I examine the factors that shaped the financial condition of US local governments during the ‘Great Recession’, with emphasis on special districts. The recent Recession focused new attention on local government fiscal health and its determinants. In this paper I provide the most exhaustive empirical test to date of those determinants and their relative power. I first identified more than 50 variables proposed in other frameworks of the determinants of fiscal health. I then employed an “Extreme Bounds Analysis” to test the robustness of each of those variables. The results suggest ten key variables drive local fiscal condition, and the magnitude of those effects vary across different types of local governments. These findings have implications for state oversight of local governments. They also have methodological implications for future work on local government fiscal condition.