Alt30 · Municipal fiscal brief

City of Show Low

FY 2025-26 · population 11,913 · prepared September 19, 2026

Strategy

Misaligned

The core question — does the spending fit the strategy?

Show Low shows a gap between what it spends on and how it funds that spending: It leans on capital but levies no property tax — the one lever that turns new development into recurring revenue. The building is funded by sales tax and state aid, neither of which scales with the assessed value it creates.

Orientation fits direction?

Aligned

Growing +10% and building ahead of residents — a capital lean is what a growth trajectory calls for.

Tax strategy funds it?

Misaligned

It leans on capital but levies no property tax — the one lever that turns new development into recurring revenue. The building is funded by sales tax and state aid, neither of which scales with the assessed value it creates.

$125.1M

Adopted budget, all funds

$57.9M

General Fund

Growing

Trajectory (+10% 2010–20)

Forward outlook · recurring revenue base

On current structure, City of Show Low's recurring base runs from $32.6M (FY2026) to about $38.8M by FY2031 — with 16% state-shared and no operating property tax to steady it. Near-term Urban Revenue Sharing is fixed by taxes the state has already collected; the later years rest on stated assumptions.

Key findings

No property tax at all

Schedule A line 4 is zero, and the form states it outright: the City levies no property taxes and has no special assessment districts. For a city of nearly 12,000 running a $125M budget that is genuinely unusual, and it means sales tax and state-shared revenue carry a load that property tax carries elsewhere.

$65.5M

Audited cash on hand

From the FY2024-25 audited statements. This is the measure the portal refuses to report for every other town, because nobody had parsed an ACFR — and it is the exact field where a benchmark source reported $0 for Globe and graded it an unearned A.

6.5x

Cash against long-term debt

Cash and equivalents of $65,466,113 against total long-term liabilities of $10,109,198, for a city of 11,913. A ratio this high is unusual and worth understanding before it is called good news — it may reflect capital reserves committed to projects not yet started.