Sacramento Brings Back Pools and Gang Prevention as Council Wrestles $66M Deficit

Sometimes a budget vote feels like choosing which of your kids gets dinner. That’s the bind Sacramento City Council found itself in this week, and while the outcome wasn’t perfect, it was a small win for residents who’d watched essential services get slashed.

On Tuesday, May 20, the council voted to restore roughly $3.6 million in services that had been previously cut to address the city’s staggering $66 million budget deficit. The biggest pieces: $1.3 million to keep the city’s gang prevention and intervention task force running, and $581,000 to restore wading pools and recreational swim hours at city pools. The council also approved a one-time injection of another $1.8 million for park maintenance, violence prevention programs, and the Heart Senior Center.

Here’s the reality: these aren’t luxuries. Gang prevention programs are preventative public safety infrastructure. Pools are where working families cool off in Sacramento’s brutal summers without dropping $200 on a private membership. Park maintenance keeps green space from deteriorating into something worse. Yet all of it had been on the chopping block just weeks earlier when the council voted to increase fees, cut homeless programs, and eliminate vacant positions.

Mayor Kevin McCarty acknowledged the squeeze in his own words:“the choices aren’t always easy. You know, increasing some fees and, you know, parking rates and licenses and having layoffs in some departments. So that’s certainly not easy.”Translation: nobody was happy, but somebody had to make a call.

The broader picture matters here. A $66 million shortfall is catastrophic for a mid-sized city. That’s not a rounding error—it’s the kind of hole that forces real people to lose jobs and real services to disappear. That the council managed to carve out funding for prevention-focused work (gang intervention, violence prevention) suggests they’re thinking beyond the quarterly crisis. Prevention is cheaper than the alternative.

The council is working to finalize the full budget in early June. Don’t expect it to be glamorous. But Tuesday’s vote showed that even in brutal fiscal conditions, Sacramento’s leadership remembered what actually matters to the people who live here.