Wisconsin is the easy case, and it is the only one. The Public Service Commission files an annual financial schedule against the PSC utility number, which is the same key the regulatory record already carries, so a debt balance and a water system are joined by an identifier both records share. Nothing is matched, and nothing can be mismatched.
Every other state in this record publishes its money under a different key. The California State Controller files a city’s water enterprise fund under the city’s name. The Texas Bond Review Board files debt issue by issue under the Board’s own government number. Neither is a water system identifier, and no agency publishes a table connecting the two. A figure on a system page outside Wisconsin arrived through a match between two sets of names, and the match is part of the figure, not a detail behind it.
How the match is made
A water system is first connected to the unit of government that runs it. This is the join every financial figure on this site depends on. Each match is made by a named rule, and a rule only matches where it produces exactly one candidate. An ambiguous name is refused, never settled by a tiebreak.
That government is then connected to the publisher’s own record of it, by name. A government whose reduced name reaches two of the publisher’s entries is refused. An entry reached by two governments is refused for both, because one city’s accounts cannot be two governments’. The second direction is the one a per-government pass cannot see: without it, whichever government was read last would put its money on the other’s page.
The accuracy of the first step is measured on a sample of matches drawn before any verdict was written, and the draw is addressed by the matching rule itself. Change how a match is made, and a different sample is drawn and the old verdicts are discarded.
No accuracy rate is published yet. The sample is drawn and the verdicts against the current draw are not yet filed, and until they are, no financial figure that depends on this match is published on any page.
That last sentence is not a promise about diligence. Until a rate exists, the section described here does not render at all: the function that produces the rate returns a reason instead of a number, and the section is built from a rate or it is not built.
What is printed beside every figure
Three things, in the same view as the number, and not on a page a reader reaches separately:
- The fiscal year it was filed for. Not the year it was retrieved, and not the current year.
- The publisher who posted it. The State Controller or the Bond Review Board. Never this site.
- That publisher’s own disclaimer, in the publisher’s own words. California posts figures as the city submitted them and not audited as presented. Texas states that its data is compiled from reports submitted by issuers, is not independently verified, and that variances for a specific issuer can be substantial.
The measured accuracy of the match is stated there too. A disclaimer one click away from a dollar figure under a named public agency is a disclaimer that was not read.
Nothing in the section is a credit opinion, an implied rating, or a judgement that any figure is sufficient.
What the figures are, exactly
California. The city’s water enterprise fund: operating revenue, nonoperating revenue, operating expense and nonoperating expense, both sides of the statement, for a city-year that resolved to exactly one Controller entity. Totals only. Some cities itemize pumping, treatment and customer accounting while others book every water sale to one line, so a zero on a named line is two different facts and the export does not say which. A total is immune to that: a filer who lumps and a filer who splits reach the same one. The fund covers every system the city runs, which is stated where a city runs more than one.
Texas. Principal outstanding and total debt service outstanding, per government, per snapshot year. The figure covers the whole government’s borrowing across every issuance, which includes the water utility and everything else the government borrowed for. A refunding bond does not carry the purpose of the debt it refinanced, so no water-only total can be separated out of this source. And the total debt service figure is not an annual payment: it is principal plus all the interest still to run to maturity, on a snapshot that carries no payment dates. What a government owes in any single future year is in its own annual financial report and cannot be derived from these columns.
When there is no figure
A system page whose government did not resolve says so, and says which of the two absences it is:
- Unresolved. Nothing the publisher files reached this government by name. That is a statement about two sets of names, not a finding about the system’s finances.
- Ambiguous. The publisher holds figures that more than one government of this name could own. This is the more informative absence, because it says the record exists, and it is still no figure: choosing between them would be a coin toss wearing a rule’s clothes.
A year the publisher filed and this site declined to print is listed with the reason. Two hundred Californian cities file the water enterprise fund category with every line at zero, which is what a city that runs no water utility looks like and not what a water utility that collected nothing looks like, and it publishes as neither.
What is not covered
Californian special districts are not covered. The Controller publishes them separately, and those rows are revenues with no expenditure side, so no statement can be completed for one, and a revenue with no cost beside it reads as a utility with no costs. Massachusetts is not covered at all. The state’s enterprise fund reports refused our request for the file, that refusal is recorded, and a figure for a Massachusetts system is therefore absent instead of approximated from its neighbors.