Remove any of the three, Scott said, and Fresno would lose far more than it would gain from savings of not paying any of the three.

Simon's memo, in fact, is a laundry list of money that Fresno won and meetings with top federal officials the city scored.

There are "numerous visits" between Swearengin, her staff and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and his staff. There is $2.45 million for a Fresno Area Express "Bus Livability Grant" and several public safety grants, among them a $10.2 million Community Oriented Policing Services grant for hiring police officers.

Simon's memo says his firm, among other things, keeps daily tabs on federal agencies and communicates that to the city, pushes Fresno's needs to federal agencies, stays in contact with the Valley's congressional delegation and sets agendas and itineraries when city officials visit Washington.

In short, it helped those city successes.

"Any lobbyist worth their salt will provide weekly, quarterly and annual reports quantifying what they bring back, and also can quantify what they prevent," Sacramento's Scott said.

Scott and Stevens say Fresno's lobbyists do that -- and the reports show the investment is worthwhile.

Relying solely on elected representatives and their staffs at the state and federal levels would short change the city, they said -- especially in today's hyper-partisan political atmosphere. A lobbyist, they said, is non-partisan and should be able to talk with elected representatives from both sides of the aisle.

In addition, Scott said, there has been a change at the federal level since the demise of congressional earmarks, where the city could go to one of its elected officials to have a specific project put into the budget.

Now, a lot of that money is handed out via competitive grants, which require knowledge of the federal bureaucracy and how to pursue the money within that system.

It is a similar challenge in California, said Tony Quinn, a longtime political analyst and former Republican legislative aide.

In the state's post-Proposition 13 era, he said, many local funding decisions have been shifted to Sacramento. He recalled a joke that was popular during his time in former Gov. George Deukmejian's administration: " 'Governors come and go. The Department of Finance is forever, and they are always saying no.' In order to get anything, you've got to convince a bunch of bureaucrats."

That's where the lobbyist comes in, Quinn said. And with term limits, their role has grown even stronger because, as with governors, legislators also come and go.

The League of California Cities helps, Scott said, but it is spread thin representing cities across the state, and sometimes legislation can come out of nowhere that could only help -- or hurt -- a small minority of the state's cities.

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It's one reason that even small Valley towns, including Fowler and Avenal, have paid for a lobbyist.

Both those cities retained California Consulting for state-level lobbying. The firm is owned by former Assembly Member Steve Samuelian. Fowler, for instance, paid California Consulting around $50,000 from 2011 through 2012.

Still, lobbyists are only as good as the cities that hire them.

Richard Lehman, a former Valley congressman who now lobbies in Sacramento, said a lobbyist is a waste of money "if you don't have specific goals and things you want to accomplish. The entity that hires the lobbyist has to know how to use them just as much as having somebody who knows their way around."