In 2018, an anonymous tip led the authorities in California to Eric Uller, who for decades had volunteered at an after-school program associated with the Santa Monica Police Department. An investigation revealed Mr. Uller, 50, had molested at least four boys on the city’s watch.

Allegations from dozens of others soon emerged, dating to the 1980s and 1990s. Weeks after his arrest, Mr. Uller hanged himself in his apartment on the day he was scheduled to appear in court.

Seven years later, Santa Monica is still paying for his crimes. At last count, the bill had reached nearly $230 million.

That’s how much money the city has distributed to 229 plaintiffs who said they had been sexually assaulted by Mr. Uller. More than 150 additional cases remain.

Budget reserves are now so low that last year the credit rating agency S&P Global lowered Santa Monica’s bond rating. Insurance has covered only about 10 percent of the city’s expenses. At a budget workshop in March, the City Council discussed selling a library to replenish a fund it had depleted to pay sex abuse claimants.

“I’m afraid that we’re careening toward bankruptcy,” Dan Hall, a city councilman, told his colleagues.

Los Angeles County made international headlines last month after it agreed to pay $4 billion to settle nearly 7,000 sex abuse claims brought by adults who had been children in its juvenile detention and foster care systems. The deal, recently approved by county leaders, is the largest of its kind in U.S. history.

But across California, it was one payout among many.

Cities like Santa Monica, along with counties and school districts around the state, are grappling with their own steep judgments and settlements that are not as record-breaking as Los Angeles County’s but are nonetheless pushing some of them to the brink of financial crisis. A state law signed in 2019 by Gov. Gavin Newsom expanded the number of child sexual abuse lawsuits that can be filed against public institutions. The law, known as Assembly Bill 218 or A.B. 218, has set off a wave of litigation pitting California’s ideals as a defender of the vulnerable against its cash-strapped financial realities.

Inspired by the #MeToo movement and revelations of child abuse covered up by the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts, the law lifted the age limit for filing childhood sex abuse lawsuits against employers that let such abuse happen, and opened a three-year window for claims that had expired under the old statute of limitations. Now, hundreds of lawsuits representing thousands of plaintiffs have led to scores of multimillion-dollar judgments and settlements, and even the author of the law has called for a retooling to give taxpayer-funded entities a break.

In the Southern California community of Moreno Valley, a jury verdict in 2023 left the school district with a judgment totaling $121.5 million. Though the district, which serves about 34,000 students, negotiated its payout to $45 million, its insurance costs have soared.

On the Central Coast, Montecito Union, an elementary school district, could lose its entire $20 million general-fund budget to uninsured sex abuse claims. “A large verdict like so many of those being seen around the state would be devastating, and we don’t know how we could possibly pay such a large sum,” the superintendent of Montecito, Anthony Ranii, said in an email.

A recent analysis of A.B. 218 done for the California Legislature by a state agency that monitors school district finances estimated that school districts alone face up to $3 billion in claims related to the law. The agency warned that some districts might not survive, and recommended that the state create a victims’ compensation fund like the one started after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

At a recent news conference, Governor Newsom called the law’s impact “challenging.”

Adult victims of childhood sexual assault view the reckoning as long-overdue compensation for irreparable trauma. They and their lawyers say the damage done by such abuse often does not become apparent until long after the deadline for filing claims. In the Santa Monica cases involving Mr. Uller, many of the plaintiffs were young boys when they were assaulted, Hispanic men from low-income families who had stayed quiet for years out of fear or shame, or to protect undocumented relatives.

“Imagine your child goes to a school, say, and the school district knows that your child’s teacher is a perpetrator — and it does nothing,” said John C. Manly, a Southern California lawyer who has represented victims in hundreds of childhood sexual abuse lawsuits, including many of the female gymnasts who were assaulted by the former team doctor of the national gymnastics team, Lawrence G. Nassar. “That’s what this is.”

But for the communities that have borne the financial brunt of “A.B. 218 claims,” as they are now known, the payouts represent a diversion of scant public funds to pay for the sins of past generations.

“Our students and families and teachers of right now are being essentially asked to pay for something a long time ago that is completely out of their control and that they had nothing to do with,” said Andy Sheaffer, the vice president of a school board in a rural stretch of Santa Barbara County.

Mr. Sheaffer’s district, the Carpinteria Unified School District, is being sued by four men in their 50s and 60s who say that they were childhood victims of a former principal who was convicted of child molestation in 1986. The company that insured the district at that time is no longer in business, records are incomplete “and everyone who kept track then is dead,” Mr. Sheaffer said, including the perpetrator. Carpinteria Unified’s legal bills are already approaching $1 million.

If a settlement cannot be reached, he said, a verdict of the size juries have awarded in other cases could eviscerate the district’s $42 million budget, and Carpinteria Unified’s management could fall to the state in a process known as receivership.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers say that such situations are rare, and that a balance can be struck in settlement negotiations. Judges have reduced payouts in some cases and others have been covered, at least in part, by insurance, they note.

For local governments in California, the many lawsuits have compounded fiscal strains like wildfires and lost federal funding. In general, lawsuits against public entities in California tend to face fewer restrictions than in most other states. Officials in the City of Los Angeles, for instance, recently reported that liability costs of all types tripled there during the past year just from claims over issues like police abuse and sidewalks buckled by tree roots, contributing to a nearly $1 billion projected shortfall.

Last month, Los Angeles officials traveled to Sacramento to ask state legislators for help, lobbying not only for state money to prevent layoffs but also for a change in state law to limit the ability of plaintiffs to recover damages from municipalities in civil lawsuits.

The chief executive of Los Angeles County, Fesia Davenport, was at the Capitol that day, too, testifying about the county’s record childhood sex abuse payout. Ms. Davenport said that the county would tap reserves, issue bonds and make budget cuts to cover its $4 billion obligation. Even so, the county will be making annual payments through 2050 or longer, and the litigation has not ended. Hundreds more plaintiffs did not take the settlement.

Like most California counties, Los Angeles County acts as the health care and social service provider of last resort for its residents, some 10 million people. Also straining the county’s budget this year are nearly $2 billion in wildfire costs, demands for raises from more than 100,000 public employees in multiple unions and the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal health grants under the Trump administration.

“Victims have a right to have their voices heard,” Ms. Davenport said in an interview. “I think it’s important as a society to recognize these historical wrongs. At the same time, we have to be able to provide the social safety net.”

It is unclear how much relief, if any, California lawmakers will offer public institutions. Last month, the Democratic state senator representing Santa Monica, Ben Allen, a former school board member, introduced a bill that would have modestly increased the standard of proof for A.B. 218 lawsuits. It was shelved before its first hearing amid fierce pushback from the state’s trial lawyers, who are typically paid contingency fees worth 30 percent or more of such settlements and verdicts.

Mr. Manly, the lawyer who represented Olympic gymnasts in the case against Mr. Nassar — and whose clients include several hundred outstanding plaintiffs against Los Angeles County — personally sponsored an online ad asking Californians to stop “Ben Allen’s Predator Shield Law.” A grainy black-and-white photo of Mr. Allen with sunglasses and a stubbly beard anchored the plea.

“There’s a massive sex abuse problem in our public schools, and not just in California, and it needs to be cleaned up,” Mr. Manly said.

But public employees have exerted their own pressure as their powerful unions worry about potential layoffs.

Lorena Gonzalez, the Democrat who wrote A.B. 218 when she was serving in the State Assembly, said in an interview she had become alarmed at the onslaught of litigation, much of it generated by heavy advertising and with outside investors providing financial support.

“It’s gotten out of hand really quickly,” said Ms. Gonzalez, now the president of the California Labor Federation. “The only way you stop these patterns of abuse is to make people take it seriously. But that shouldn’t mean you have to bankrupt the state.”