fiscal reform. This effort was just one of numerous fiscal advisory projects undertaken by the Blue Sky Consulting Group, which range from delineating higher education funding challenges to modeling changes to the state's "rainy-day" fund mechanisms.

The sorry state of California's infrastructure is a common refrain, but how much additional infrastructure investment can the state afford? In order to address this question, we examined California's ability to take on additional debt  to fund infrastructure projects, constructing a simulation and forecasting model to project debt service payments and state General Fund costs and revenues under a variety of scenarios. This interactive simulation tool allowed our client to project the effects of various interest rate assumptions, program caseload and cost increase scenarios, and new debt approval schedules. The resulting insights were used to guide strategic decision-making with respect to new infrastructure initiatives.

The Blue Sky Consulting Group developed a long-term business planning model for the Board of Regents and Office of the President of the University of California, which sought to improve the ability of the system's leaders to manage the organization's $20 billion annual budget. The model can adapt over time as enrollment, state budget, and cost structures change, making it more than just a one-time planning solution.

The managers of the state’s 529 college savings program, known as Scholarshare, sought assistance in estimating the fiscal and economic effects of adopting a tax credit to encourage additional saving for college. Our analysis showed how many additional Californians would open accounts in response to the tax credit and how much more existing participants would save. We also estimated the economic effects of such a program, and determined the cost to the state’s general fund.

This report, prepared on behalf of the Los Angeles Revenue Commission, presents estimates of the potential revenue that could be generated from a tax on vacant or unoccupied property in the City of Los Angeles (the City) and identifies the design features the City may want to consider should it proceed with implementation of a such a tax.