Alt30 · Municipal intelligence
← MapStrategy alignment · Arizona
Every town leans one way — building capital, or running services. This asks whether that lean fits where the town is headed and whether its tax strategy can fund it. One verdict per city, then the evidence: the capital-intensity trend, its growth cohort, and what its revenue base can actually carry.
Buckeye is coherent: a capital orientation that fits a growing trajectory, funded from a base that can carry it.
Orientation fits direction?
AlignedGrowing +80% and building ahead of residents — a capital lean is what a growth trajectory calls for.
Tax strategy funds it?
AlignedThe capital lean is funded from a self-reliant, diversified base with the property lever active — the tax strategy supports the spending strategy.
Direction is the realized 2010→2020 growth trajectory — a proxy for a town's goals, not a plan it has stated. Orientation and tax strategy are FY2022 Census of Governments; property tax is the one clean local signal, so the funding verdict leans on it. A verdict is a question worth asking a town, read against its trajectory — not a grade.
The evidence · spending orientation
Capital Intensity Ratio — the share of Buckeye's own spending that builds things rather than running services — across the four Census years, read against its cohort.
31.1%
capital intensity, 2022
+1.87pp
per year, 2007–2022 (4 pts)
91th
percentile among 35 growing cities
Capital intensity climbed +29.5pp while the city grew 79.8% — the capacity-building you would expect of a growing city.
31.1%
Buckeye
18.3%
median of 35 growing cities
Self-reliant and reasonably diversified — the base can fund either a growth or a services strategy from revenue the city controls.
64%
raised locally (taxes + fees)
24%
from state & federal aid
0.67
diversification · +0.12 vs cohort
Own-source revenue mix
Revenue strategy
No obvious gaps: the city levies a property tax, is not over-concentrated in one source, and is not heavily aid-dependent. Its capacity constraint is scale, not structure.
FY2022, U.S. Census of Governments. The Census folds state-shared sales tax into a city's own general sales tax, so the locally-raised and aid shares are directional — the shared portion inflates “raised locally” and understates true state dependence. Property tax is the one unambiguously-local signal, which is why the untapped-lever read leans on it.
| City | Cohort | Pop 10–20 | CIR/yr | CIR 2022 | Service 17–22 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buckeye | Growing | 79.8% | +1.9pp | 31.1% | +59.3pp |
| Sierra Vista | Stable | 3.2% | +1.0pp | 23.7% | +12.4pp |
| Glendale | Stable | 9.5% | +0.9pp | 12.4% | +5.6pp |
| Queen Creek | Growing | 125.8% | +0.9pp | 71.9% | — |
| Show Low | Growing | 10.1% | +0.7pp | 25.8% | +49.7pp |
| El Mirage | Growing | 12.6% | +0.6pp | 11.5% | +7.9pp |
| Kingman | Growing | 16.5% | +0.5pp | 18.4% | — |
| Flagstaff | Growing | 16.6% | +0.4pp | 20.7% | −4.6pp |
| Douglas | Declining | -4.9% | +0.4pp | 11.9% | −9.1pp |
| Bullhead City | Stable | 4.6% | +0.3pp | 2.3% | +9.6pp |
| Camp Verde | Growing | 11.7% | +0.1pp | 4.2% | — |
| Cottonwood | Stable | 6.8% | +0.1pp | 12.6% | +14.6pp |
Ranked by the least-squares slope of capital intensity over the trusted years, among cities above 10,000 residents — below that a single project distorts the ratio, so smaller towns are browsable by name but not ranked here. Click any row to load that city above. “Service 17–22” is the change in resident-service spending per capita over the two years that carry functional detail.
Opportunity cost
Enter a project cost or incentive package and see it restated in the services a city actually funds. It weighs your figure against real spending — it does not estimate what the project itself would return.
$5,000,000 is 5.4 years of Show Low's parks & recreation budget — or a 20.2% lift to its entire operating budget for one year.
5.4×
years of the parks & recreation budget
20.2%
of the operating budget, one year
$410
per resident
For context, Show Low spends $921K a year on parks & recreation — about $76 per resident.
Service spending is the city's FY2022 current operations from the U.S. Census of Governments — the latest year broken out by function. A project cost is one-time, so it is shown as “years of” an annual service or as a single-year share of the operating budget, never as if the capital dollars recurred. This is a comparison of scale, not a forecast of what the project would return.
The forward view
Alignment reads the record through FY2022. The fiscal-trajectory tool projects the recurring revenue base forward — and lets you bend it with a state income-tax cut, a downturn, or a new property tax.