Carryover Estimate
Also known as: carryover,unspent prior authorization
The portion of a project's prior-year appropriations that the City projects will remain unspent at the end of one fiscal year and be available to spend in the next.
In OpenGov's CIP detail export, each project has a single 'Carryover Estimate' line per snapshot, labeled with the year it leaves (for example, '2025-26 Carryover Estimate' represents the balance leaving FY 2025-26 and entering FY 2026-27). The 5-year envelope shown for a project is the carryover estimate plus the new money proposed across the five plan years. The precise data-model definition of this column in OpenGov is one of the items the budget tool flags for staff clarification, because the same project can show very different carryover estimates across plan snapshots and the underlying reason is not always visible in public data.
Middle Avenue Caltrain Crossing (CPT005) showed a $7.3M carryover estimate in the FY 2025-30 Adopted plan; the same project shows $0 carryover in the FY 2026-31 Proposed plan.