Open a Foster City preliminary title report and, about two-thirds of the way down the secured tax roll, there's a line that doesn't appear on a title report in Burlingame or San Mateo: a voter-approved bond levy tied to the city's levee. It's a small dollar figure, usually a few hundred dollars a year, but it's unfamiliar enough that buyers moving from almost anywhere else on the Peninsula stop and ask what it is. The instinct is to read it as evidence that Foster City costs more to own. The tax rolls say the opposite.
What the line item actually is
Foster City sits on land that didn't exist as buildable ground before the 1960s. Developer T. Jack Foster, working with Richard Grant, built the city on what was then called Brewer Island, and to finance the dredging, the lagoon system, and the levee that holds the bay back, California created a one-of-a-kind public agency in 1960: the Estero Municipal Improvement District, or EMID. EMID isn't a homeowners association or a special district layered on top of normal city government. It is, alongside the City of Foster City, one of two legally distinct governments that share the same five-person council and the same city hall at 620 Foster City Boulevard, meeting the first and third Monday of every month. EMID handles police, fire, planning, lagoon and levee maintenance, parks, water, and sewer, and property tax revenue flows to EMID rather than to the city's general fund, a split that dates back to Proposition 13.
That structure matters here because it's the same mechanism the city used again in 2018, when it needed to pay for levee work a second time.
Why the levy exists
In 2014, FEMA told Foster City that its bayfront levee no longer met minimum flood protection standards. If the city didn't act, FEMA intended to place Foster City inside a federally designated flood hazard zone, which would have forced homeowners with federally backed mortgages into mandatory flood insurance. City Manager Jeff Moneda, describing the stakes to KQED at the time, pointed to what a levee failure would mean for basic services, not just individual homes: water, sewer, and electricity all sit at the same low elevation as the neighborhoods behind the levee.
"Flushing their toilets, drinking water, ability to take a shower. All of those would be compromised."
Voters were asked to weigh a known, modest annual tax against an unknown, and likely much larger, insurance bill. In June 2018, they approved Measure P by a wide margin, authorizing $90 million in general obligation bonds to raise the levee by as much as eight feet using steel reinforcement sunk into bay mud. The city issued the first $85 million in bonds in August 2020 and hired Shimmick Construction to build the improvements, with work beginning that fall and running roughly three years. The city's own levee project FAQ lays out exactly how the bill gets paid: a special tax added to every property tax bill inside EMID's boundaries, separate from the standard 1 percent Proposition 13 base rate, running for 30 years.
The part that changes the math
Here's where the levy behaves differently than most buyers expect. It isn't a percentage of home value. It's a fixed charge per $100,000 of assessed value, and the city projected that rate would decline over time as long as property values kept rising. The first-year rate, appearing on tax bills starting in fall 2020, was about $36 per $100,000 of assessed value, a bit lower than the roughly $40 estimate used on the ballot itself. City projections put the following year's rate closer to $33 per $100,000, continuing to drift downward as long as assessed valuations across the district keep climbing.
That's the mechanical reason the levy doesn't do what a new line item on a tax bill usually implies. A charge fixed in dollars, spread across a tax base that's grown substantially since 2020, shrinks as a share of what any individual owner pays. It's the opposite of a percentage-based tax, which rises in lockstep with value. Run the two side by side over the life of a 30-year bond and the fixed charge becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of the total bill almost every year the market cooperates.
What the county's own numbers show
The result shows up in aggregate tax-roll data. Property tax analytics firm Ownwell's current published figures for San Mateo County put Foster City's average effective property tax rate, actual tax bill divided by assessed value, at 1.22 percent. The county average is 1.25 percent. The average Foster City homeowner's bill runs about $9,715 a year, compared with roughly $11,405 across San Mateo County as a whole.
| Foster City | San Mateo County average | |
|---|---|---|
| Average effective tax rate | 1.22% | 1.25% |
| Average homeowner tax bill | ~$9,715/year | ~$11,405/year |
That's a city carrying an extra, named, voter-approved bond levy that most of the county doesn't have, and still landing below the county's blended average. The levee tax didn't push Foster City's overall rate above its neighbors. Rising assessed values across the district have grown faster than the fixed levy attached to them, which is exactly what the city's own tax-rate projections assumed would happen when Measure P passed.
What this means if you're comparing carrying costs
If you're weighing Foster City against another mid-Peninsula city on a spreadsheet, the presence of a line item you don't recognize is a reasonable thing to ask about. It shouldn't be the thing that decides the comparison. What decides it is the effective rate on the actual bill, and here that number sits at or below what a comparable home would carry elsewhere in the county. Ask your title company or lender to show you the current levy amount on any specific parcel before you write an offer. It's a matter of public record on the secured tax roll, it will keep shrinking on a fixed schedule for as long as values keep rising, and unlike the flood insurance premium the city was trying to avoid, it has a defined end date.
The other detail worth carrying into a comparison: this isn't the first time Foster City has financed itself this way. The bonds that built the original lagoon, levee, and utility system through EMID in the 1960s were fully paid off in 2007. Measure P is the second act of the same financing tool, not a new or unusual burden invented for this generation of owners.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Measure P levy the same thing as a Mello-Roos tax? No. Mello-Roos special taxes fund a Community Facilities District and are governed by a different state law. Measure P is a general obligation bond, approved by two-thirds of Foster City voters in a citywide election, and it's billed as bonded indebtedness on the secured tax roll rather than as a CFD special tax. Either way, it shows up as its own line and your title company will include it in escrow disclosures.
Will the rate keep going down every year? The city's own projections assume it will, as long as assessed property values across the district continue to rise, since the levy is a fixed dollar amount per $100,000 of value rather than a percentage. If valuations were to flatten or fall, the fixed charge would represent a larger share of a smaller number.
When does the levy end? The bonds were authorized to be repaid over 30 years from their 2020 issuance, putting the tax on track to fall off Foster City tax bills sometime around 2050.
If you're comparing Foster City to other Peninsula cities and want the current levy amount, the effective tax rate, or anything else pulled for a specific address before you write an offer, Let's Connect.
