Kern County, California

Overview

Kern County's adopted FY 2025–2026 County Funds total $4,358,790,731, and All Funds total $4,477,328,059 as stated. Public Protection ($1,268,271,409) is the largest County Funds function, followed by Public Assistance ($1,025,897,940) and Health and Sanitation ($955,414,311). The county authorized 8,669 positions in the FY 2025–2026 Adopted column, down from 8,860 in FY 2024–2025 Adopted. For context only, the FY 2026–2027 Recommended all-funds total is $4,420,713,107 — the dashboard basis remains FY 2025–2026 Adopted.

Source: Kern County FY 2026–2027 Recommended Budget (county site), FY 2025–2026 Adopted column.

At a glance — FY 2025–2026 Adopted column

Source: Kern County FY 2026–2027 Recommended Budget, summary table.

County Funds — by function, FY 2025–2026 Adopted

Function lines sum exactly to the County Funds total.

Source: Kern County FY 2026–2027 Recommended Budget, summary table.

All Funds — FY 2025–2026 Adopted

$1 rounding difference, disclosed: the four components add to $4,477,328,060, one dollar above the document's stated All Funds total of $4,477,328,059. The stated total is reported as stated; the $1 difference is not adjusted away.

Source: Kern County FY 2026–2027 Recommended Budget, summary table.

Authorized positions

Source: Kern County FY 2026–2027 Recommended Budget, summary table.

Debt

No outstanding long-term debt schedule was extracted from this budget summary, so no debt-outstanding figure is shown. The Debt Service function figure of $13,616,722 is a budget-year financing use, not a measure of debt outstanding, and is not presented as one.

Source: Kern County FY 2026–2027 Recommended Budget, summary table.

Elected officials

The Board of Supervisors and other elected officials are not named in the cited excerpts of the budget summary used for this page, so no names are shown here rather than naming officials from an unverified source. No contact details are shown.

Source: Kern County FY 2026–2027 Recommended Budget.

Board meetings

The Board of Supervisors holds regular meetings beginning at 9:00 a.m. on designated Tuesdays (with 2:00 p.m. sessions) at the Kern County Administrative Center, 1115 Truxtun Avenue, Bakersfield. Meeting dates are set by resolution; check the county’s agenda page for the next designated date.

Kern County Board of Supervisors procedural rules

Livability — Kern County

Kern County scores 40.1 on the Hometown Numbers Livability Index, ranked #48 of 58 ranked California counties. Violent crime: 667.3 reported violent crimes per 100,000 residents in 2024 (FBI Crime Data Explorer; score 9.6, where a higher score means a lower rate). Full rankings: California livability rankings.

Method: percentile rank (count below + 0.5 × count equal) ÷ N × 100, lower-better measures inverted; composite is the mean of available component scores, rounded to 1 decimal; a county needs at least 5 of 7 components or it is unranked, never estimated. Vintages: ACS 2024 5-year (2020–2024) for housing affordability, income, and commute; FBI Crime Data Explorer 2024 for violent crime; County Health Rankings 2025 release for graduation and uninsured. Unemployment (BLS LAUS 2024) is missing for every California county because the BLS public API was unreachable (HTTP 503) on 2026-10-25; composites rest on the other components and will be recomputed if BLS data becomes available.

Housing prices — Kern County

County-level figures for Kern County.

Source: American Community Survey 2024 5-year estimates (2020–2024), tables B25077 (median home value) and B25064 (median gross rent).

Public schools — Kern County

Schools physically located in Kern County.

275 public schools in 60 school districts, from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES EDGE Public School Locations, 2024–25 school year).

4 schools in the NCES 2024–25 locations list for this county are not shown because they are not currently open: High Desert (status 7), Mountain View TK-8 (status 7), Opportunities for Learning - Ridgecrest (status 7), Vieweg STEM Academy (status 7) — temporarily closed (status 6) or scheduled to open within 2 years (status 7) under NCES CCD operational status codes.

School performance (proficiency): district-level proficiency values are published in the federal Ed Data Express tool and are retrievable by CSV export, but they have not yet been added to this page — the export requires a live-browser download (direct requests to the tool are blocked), so no proficiency figures are shown rather than substituted ones. Source for the list: NCES EDGE Public School Locations — Current, 2024–25.

Neighbor comparison

How Kern County’s General Fund spending per resident and fund-balance share compare with adjacent counties, computed from each dashboard’s own published figures.

GF total dashed: no GF total published (page reports County Funds group $4,358,790,731 and All Funds only)

Fund-balance % dashed: no GF ending balance published

Los Angeles County: GF total dashed: no GF total claimed: page's fund-group label is 'Total General County' ($40,097M), explicitly not 'General Fund' alone

Los Angeles County: Fund-balance % dashed: no GF ending balance published

Santa Barbara County: GF total dashed: no GF total shown from the adopted-budget summary (per page disclosure)

Santa Barbara County: Fund-balance % dashed: no GF ending balance published

Tulare County: Fund-balance % dashed: June 30, 2026 balance $134,664,768 is beginning of FY 2026-27, not ending

Ventura County: Fund-balance % dashed: fund balance available $111,431,474 is beginning, not ending

Inyo County: No Inyo County dashboard in this dataset (no county GF figure exists here); a city dashboard in the county, if any, does not supply a county figure.

Kings County: No Kings County dashboard in this dataset (no county GF figure exists here); a city dashboard in the county, if any, does not supply a county figure.

San Bernardino County: No San Bernardino County dashboard in this dataset (no county GF figure exists here); a city dashboard in the county, if any, does not supply a county figure.

San Luis Obispo County: No San Luis Obispo County dashboard in this dataset (no county GF figure exists here); a city dashboard in the county, if any, does not supply a county figure.

Per-capita GF spending = the dashboard’s published General Fund total ÷ county population (ACS 2024 5-year, table B01003). Fund balance % = published GF ending balance ÷ GF total for the same fiscal year unless noted.

— in the fund-balance column means no GF ending balance is published on that dashboard (adopted budgets typically state only a January 1 balance).

Neighbor rows are county figures for the counties adjacent to the home county (U.S. Census Bureau County Adjacency File, 2024; out-of-state neighbors excluded).

Sources & notes

• Only source used: Kern County FY 2026–2027 Recommended Budget, published June 2026 (county-site PDF), FY 2025–2026 Adopted column of its summary table. FY 2026–2027 Recommended Budget. Adoption of the FY 2025–2026 budget on August 26, 2025 (unanimous) is recorded in the program's adoption record; a standalone adopted FY 2025–2026 book was not isolated.
• Sum checks: County Funds functions exact ($4,358,790,731); All Funds components sum to $4,477,328,060 against a stated total of $4,477,328,059 ($1 rounding difference, disclosed).
• What is not claimed: no standalone adopted-book figures; no outstanding-debt total; FY 2026–2027 Recommended figures ($4,420,713,107 all funds; 8,559 positions) are context only and are not the dashboard basis.
• Jurisdiction palette: Page accent: #123F4D, sampled from Kern County's official homepage (kerncounty.com) on 2026-10-25 — very dark teal top utility strip and AROUND KERN COUNTY section background; dark slate-teal FIND A SERVICE button #224F60, olive-green service icons #A6BE4A, chartreuse accents #C7D83A, muted rust links #8C3A30 noted; Granicus platform template with jurisdiction-specific colors; the dark-theme accent (#B8C5CA) is a lightened tint of the same color for contrast on the dark background. Shades are rendered approximations from the live homepage, not stylesheet values.

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