San Diego Met Just 48% of Its Own Performance Targets
Summary
San Diego's independent city auditor reviewed three years of the city's self-reported Key Performance Indicators and found departments met just 48 percent of their targets on average in the FY2026 budget, ranging from 0 percent to 100 percent depending on the department. Only one of seven City Council offices and nine of 27 departments say they routinely use the metrics to inform a budget or policy decision, and eight of 27 departments skipped the explanation for a missed target that city policy requires. The audit lands as San Diego plans around an average $49 million annual structural deficit through 2030 -- the exact stretch when performance data was supposed to help decide what survives the cuts.
A scorecard nobody has to explain
Every San Diego department is supposed to publish KPIs -- specific, numeric performance measures, like average 911 call-answer time or the share of potholes fixed within a deadline -- in the city's annual budget. Council Policy 000-02⧉ requires departments to explain, in the budget document itself, any KPI that missed or is trending away from its target. The auditor found 8 of the 27 departments that owed such an explanation for FY2026 didn't fully provide one, and 13 more explained only some of their misses -- meaning roughly 78% of departments that fell short somewhere left at least one gap unexplained. Without that explanation, neither the City Council nor the public can tell whether a missed target means a department needs more resources, was handed an unrealistic goal to begin with, or simply underperformed.
The tool almost nobody uses to decide anything
KPIs exist to help San Diego's leadership decide where to put scarce money -- and the city has very little of it to spare: the FY2026 Adopted Budget projects an average annual structural deficit of $49 million from FY2027 through FY2030. Yet when the auditor surveyed all nine Council Offices and 33 departments with KPIs, only one of the seven Council Offices that responded (14%) said it routinely uses KPIs to inform a budget or policy decision, and 72% said they rarely, never, or almost never refer to them at all when making budget calls. On the department side, only 9 of 27 respondents (33%) said they routinely use their own KPIs for budgetary or operational decisions.
View data as table
| Explanation Provided | 19 | 13 of these only partially |
|---|---|---|
| No Explanation Provided | 8 | required by policy, not given |
| No Explanation Needed | 5 | met all targets |
| N/A (no KPIs) | 1 | City Attorney's Office |
A problem the city's own auditor has flagged 11 times since 2019
This isn't a new finding. Since 2019, 11 separate OCA audits -- covering programs from tree trimming to street sweeping to code enforcement -- have identified KPIs that were irrelevant to the service being measured, unrealistic, inaccurate, or that didn't follow best practices. Part of the reason: the Performance and Analytics Department (PandA), the office responsible for guiding and reviewing every department's KPIs citywide, has just two staff members -- 1.0 full-time-equivalent combined -- assigned to that job. The City and County of San Francisco, by comparison, dedicates four staff members to the same function, funded directly through its City Charter. PandA told auditors it doesn't have the capacity to check KPI accuracy on a regular basis once a measure is already in use.
The gap between a target and what actually happened can be wide even when nobody is required to say why. General Services' FY2026 goal for Facilities Preventive Maintenance -- the share of maintenance work that's preventive rather than reactive -- was 70%; the department actually hit 19%, about a quarter of its own target. Its Fleet Electrification goal, tied to the city's Climate Action Plan, called for 90% of fleet vehicles running on electric power; the department reached 5%, about a eighteenth of the target. Both examples come from a single department in a single budget year -- with 33 departments each tracking several KPIs, the audit's 48% citywide average suggests these are not outliers.
What the auditor told the city to fix, and by when
The audit made five recommendations, and City Management agreed to implement all of them: publish a standalone annual Performance Report to the Budget and Government Efficiency Committee and City Council, separate from the budget document (due October 2027); finalize a data-validation procedure so KPI numbers get checked for accuracy (January 2027); build a public dashboard with historical trend data (March 2027); write a formal citywide policy on whether KPIs should be aspirational or realistically achievable (December 2026); and have the City Attorney's Office -- the one department that tracks no KPIs at all, having stopped publishing them in 2006 and stopped its own annual accomplishment reports in 2017 -- adopt at least one (June 2027). None of the fixes carry a target date before the current fiscal year ends.
- San Diego's own scorecard says it hits fewer than half its goals, and the city can't fully explain why. Departments met 48% of KPI targets on average in FY2026, and 8 of the 27 departments that owed an explanation for a miss under city policy didn't fully give one.
- The people who are supposed to use this data mostly don't. Only 1 of 7 responding Council Offices and 9 of 27 responding departments say they routinely use KPIs to inform budget or policy decisions -- even as the city plans around an average $49 million annual deficit through 2030.
- The auditor has said this before. Eleven separate OCA audits since 2019 have flagged KPI problems, and the office tasked with fixing them citywide has one full-time-equivalent staffer to do it, versus four at San Francisco's comparable office.
All figures come from the City of San Diego Office of the City Auditor's October 2025 Performance Audit of the City's Key Performance Indicators (OCA-26-03), read in full via direct PDF fetch; an archive.org Save Page Now request returned a 'temporarily offline' error at the time of this iteration, so the direct sandiego.gov URL serves as the one-click original. A blind adversarial verifier, working from the primary document alone with no access to this draft, independently checked every itemized fact; see verification.json.
The 29.6% and 33.3% conversions, the 78% approximate share of shortfall departments with an unexplained gap, and the 27.1%/5.6% actual-to-target ratios for the two General Services examples are this outlet's own arithmetic on the audit's own figures (methods and caveats in analysis.json); the 33.3% figure matches the audit's own stated 33% as a cross-check. The audit's own '27 departments' denominator (used for the explanation-compliance and routine-use figures) excludes the 5 departments that met every FY2026 target and the 1 department, the City Attorney's Office, that tracks no KPIs -- both are broken out separately in the figure below rather than folded into the 27.
Sources(1) ▾
- City of San Diego, Office of the City Auditor, Performance Audit of the City's Key Performance Indicators (OCA-26-03) (2025-10-01) — The primary document: San Diego's independent Office of the City Auditor's performance audit of the City's Key Performance Indicator (KPI) system, published October 2025. Source for the citywide 48% average KPI-target-achievement rate and the 0-100% department range (Exhibit 12, p.22); the survey findings that only 1 of 7 Council Offices and 9 of 27 departments routinely use KPIs to inform decisions, and that 72% of Council Offices rarely or never refer to KPIs when budgeting (pp.5-6, Exhibit 3); the finding that 8 of 27 departments required to explain missed targets under Council Policy 000-02 did not do so (p.10, Exhibit 6); the finding that 11 separate OCA audits since 2019 identified KPI problems (pp.12-13, Exhibit 7); the Performance and Analytics Department's 1.0- staffing for citywide KPI review versus San Francisco's 4 dedicated, Charter-funded staff (pp.14-16); the Facilities Preventive Maintenance and Fleet Electrification target-versus-actual examples (p.25); the finding that the City Attorney's Office is the only department without KPIs (p.27); the FY2026 Adopted Budget's projected $49 million average annual structural deficit for FY2027-FY2030 (p.1); and the audit's five recommendations, all agreed to by City Management (Report Highlights). sandiego.gov · original document
Comments
Always open. Logged-in readers can annotate paragraphs in place.
A performance audit⧉ by San Diego's Office of the City Auditor -- an independent office that reports to the City's Audit Committee, not to the Mayor or the department heads it reviews -- found the city met only 48% of its own Key Performance Indicator (KPI) targets on average in the FY2026 budget. The share ranged from 0% to 100% depending on the department, and 8 of the 27 departments that owed an explanation for a missed target under city policy did not fully give one.