Suggestion - Central Government Bailouts need to be scaled to city population

[Stylesjl]

Currently when a city goes bankrupt two things will happen:

- The current mayor resigns.
- The city is given 200 million from the central government as a bailout.

There is a problem with this bailout and that is that it is not scaled to the city's needs. A very small city that goes bankrupt will receive 200 million which is a huge amount but a big city with a big budget can very quickly burn through 200 million which can lead to repeated bankruptcies in a short time period.

My suggestion is that bailouts be scaled to population.

Not to the city GDP as this can be distorted during a budget crisis (GDP too high due to excessive government spending or too low as the raised taxes and government spending cuts were not enough to stop the budget crisis but enough to decrease GDP sharply).
It also shouldn't be scaled to the city budget, as this would encourage the running up of huge spending in the first place.

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In addition to this a rule should be imposed on the human player - if a human controlled mayor resigns then ALL members of that party should be barred from being put in office until they win a new election. Often when I bankrupt a city I find out that I am still in charge as another member of my party just takes the mayor spot.

[cantdownloadit]

Certainly here a council cannot go bankrupt, they issue a Section 114 notice - the national government may or may not get involved at this point. As far as I am aware here if the authority goes "bankrupt" that doesn't even mean the councillors are replaced or anything like that. They don't always get bailouts either, they mostly have to just cut the public services provided.

[Stylesjl]

You are right, UK councils can't go bankrupt:

Section 114 notices are reports issued by the chief financial officer (or Section 151 officer) of a British public body to prevent certain types of expenditure. The notices take their name from section 114 of the Local Government Finance Act 1988.

The most common type of notice is made under section 114(3) which restricts all spending except for that which funds statutory services.Despite the fact that local authorities in the United Kingdom cannot go bankrupt, issuing a section 114 notice is often described in the media as a council effectively declaring bankruptcy. Most councils under a section 114 notice will then pass a new budget to introduce cuts and reduce spending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_114_notice

In contrast American municipalities can go bankrupt under chapter 9:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapter_9 ... tates_Code

But from what I understand they generally don't get bailed out either, or at least not normally (New York was given a loan by the feds in 1975 for instance, also a lot of cities were relieved during Covid-19).

Though I'm not sure about it's implementation in the game though, without a bailout how would the city get it's finances temporarily in order given that the game never tolerates having a negative cash balance?

[cantdownloadit]

it would probably have to trigger when the game predicts the city will be bankrupt in X months, to give time for remediation action to take place.
The section 114 as i understand it when they predict a significant spending shortfall in the the coming financial year, rather than when they hit zero money.