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.
Show Low shows a gap between what it spends on and how it funds that spending: It leans on capital but levies no property tax — the one lever that turns new development into recurring revenue. The building is funded by sales tax and state aid, neither of which scales with the assessed value it creates.
Orientation fits direction?
AlignedGrowing +10% and building ahead of residents — a capital lean is what a growth trajectory calls for.
Tax strategy funds it?
MisalignedIt leans on capital but levies no property tax — the one lever that turns new development into recurring revenue. The building is funded by sales tax and state aid, neither of which scales with the assessed value it creates.
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 Show Low's own spending that builds things rather than running services — across the four Census years, read against its cohort.
25.8%
capital intensity, 2022
+0.74pp
per year, 2007–2022 (4 pts)
83th
percentile among 35 growing cities
Capital intensity climbed +6.2pp while the city grew 10.1% — the capacity-building you would expect of a growing city.
25.8%
Show Low
18.3%
median of 35 growing cities
Growth-oriented but without the lever that captures growth: it levies no property tax, so rising assessed value never reaches the budget and the load falls on sales tax.
76%
raised locally (taxes + fees)
22%
from state & federal aid
0.47
diversification · −0.08 vs cohort
Own-source revenue mix
Untapped levers & exposures
Property tax is not levied
The largest recurring revenue lever is untapped. Property tax scales with assessed value, so it is the instrument that most directly captures a city's own growth — and its absence leaves sales tax and state aid to carry the whole load.
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.