The price of everything has gotten more expensive over the past decade. That scene from “Arrested Development,” where clueless matriarch Lucille Bluth guesses the cost of a frozen banana at $10, is, sadly, more tragic than funny the closer inflation inches us toward that outlandish price tag.
Adjusted for inflation, a $10 frozen banana in 2003 (when that Season-One episode aired) is worth $18.15 today, according to an online Consumer Price Index Inflation calculator.
See? Financial analysis can be fun!
Dollars spent by local governments are no less affected by inflation.
The Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit investigative newsroom, wondered how inflation, coupled with population growth, has affected local governments’ spending since 2016. The Source is one of the newsroom partners throughout the state to participate in the project, which uses a government’s Statement of Activities — a total metric that differs from simply looking at budget figures — to track how local governments’ spending has followed population growth and inflation.
We elected to sift through the datasets pertaining to Deschutes County and the cities of Redmond and Bend, aiming to help us understand how much those governments spend, and how that has tracked with inflation over time.
The idea: to help people better understand how their governments spend taxpayer dollars, and whether those local governments are getting better — or worse — at the job from year to year.
Armed with the data analyzed by the Oregon Journalism Project, we called up each respective government’s chief financial officer to sift through the figures.
Notes on the methodology
Since the number-crunching would otherwise be a Herculean undertaking, OJP tasked Claude AI to parse each local government’s spending, as reflected in each government’s Statement of Activities, which each jurisdiction includes in its Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. The Statement of Activities is the single audited number that represents what the jurisdiction actually spent in that fiscal year — no budget versus actual, no fund-by-fund interfund double-counting.
OJP chose the Statement of Activities total because it is the only number consistently published across every level of government (state, county, city or school district, for example) under the same Governmental Accounting Standards Board, making cross-jurisdiction comparisons possible.
In visiting the Oregon Journalism Project’s online Civic Ledger, folks can explore and compare spending activities of seven Oregon cities, five Oregon counties, two school districts and Oregon and Washington at the state level.
All real-dollar figures are deflated using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers in the West Region, not seasonally-adjusted June values. June aligns with most jurisdictions’ fiscal-year end, June 30.
OJP indexed each fiscal year’s nominal spending to 2025 dollars by multiplying by the 2025 Consumer Price Index with that of any respective year. That means the inflation benchmark on the index page is the Compound Annual Growth Rate of the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers over the same FY 2016 – FY 2025 period.
Because the Consumer Price Index of Urban West Consumers is a single regional index, the inflation benchmark is the same for every jurisdiction. Indexed to 100 in Fiscal Year 2026, the population has already been divided out, which allows a measurement against a single inflation benchmark.
That allows for a “banana-to-banana” comparison.
OK! Let’s dive into the data.
Deschutes County: Climbing revenues and expenditures
The ledgers of the third-fastest-growing county in the state reflect climbing revenues and expenditures, as its population has grown from 170,740 in 2016 to 212,141 in 2025 — a growth rate of 24%.
Deschutes County Chief Financial Officer Robert Tintle agrees that the County’s Statement of Activities makes all government organizations comparable; each respective figure represents a full-accrual basis of accounting. Statements of Activities, Tintle explains, include expenditures such as pensions, cost depreciation and other accumulated costs that a government typically doesn’t pay on a year-to-year basis.
“I noticed that Deschutes County is typically lower than the inflation rate, which I think the County has always been,” Tintle said. “The Board of County Commissioners has always been prudent as far as its expenditure growth.”
When an entity clocks in below the inflation rate, it means they are spending less than they take in, even adjusted for inflation.
Tintle noted how the County’s expenditures increased between Fiscal Years 2019 and 2021 — during the Covid-19 pandemic — jumping from 88.1 to 110.9 points since being indexed at 100 in 2016. That’s when a lot of cash came in from the state and the federal government, such as the American Rescue Plan Act fund, a $1.9 trillion federal economic stimulus package. A third of that fund included Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds. Much of that cash went toward health services. Concurrently, health and welfare rang in at $62.69 million in FY 2021, about $13 million more than the two preceding years. Road funding was also a large factor during this period: Since 2016, annual County road spending hovered around $18 million each year through FY 2020. In the following year, spending kicked up to $25.5 million and $22 million in 2022. There was a $15 million dip in road spending in 2023 before ramping up to about $35 million in 2024 and 2025, respectively.
“If we have more funding in those two areas, then we’re going to have more expenditures,” Tintle said.
He also notes that Deschutes County took conservative efforts in the last few years to stabilize, since expenditures were growing faster than revenue as the state and federal funds were put to use.
“We were responding to growing demands in the community, so we’ve had to expand more in certain areas, such as roads and all services, particularly public health and response to the pandemic,” Tintle said.
City of Redmond: Conservative approach to taxes and fees
When reached by the Source via conference call, Redmond Financial Director James Wood and the City’s Deputy City Manager Jason Neff were giddy to discuss Redmond’s financials, using the Statement of Activities as a fiscal North Star.
“This is probably the best methodology that we’ve seen,” Wood said. “This gives us an apples-to-apples perspective.”
Wood’s first impression of the data was one that confirmed his and Neff’s understanding that the City of Redmond was below the inflation rate. The pair cited the Redmond City Council’s conservativeness as reflected in its approach to fees and taxes. Neff pointed out that rates on utilities like water and sewer have remained around 2.3%, well below the 3.6% Consumer Price Index across the 10-year span.
“We run a balanced budget,” Neff said. “Annually, we really go out of our way to make sure that expenses don’t exceed revenues — or we try to stay neutral. By virtue of that, we should be running below the inflation and population growth rate. We’ve got to live within our means.”
Looking at the Covid-19 pandemic years, Wood noted that inflation peaked at 9%; that impacts local governments just like individual consumers.
In the interest of adding more nuance to the City of Redmond’s financial reading, Wood noted a minor adjustment for the Redmond Municipal Airport. As Wood indicated, airport enplanements — a metric indicating the number of times a passenger steps onto a plane — have increased by 118% over the last 10 years. That doesn’t even consider inflationary increases, he said; OJP’s Civic Ledger analysis implies only an 82.72% growth in expense would be reasonable for the airport during that time. In other words, an analysis like this is difficult when you’re analyzing an area — or a local government — that’s experiencing the rapid growth that Central Oregon is.
City of Bend: Big investments in projects
The City of Bend’s spending has tracked above the rate of inflation, but Samantha Nelson, the City of Bend chief financial officer, says that’s not necessarily a bad thing, on par with overspending. Much of the City’s resources came from the federal government during Covid-19 and were spent in the following years.
“We’ve had some fairly significant investments that occurred — and continue to occur — since then,” Nelson said. “That’s going to inflate our expense numbers a little bit, and those are one-time events that are occurring.”
The City’s transportation GO Bond, for example, won voters’ approval in November 2020. That money came from a dedicated increase of property taxes.
Nelson noted that also during the Covid Pandemic, the City was using the $14 million in ARPA money it received from the federal government, putting to use toward numerous services, including houseless services. For example, in 2021, the City of Bend used $2 million in ARPA funds to acquire the property that is now the Lighthouse Navigation Center.
“Some of those increases during that time are very much tied to very specific capital projects,” said Nelson, who has 19 years in government financial experience and took over as the City’s CFO in 2023. That’s when construction had begun on the City of Bend’s Public Works campus, about a $128 million investment.
“If you have ARPA money, that money has deadlines by the time you had to spend it,” Nelson said, adding that spending commitments were required by the federal government.
Money from the GO Bond was similarly dog-eared, with firm initiation and completion dates, Nelson said. The City is about halfway through that funding.
Since 2020, the spending lines of Bend and Redmond have surfed similar waves. Nelson interprets that crest as a period of substantial growth for both cities, including population.
You don’t have to live here to recognize that Deschutes County and its two largest cities have experienced explosive growth over the past few decades. U.S. Census data shows that Deschutes County grew from about 174,300 residents in 2015 to 213,072 in 2025, the latest estimate available. Redmond grew from about 28,430 to 38,540 in that same time period, and Bend, from 76,639 to 107,342. Oregon, for its part, grew from 4.02 million in 2015 to an estimated 4.3 million in 2025.
All this growth precipitated needs that had to be met with spending. Those needs included housing, and increased services.
Nelson says narrative histories can be teased from these numbers.
“It’s my job as a financial professional to explain the story behind the numbers and say, “OK, what attributed to that? What happened? Government expenditures are not that clear cut. They’re way more complex, more nuanced in the details.”
Oregon: spending grows the social safety net, state payroll
Not to be neglected, Oregon’s state spending outgrew population growth during the pandemic and didn’t recede during this analysis period. That’s what Oregon Journalism Project reporter Nigel Jaquiss demonstrated in a recent piece that uses OJP’s Civic Ledger to look at the state’s spending patterns. He reported that a growing economy and revenues from existing taxes fueled spending. During the analysis period, Jaquiss reports that state employees grew by 11%, yet the largest source of spending came from supporting Oregon’s social safety net, including the expansion of the Oregon Health Plan.
For a fuller understanding of state spending, read Jaquiss’ story, “Medicaid Shortfall Follows Decade-Long Growth in State Spending,” at Oregonjournalismproject.com
—The Oregon Journalism Project’s Civic Ledger is free and available to the public. It can be found at civicledger.oregonjournalismproject.org/
This article appears in the Source August 13, 2026.
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You had me interested until you said you used AI for the analysis. I scrolled on to the next story.
thank you, Peter, for comparing the core governmental economic facts with succinct objective eloquence, free of political blame and ‘marketing’.
We all crave more non-partisan objective understanding of our reality.
Peter,
First of all, many are delighted with the Source’s ownership now, choosing to NOT be afraid of City Hall leadership. Secondly, Richard Coe can’t be happy with this turn of events. Why is this? Because the Bulletin has now fallen to a new low in in-depth reporting on how this city is being financially managed. Lastly, asking a highly paid, politically appointed CFO for a candid and strategic assessment of Bend’s financial performance is tantamount to asking J.D. Vance if he enjoys being President Trump’s vice president. Keep up the serious reporting, but don’t be afraid of providing a summarizing conclusion to your reporting.