It's the same question you'd ask about your own household. Here's Joliet's answer in plain numbers, and why the city's own books already show it owes more than it owns.
Every figure comes from the City of Joliet's own audited annual reports.
Does Joliet own more than it owes?
The first number is already printed in the audit. Keep scrolling for how both are built, in plain English.
Add up your family's finances: everything you have that's basically money (checking, savings, investments) minus everything you owe (cards, car loan, mortgage). What's left tells you whether you're ahead or behind.
A city has this exact number too; accountants call it its net financial position. Almost no city advertises it, so we did the math from Joliet's own report, and split it per household, because a billion dollars is impossible to picture but a per-home figure isn't.
Joliet owes about $1.24 billion more than it holds in money-like assets. That figure isn't hidden or estimated; it's taken straight from the city's own audit.
Split across every household in town, that's about −$24,300 owed per household.
It does. The official "total net position" is about −$25 million. But it gets there by counting roads, pipes, and buildings (about $1.2 billion) as assets. The city can't sell those to pay pensions or bondholders. Net financial position is the stricter, more honest test: the money the city actually has, against what it owes, and that's −$1.24 billion.
But that is only part of the picture.
The shortfall isn't a mystery overspend. It's three real obligations the city has taken on, all owed to real people:
These are promises made over decades, to people who did the work or lent the money. The debt was always on the books; bonds and loans always show up. The striking part is the other two pieces: until a few years ago, the pension and retiree-health promises, together by far the largest, sat nowhere on the city's balance sheet.
In 2015 a new accounting rule forced cities to put their full pension promises on the books. In 2018 another rule added retiree health care. Tens of billions appeared overnight across the country: debts that had always existed, suddenly visible. Before those rules, Joliet's books looked like a healthy city's: assets around four times its liabilities. The money was always owed. The rules just made Joliet show it.
Even after pensions and retiree health care, one real cost is still missing from every statement: what it would take to fix worn-out roads, pipes, and buildings.
Joliet's audit already admits the wear: about 37% of the value of its roads, pipes, and buildings is used up. It just never totals what fixing all that would cost. Run the city's own two numbers through the Strong Towns worksheet and the replacement bill comes to an estimated $1.25 to $1.6 billion.
Per household, that's another $24,000 to $31,000, on top of what's already owed.
This is a back-of-the-envelope range, on purpose. The point isn't the exact figure; it's that the figure is large, and nobody publishes it.
Together, about $50,000 per household, hidden behind a headline that looks balanced.
A typical household is already $24,300 behind, with another ~$28,000 repair bill that no statement shows.
Joliet's official bottom line looks nearly balanced. These two bars are what that headline leaves out, and what residents are left to carry.
A −$1.24 billion position is a hard starting point, harder than most cities face. But Joliet isn't an outlier: the pension and retiree-health gaps are shared across Illinois, and much of the debt is the essential ~$1.45 billion Lake Michigan water project, replacing an aquifer projected to fall short by 2030. The point isn't blame; it's that a number you can see is a number you can plan around.
Joliet has real assets too: a large economy, a rising tax base, and that water investment. Whether they become a way out or a deeper shortfall depends on the kind of growth the city chooses, the next question. And every new subdivision, road, and pipe is another maintenance promise owed forever. So the city faces two jobs at once: funding what it already owes, and weighing the long-term cost of anything new.
Ask Joliet for three things: fund the pension and retiree-health promises on a real, published schedule; publish a "state of good repair" number every year (what it would cost to bring what we already own back to good condition); and weigh every new commitment against what's already owed. Federal agencies must publish that repair number. New York City's charter requires it. Joliet can too.
"These figures come from Joliet's own published reports. The city publishes no single estimate of its delayed repair costs. If this picture is wrong, the city should publish the numbers that show it."
It's the most natural response to these numbers: we're behind, so let's expand the tax base. Attract development, add warehouses and housing, offer incentives for new business. If the city were simply short on income, that instinct would be right.
The short version: growth brings revenue now, but also new roads, pipes, and services to maintain for decades. It can't shrink the pension and retiree-health promises that make up most of the shortfall, and Joliet's incentives often divert the new revenue anyway. It's worth doing, but only the kind that covers its own long-term cost.
But the shortfall isn't mainly an income problem, and growth isn't free money. It's the one move that brings cash now and bills forever, which is exactly why it has to be done carefully. Three things make "aggressive, subsidized growth" an unreliable fix here.
First, the shortfall is mostly promises growth can't touch. Most of the −$1.24 billion is pensions and retiree health care already owed to people who worked for decades. A new warehouse doesn't shrink that by a dollar. What it adds is new roads, pipes, and pavement to maintain for decades, and if the city staffs up to serve it, new pension and retiree-health promises of its own. Growth can add to the liabilities it's meant to reduce.
Second, incentives divert the revenue they promise. Joliet already runs at least six "tax-increment financing" districts, a common growth incentive, plus similar deals. By design, those capture the new tax growth and spend it inside the district, often for two decades or more. So subsidized development frequently never reaches the city's general budget or the pensions while the incentive runs.
Third, Joliet has already grown a lot. Over the last decade it became one of the country's largest logistics hubs, with a fast-rising property and sales tax base. Even so, the financial position fell over those years, from −$82 million to −$1.24 billion, much of it as pension and retiree-health promises came onto the books. A bigger tax base didn't come close to offsetting a legacy bill that size.
And won't the jobs pay off? Jobs are a real benefit to workers and the regional economy, but the path from jobs to city revenue is looser than it sounds. Property tax tracks the value of buildings, not the number of jobs, and of each tax dollar the city keeps only a minority, with school districts taking the largest share. Illinois cities can't levy a local income tax, so paychecks don't flow to City Hall, and warehouses generate little local sales tax because they aren't retail.
The clearest way jobs lift city revenue is indirect: when workers become residents and add homes to the tax rolls, which also brings more residents to serve. And where an incentive is involved, much of the new property tax is diverted for years anyway. So jobs can be worth pursuing for the community without automatically improving the city's books. It comes back to the same test: what does the city actually keep, after incentives, against what it has to spend?
There's also a particular catch with the kind of growth Joliet attracts. Warehouses and freight yards generate property tax, but they rely heavily on public infrastructure: thousands of trucks a day, and a single loaded truck does road damage many times that of a car. They tend to bring low jobs per acre, high pavement per acre, and a public incentive to land them. It can still pencil out, but only if someone checks.
It's an argument for growth that pays for itself. Incremental, tax-rich-per-acre development, the kind that fills in what the city already maintains, can genuinely help. Subsidized, infrastructure-heavy, low-yield development usually can't. The difference is arithmetic, not ideology.
"Before we subsidize anything, show the math: over its full life, will this generate more than it costs the city to serve and maintain, and will it help fund what we already owe, or add to it?"
You don't need a finance degree. The math is middle-school arithmetic, and every number is public.
A neighbor can raise it at a coffee shop. So can a city council member, a budget director, or a CPA who lives and breathes accounting rules. They'll all recognize the numbers, because the numbers are the city's own. That's the whole point: it's one number, at the kitchen table, that everyone can argue about together.