A city that can't cover what it owes can't freely invest in its future. Strong Towns calls this the solvency principle. By that test, Joliet faces a real challenge: it owes more than it holds in financial assets, and the gap has widened with every accounting era since 2011. The seven charts below show where the math is weak, and the one measure that looks steadier than the rest.
Data: 2011–2024 City of Joliet Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports
#DoTheMath means reading a city the way you'd read your own finances: not just this year's budget, but the whole balance sheet over time. The Strong Towns Finance Decoder pulls a handful of numbers from a city's audited annual reports and charts seven indicators. Every budget, project, and growth decision should be able to answer three questions:
Many cities that run this exercise find a balance sheet gradually weakening. Joliet's has already crossed that line, so here the Decoder isn't an early warning; it's a diagnosis. The point of honest accounting is to size a problem while you can still plan around it.
Joliet is one of Illinois's largest cities outside Chicago, a historic canal-and-rail town of about 150,000 that has reinvented itself as a national logistics and warehousing hub (the Joliet/Elwood CenterPoint Intermodal Center is regularly called the largest inland port in North America), with the roads, water, and sewers that growth demands. It also carries a long legacy of pension and retiree-health promises to its police officers, firefighters, and staff.
Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn argues that cities go broke for one reason: they take on more long-term obligations (debt, pensions, pipes to maintain forever) than current revenue can sustain, and the bill arrives a generation later. Joliet shows that pattern clearly, because two accounting reforms brought a long-postponed bill into view almost overnight.
Five numbers every Joliet resident can check, pulled directly from the city's 2024 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR).
The charts below break it down, grouped by those three questions.
Six of the seven measures point the same way: Joliet owes more than it holds, and the gap has widened with every accounting era since 2011. The one that looks steady, infrastructure, only looks that way because new, debt-financed building lifts the average; the 37% already worn is a large repair bill the books never total.
The good news is that none of it is a mystery: the pension, retiree-health, and debt promises are on the books, and the repair bill can be measured from the city's own depreciation. The work now is to fund those promises on a real schedule, publish that repair number yearly, and weigh every new commitment against what's already owed, since growth helps only when each project covers its own long-term cost.
See what the city publishes, run the numbers yourself, or learn the method behind this page.