Town Center (future view)
The purpose of this web site is to provide a balanced discussion weighing the pros and cons of incorporating El Dorado Hills into the third city in El Dorado County. The cityhood effort is being led by the El Dorado Hills Citizens for CItyhood (EDHCC), a non-profit organization who have teamed with the El Dorado Hills Community Services District (EDHCSD) to complete the necessary studies and approvals leading to a vote of the citizens in the area of incorporation. To date, the only information provided to citizens in EDHCSD meetings has been entirely pro-cityhood as provided by members of the EDHCC. I do not believe the benefits of cityhood outweigh the costs of becoming a city. I hope to provide sufficient information to convince the reader that cityhood is not in the best interests of the citizens of the unincoporated El Dorado Hills community.
The Case for Cityhood
The EDHCC group has put together a presentation outlining the benefits of becoming a city. The presentation was given to the EDHCSD at a regular meeting in March 2025 and to the general public at a special CSD meeting.
The presentation only describes the benefits of cityhood and completely ignores any reasons why cityhood would not be a good solution for El Dorado Hills. The presenation predicts that cityhood will generate surplus revenue which could be used to increase police protection or for additional parks and recreation. Claims are made, but there are no references with data to back up these claims.
In this section, we’ll present some countering arguments to the EDHCC arguments for cityhood.
The Preliminary Comprehensive Fiscal Analysis (PFCA)
The cityhood effort has been going on much longer than just the past year. An effort to incorporate in 2005 failed to achive majority approval.
According to the cityhood timeline on the EDHCSD web site, the current effort began in 2020 with a Preliminary Comprehensive Fiscal Analysis to demonstrate that the city would be viable from an economic standpoint.
The PFCA, published in August 2021 showed that the new city’s budget forecast would have sufficient revenue to support current service levels. However, the PFCA has significant errors and omissions that require further review.
In this section, we’ll take a closer look at the PFCA estimates and conclusions.
Selected City Services
The EDHCC case for cityhood cited local control and enhancement of city services as a positive outcome of incorporation. Although this sounds like a simple goal, replicating services currently provided by El Dorado County can be quite complex and costly. Furthermore, some of the most sought-after city services such as law enforcement and road maintenance can actually be performed by our CSD after approval by the El Dorado Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) without the need to incorporate.
In this section, we’ll discuss municipal services and explore some of the complexities and costs involved with transitioning those services to local control.
Conclusion
The unincorporated community of El Dorado Hills is a great place to live. We have beautiful neighborhoods, good schools, great parks and recreation, low crime, and good roads. From my perspective, it doesn’t look like anything is broken, so why try to fix it? And since when is more government the answer to any problem?
I hope that the three discussions above will show that the increased taxes incurred by cityhood are too great a price to pay to address any perceived problem.