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 2014. The seven charts below show where the math is weak, and the one line that's holding up.
Data: 2014–2024 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, which makes the Decoder less an early-warning system here than a current assessment. 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, 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-deferred bill into view almost overnight.
Five numbers every Joliet resident can check, pulled directly from the city's 2024 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR). None of them is comfortable, but all of them are knowable, and one is holding up.
The charts below break it down, grouped by those three questions.
Six of the seven indicators point the same way: Joliet owes more than it holds: assets barely cover liabilities, only about a third of what it owes is backed by financial assets, and the gap has widened with every accounting era since 2014. That's a difficult position, and it's better to state it plainly.
The one line holding up is infrastructure: about 63% of the value of the city's roads, pipes, and buildings remains, and it has risen lately. But that uptick is a wave of newly added capital, not extra upkeep. The Lake Michigan build still to come is largely debt-financed, the same kind of borrowing that pushes the debt and interest lines the wrong way. It buys an essential future water supply; it doesn't shrink what's already owed.
The good news is that none of this is hidden anymore. Pensions and retiree health are on the books; the numbers are public. The work now is to fund the promises on a real schedule, publish a yearly repair number, and weigh every new commitment against what's already owed.
And be wary of "we'll grow our way out." Expanding the tax base brings revenue now, but also new roads, pipes, and staff to maintain forever, and Joliet's incentives (its TIF districts and business-district allocations) can divert that new revenue for years. Growth helps only when each project and incentive is shown to cover its own long-term cost. That arithmetic, not the size of the boom, is what moves these lines.
See what the city publishes, run the numbers yourself, or learn the method behind this page.