Report 1 of 2 · The Independent Separation Report
An independent answer to Leon County RFP BC-2026-003, item by item, from public records — and the three motions that follow from it.
The executive brief’s eleven numbered findings, in the front door’s current wording, each pointed at the section and figure of this paper that carries it. The numbering is the brief’s, kept so its Fact chips open this paper.
Six lenses, twenty-two figures. Each tile steps through its own figures; click a tile to hold it, click again to let it run, and click a figure to open the section that proves it. Every tile is rebuilt from this paper’s data bundle, so a tile cannot differ from the figure it points at, and each carries its label. Tiles the executive brief once showed that have no line in the canonical figure basis are not reproduced.
Two governments have spent a year arguing about fire service across a boundary that 10,678 households did not choose to live next to. The public argument has been about a percentage — the City asked for 22%, the County offered 17% — and about six buildings. This paper is about what the percentage would buy, and it finds that the buildings cover 1.4% of the homes at stake.
Leon County’s solicitation, RFP BC-2026-003 (“Evaluation of the Establishment and Delivery of Fire Services,” opened November 12th, 2025), asks in §3.1 for twelve things: the current level of service under the interlocal (A) with call volume, response time, resources and staffing (A.1); alternative delivery models at a comparable level of service (B) with their effect on the ISO rating (B.1), the use of the volunteer departments (B.2), automatic aid and closest-unit response (B.3) and shared or co-located stations (B.4); an operational, programmatic and fiscal comparison (C); a timeline for adoption (D); efficiencies in the current model, including the agreement, the assessment and the method of collection (E); a final report with recommendations and revenue options (F); and a presentation to the Board (G). The Board awarded the work to Fitch & Associates on December 9th, 2025 (contract B-26-069, $109,995). Half the fee, $54,997.50, has been paid on a purchase-order milestone schedule; Amendment 1, executed June 5th, 2026 under the Purchasing Director’s signature authority, extended the term 210 days to December 31st, 2026, and the County’s own production on the contract (T26-0654) contains no deliverable and no Notice to Proceed. The Board first sees whatever it has bought at its workshop at the fire services workshop — the day it is asked to act on it.
It is an independent answer to that scope, from public records, written so the Board is not choosing between a consultant’s deliverable and nothing. It gathers nine self-contained analyses this study published between August 27th and September 6th, 2026 — on who actually arrives first, on the disparity in who pays, on the five-year cost of each path, on the workforce, on the options, on the EMS levy, on siting, on the ISO grading schedule and on who pays what now — under the County’s own twelve headings; version 2 folds in the executive brief that used to travel beside it — its eleven findings (the highlights above), its board of figures, and its living map (Figure 1, second stage) — so the brief is no longer a separate document; the study’s executive summary, in that brief’s layout, is The Decision Behind the Numbers, which fronts Two Leon Counties — the Disparity Study — the same study in our order, the eleven findings in four parts — with a two-page print cut beside it. It adds no new number: every figure below appears in one of those papers or in the study’s canonical figure basis, with its provenance. Where the RFP asks for a recommendation (item F), the recommendation here is ours and is labelled so: two tiers the County can act on at the workshop, the first without the City agreeing to anything.
Every quantity carries one of six labels, on the figure and in the sentence. measured is a count or a timestamp from a record — the cohort, the CAD medians, the roll. modelled is computed from records by a stated method — road distance, the second-unit interval, the instruments, the five-year paths. proxy is a measurement of the wrong population standing in for the right one, labelled every time — the 39% first-arrival share from six zones. range is a figure whose basis cannot be pinned down and is therefore published as an interval with no midpoint — the pay gap. documentary is a thing a record says — a vote, a contract clause, a lead time. ours is a recommendation, not any government’s. Two clocks run through the paper and are never mixed: first-unit arrival is measured from dispatch timestamps; the interval to the second unit is modelled on the road network. Distance is road miles on the county street centreline network and is never response time.
The unincorporated area of Leon County, Florida surrounds the City of Tallahassee, which is the county’s only incorporated municipality. At the 2020 Census the county held 292,198 residents and the city 196,169, so the unincorporated area — the area this study is about — is home to about 96,029 people documentary. That figure is the decennial subtraction and is not updated to later estimates. Under the 2009 interlocal agreement (extended by its Sixth Amendment to September 30th, 2028) the Tallahassee Fire Department’s sixteen career stations answer calls county-wide; six of them — Stations 10 through 15, the “county-facing” stations — are the ones the agreement contemplates transferring, and seven volunteer sites (five County-owned substations FS29–FS33 and the two Miccosukee Volunteer Fire & Rescue stations) sit beyond them. The County pays for the service through a flat fire assessment on each dwelling unit — $223.00 in Zone 2 and $245.39 in Zone 1, about $11.8M a year from Fund 145 — and funds ambulance service separately through an ad valorem municipal service taxing unit at 0.750 mills. Insurers price homes here off the ISO Public Protection Classification, and the whole county is graded Class 3. The grade is awarded to an address, and one of its tests is whether that address is within five road miles of a station that responds to it. That test is the line this paper is drawn on, and it is the insurance industry’s threshold, not ours.
LIVE/ folder beside this file.
Every incident-level figure rests on two productions: the City of Tallahassee’s dispatch production PRR2026-877 (structure-fire CAD by beat, 2021–22, 509 fires with a dispatch-to-first-arrival time; six per-station volunteer-zone CAD reports for calendar 2021, 9,760 zone-rows) and the 2022 ISO Fire Suppression Rating Schedule submission, including the hydrant flow summary of June 29th, 2022. Neither is the complete Computer-Aided Dispatch record; responses handled solely by a volunteer department, and every year outside the produced window, are absent. Cost and revenue figures come from the County’s FY2026 adopted budget (Fund 145 Fire Control; Fund 135 EMS), the Fire Rescue Services Assessment Roll FY2026, the Property Appraiser’s roll as pulled September 3rd, 2026 (46,768 unincorporated dwelling units with a district and a valued parcel; $7,809.4M taxable), the County’s records production on the consultant contract (T26-0654), the negotiation record in adopted minutes and resolutions (the May 27th, 2025 special meeting; City Resolution 25-R-45; the July 14th, 2026 Board direction), and the City’s own agenda item citing apparatus lead times. Geography is the TLCGIS street centreline network, address points, parcels, city limits and hydrant layers.
Every dwelling unit in the unincorporated area was placed individually — 47,395 address points, not a grid — and routed over the county street centreline network (19,726 built segments, 2,542.6 miles, densified to 179,217 nodes and 183,795 edges; addresses snap at a median of 0.027 miles) to the nearest responding station by multi-source Dijkstra. The 2028 scenario changes only the station set: the sixteen City stations become the six county-facing ones plus the seven volunteer sites. A unit crosses if it is within five road miles today and beyond five after. The pipeline was re-run from source on August 17th, 2026 and reproduced every figure exactly; a live re-pull on September 1st reproduced the cohort, its parcels, its value and all five district totals before any new column was read; the station-coverage run of September 7th reproduced the definition again (10,678 of 10,678 inside today; 10,641 of 10,678 outside after, 37 marginally inside and reported). A schematic-circle run on parcels, computed independently, agrees within 3% and is published as a cross-check, not a conflict.
First-unit arrival is measured: dispatch to first arrival on the 509 structure fires, by station area, and on 14,396 medical calls. Both previously published medians (5:06 core, 6:24 rural) reproduce to the second from the production. The interval between the first engine and the second is modelled (drivetime.py: road-network travel at functional-class apparatus speeds, undirected, simultaneous dispatch, no dispatch or turnout time; medians by volunteer zone; the 2028 figures on the 2028 station set). The lawful-entry clock adds the two: a three-person crew cannot enter a working structure fire under 29 CFR 1910.134(g)(4) until a fourth firefighter is on scene, so entry waits for the second unit. A 2021 CAD sample checks the model today — on 16 structure fires with a second company from a different station, it arrived a median of 4.1 minutes after the first — and by construction cannot check 2028, because the units removed in 2028 are the ones arriving first.
The six per-station volunteer-zone CAD reports were re-parsed for the origin of the first suppression unit on scene: inner-city stations (1–9, 16), county-facing stations (10–15), or a volunteer department. Of 9,760 zone-rows, 5,821 carry a suppression-unit arrival within 60 minutes and a dispatch timestamp; those are the denominator. The pooled share is a ratio of sums, not a mean of zone percentages. It is a proxy: six volunteer communities, one calendar year, City production only, and it is labelled so in every sentence that quotes it. Volunteer arrival is measured separately, on a different denominator (138 structure fires in the zones over 2021–22), and the two are never blended.
Because no public document said what “four new stations, $28–40M” would actually buy, a maximal-covering location model was run, greedy, over the same street graph, with candidate sites on a ~0.6-mile lattice of road nodes: 850 anywhere, 656 outside the authoritative city polygon. Greedy means station counts are upper bounds. The constrained run — sites the County could actually build, outside the city — is the control, and the difference between it and the unconstrained run is the finding. Capital is a linear extrapolation of the study’s own $28–40M for four stations ($7–10M each), an extrapolation and not a costing. Road distance, not travel time.
The instruments are priced on the whole unincorporated roll (46,768 units, $7,809.4M taxable value, September 3rd, 2026), holding the total raised constant at $223 per unit, so a change of instrument reallocates the burden and reduces nothing in aggregate; the square-foot tier borrows its slope ($0.13 per square foot above 1,600) from Florida fire-district precedent and solves only the base ($148.81) locally. Five-year path costs (FY2029–FY2033, the first window in which every component appears at least once) are arithmetic on components the study had already published — operating, startup, purchased aid, station capital and station operating — County-side, unfinanced, in the study’s own nominal terms. Every staffing figure scales with a loaded cost of $122,000 per FTE that no record verifies; every parity figure is a range because the $44,178 starting salary in the record has no established vintage.
The County’s twelve scope items, in the County’s order. Each opens with what was asked, states what the record answers, and closes with its status: answered means answerable from public records, here, with sources — it is not a claim about the County’s commissioned consultant, whose work this study has not seen; gap means named and unresolved; the consultant’s means noted for completeness and not claimed.
Asked: the current level of service — operation, personnel, finance, capital. Answered: the service the County buys is defined by what ends. On the county’s own street network, 10,678 dwelling units on 9,648 parcels are inside five road miles of a responding station today and outside it the day after measured. They are not remote: 96.9% are within one mile of the city limit and none is more than two; 74.4% are within half a mile. They carry $2.73 billion of market value and $27.3 million a year in property tax, median home $245,167. Every commission district is hit — 1,793 / 1,946 / 1,853 / 2,133 / 2,953 units in Districts 1 through 5 — and the loss falls unevenly in kind: Districts 1 and 2 hold 95.9% of the affected mobile homes, Districts 3–5 hold 77.5% of the affected single-family homes, and the median crossing home in District 4 carries $441,534 of value against $89,035 in District 1. For 149 of the 10,678 the roll runs a station that stays (12 or 15); they cross because the station within five road miles of them today is a different one.
| Class | Units | % of units | Market value | % of value | Median parcel |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single family | 8,045 | 75.3% | $2,500.6M | 91.7% | $273,855 |
| Mobile home | 1,444 | 13.5% | $58.2M | 2.1% | $38,016 |
| Multifamily | 840 | 7.9% | $86.6M | 3.2% | $157,583 |
| Condo / co-op | 280 | 2.6% | $67.8M | 2.5% | $335,000 |
| Other residential | 69 | 0.6% | $14.5M | 0.5% | $20,687 |
| All | 10,678 | 100% | $2.73B | 100% | $245,167 |
| District | Units | Single family | Mobile homes | MH share | Median home |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| District 1 | 1,793 | 854 | 832 | 46.4% | $89,035 |
| District 2 | 1,946 | 955 | 553 | 28.4% | $100,444 |
| District 3 | 1,853 | 1,807 | 6 | 0.3% | $351,718 |
| District 4 | 2,133 | 2,091 | 25 | 1.2% | $441,534 |
| District 5 | 2,953 | 2,338 | 28 | 0.9% | $263,805 |
What the County buys today, in personnel and finance: sixteen career stations with 277 shift-rank positions, of which the six county-facing stations hold 81.5 measured (establishment, not payroll); riding strength of three per engine; 86 volunteers across six county departments; the whole service for $11.8M a year (Fund 145 Fire Control: $11,318,512 payment to the City, $482,479 volunteer line) — about 39 cents on the dollar of a roughly $30M service. In water, 93.8% of the cohort already has a hydrant within 1,000 feet and 94.8% has a City-owned hydrant nearest; 9,440 hydrants are active county-wide, and of 90 City locations flow-tested for the 2022 grading, 39 delivered less than needed. The public band, for anyone who needs one number rather than the crossing cohort: 12,000–17,000 units beyond five road miles in 2028 and 3,800–7,800 beyond seven, the width of which is entirely whether the volunteer stations earn credit (item B.2). Status: answered.
Asked: call volume, response time, resources and equipment, staffing. Answered: the first unit reaches a structure fire in a median of 5:06 in the core city (stations 1–8, n=327) and 6:24 in the rural station areas (stations 11–14, n=67); at the 90th percentile the gap widens from 1:18 to 3:06 — 7:56 against 11:02 measured. Station 13, which becomes Lake Munson’s nearest responder after 2028, runs 6:24 median and 9:12 p90 in its own current area today (n=27) — its measured history, not a forecast. Of 132 fires in the ISO/NFPA 1710 calculator set, the first engine met the benchmark on 76 (58%). Most calls are not fires: across 14,396 medical calls the first unit arrived in a median of 6:14 in city station areas and 8:12 in the six outlying ones, 9:39 against 13:43 at the 90th percentile, and one Miccosukee-area call in ten waited past 18:49. In the six outlying zones the grading year brought 2,984 medical calls against 67 structure fires — roughly 45 to 1 — and under the agreement the City’s engines are the advanced-life-support first responders county-wide, arriving ahead of the County ambulances that hold the transport monopoly. How far behind the engine the ambulance arrives is unpublished: the Consolidated Dispatch Agency holds it.
| Area | n | Median | 90th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Structure fires — Stations 1–8 (core city) | 327 | 5:06 | 7:56 |
| Structure fires — Stations 11–14 (rural county) | 67 | 6:24 | 11:02 |
| Structure fires — Station 13 alone (Lake Munson’s nearest responder after 2028) | 27 | 6:24 | 9:12 |
| Medical calls — city station areas | 14,396 | 6:14 | 9:39 |
| Medical calls — the six outlying station areas | 8:12 | 13:43 (Miccosukee area p90 18:49) |
Status: answered — and it re-derives the brief’s published medians to the second. What the record cannot yet show is the ambulance interval and any multi-year trend; both are in records request C.
Asked: alternative delivery models at a comparable level of service, and the most cost-effective options. Answered: the middle ground between “stay” and “full standalone” was priced in August on a consistent basis modelled: a successor contract on reformed terms at $16–20M a year (the realistic band; the negotiated band ran $13.8–15.4M agreed-to-asked); a bridge of two to four years and then build; a joint authority at a County share of about $14–18M, feasible only if agreed well before separation; a partial transfer of the four rural stations at $21–24M that buys back 3.9% of the affected units and is dominated; and a neighbouring-county or private contract, for which no capable counterparty exists. The standalone ladder itself runs $23.5M (lean, three-person crews) · $25.3M (EMS shared services) · $26.7M (no integration) · $30.0M (same service, restoring ISO Class 3), with about $20.25M of startup. Against today’s $11.8M, a household on the ~50,300 basis goes from $234 today to $467 under lean and $597 under same service.
Comparable level of service turns on one variable that no option other than staffing moves before the deadline. What decides a working house fire is how long the first crew waits for the second, because three firefighters cannot lawfully go in. Today that modelled wait is 7.7 minutes in Woodville and 3.7 in Lake Jackson; on the 2028 station set it becomes 18.3 and 18.0, while Miccosukee does not move at all because nothing it depends on is leaving modelled. Lawful entry — measured first unit plus modelled gap, three aboard — runs 10–14 minutes today and about 24 after separation in the worst-hit zones. Put a fourth firefighter on each county-facing engine and the same crew is through the door in about seven. That is $2.80M a year, and across the ten costed interventions it is the only one that buys any minutes at all before October 1st, 2028; every other operational option either cannot be delivered by then or acts on a constraint that is not the binding one.
drivetime.py, FIGURE_BASIS §4a). Right view: lawful entry with three aboard today, three aboard after separation, and four aboard — the one intervention that moves it. A model, not a measurement; the measured half of the clock is Figure 3. The 2021 CAD sample puts today’s second company about four minutes behind the first on structure fires (n=16), so the model is pessimistic today and unverifiable for 2028 by construction.Status: answered. The option set is priced; the one option that buys minutes is identified and costed; the successor-agreement terms that make it a purchase rather than a subsidy (open-book pricing, pro-rata clawback, 48-month notice) are drafted in the August synthesis and carried into item F.
Asked: the potential impact on the current ISO rating. Answered: the grade is not awarded to a county but to an address, and past five road miles from a responding station the department’s own capability stops counting. Leon County is Class 3 today on a score of 73.54 of 105.50; Class 2 begins at 80.00; Credit for Company Personnel earns 6.51 of 15 points, the department’s weakest item, and the schedule applies a divergence penalty of −4.75 because the water supply outruns the department’s ability to use it documentary. After separation the cohort does not fall uniformly to Class 10. Between five and seven road miles with a creditable hydrant within 1,000 feet a property lands in Class 10W, a real class that exists because such homes demonstrably burn better than homes with no water; beyond seven miles, or without creditable water, it is Class 10. Joining the hydrant layer to the cohort: 6,779 of the 10,678 (63.5%) land in 10W and 3,899 (36.5%) in Class 10 modelled. Neither is Class 3: 10W is reduced loss potential inside the unprotected range, not a partial return to protection — and the two thirds who land on that ledge land there because the water stayed, and 91% of them depend on a City-owned hydrant. The $8.5M Class 2 upgrade the City is buying moves none of them back. This consequence was voted out of one cost estimate: at the May 27th, 2025 special meeting the annual increase was put at about $49 with the ISO component and about $38 without — corrected September 8th, 2026 from “a month”, see the corrections register — and the motion that carried excluded all ISO-related costs, 4–3.
Status: answered — with the exact divergence arithmetic and the Class 2 decomposition — but B.1 stops short of pricing Class 2 as an engineering programme, which is a licensed firm’s work.
Asked: utilisation of the volunteer fire departments. Answered in part: what the departments do is measurable; how ISO grades them is not, and that determines the insurance class of every community whose road distance does not change. On the City’s dispatch production for 2021–22, across the six volunteer zones a volunteer unit arrived at 38 of 138 structure fires — 27.5% (95% CI 20.1–35.0); in 69 of them no volunteer unit was listed at all measured. In roughly 72% of structure fires inside the volunteer zones the arriving unit was a City engine — the engine that stops responding on October 1st, 2028. Who arrives first, all calls, calendar 2021: an inner-city station’s unit on 56% of calls in the Lake Jackson zone and 45% in Woodville; on 55% and 44% respectively no other unit arrived at all. Pooled across the six zones an inner-city station put the first unit on scene on 39.1% of all calls (2,276 of 5,821) and 39.2% of fire-type calls (142 of 362) proxy, and ten of the sixteen stations that answer the county are not the six the interlocal contemplates transferring. Woodville and Fort Braden have not one unit in the 10,678 and their distance to the nearest station is unchanged — but the station is not the engine, and they are exposed on a different axis, measured by who responds. The volunteer line in the County budget is $482,479; the study’s $0.60M programme takes it to about $1.1M and has been priced but never designed.
ISO_ENQUIRY_DRAFT_2026-09-04.md) and has not been sent. Status: gap.Asked: automatic aid and closest-unit response across the boundary. Answered: the arithmetic of the cohort is the case for it. 10,529 of the 10,678 — 98.6% — sit behind stations that stay City property whoever wins the argument about the buildings measured; a closest-unit or automatic-aid arrangement with the City reaches them on October 1st, 2028 from stations that already exist, while four new County stations would reach 88.1% of them no earlier than 2030. The published price of purchased aid is $0.5–1.5M a year documentary; if aid is refused or priced punitively that line is too low, and nothing in the record prices aid from the City’s side. The August synthesis costs it as a bargaining range and drafts the operational protocol in term-sheet form on the per-response pricing precedent; a written aid price from the City is the single question that decides the entire station programme. The interlocal is already more than a fire contract — under it the City’s engines are ALS first responders county-wide — so the aid question and the EMS successor question are the same question. Status: answered; the price from the City’s side is not in any record and is asked for in item F.
And what is being fought over has not been priced. On the Property Appraiser’s own improvement year — 3 of the 5 station buildings carry 1988, 40 years old by 2028, and the other 2 carry 1995, or 33 measured (Sta 10 Tower Road 1988 · Sta 11 Centerville 1995 · Sta 12 Chaires 1988 · Sta 13 Oak Ridge 1988 · Sta 14 Blountstown 1995). All 5 stand on land the City bought in 1988, verified against the recorded deeds. That is the appraiser’s roll field and not a condition assessment: age is not condition, and this paper makes no claim about the condition of any building. Against those ages sits the price. Exhibit E ¶D.2(a) obliges the City, at the County’s sole option, to sell Stations 10–14 and their land for no more than $525,000 — five stations documentary. Station 15 is not capped: the price there is “the City’s investment in same,” and no such figure exists in any public record, so this study built one — $1,789,171.60 modelled. Apparatus is priced separately at unamortised value on the agreement’s own 15-year and 10-year schedules. And on 4 September 2026 the City certified in writing that no appraisal, valuation or asset list exists for those provisions. Only 8 of the 10,678 households sit behind Station 15 — the one building whose price is open-ended. Status: answered; the City's fixed-asset ledger for Stations 10–15 was requested in PRR2026-869 and has not been produced — 'currently still working on this item'.
Asked: shared or co-located stations in the boundary areas. Answered: the six county-facing stations could be bought outright for about $2.3M documentary, and the interlocal’s termination clause transfers the City’s fire assets at a reasonable cost; the City is now arguing that 2028 is an expiration, on which reading nothing transfers at that cost. This paper takes no position on which reading is right, only on what turns on it: the buildings in that argument are worth about $2.3M, and the service question behind them is worth $217–249M over five years. Nobody had published what four stations would actually buy, so this study computed it modelled: on the county’s own street network, four stations sited where the County could actually build them bring 88.1% of the 10,678 back inside five road miles — not all of them; reaching every one takes nine, an implied $63–90M of capital on the study’s own per-station cost; two County stations reach 97.1% at the seven-mile Class 10W edge ($14–20M). And an optimiser left free to put a station anywhere puts its first four sites inside the city limits, each within about a mile of an existing station and one of them 0.0 miles from Station 16 — 96.9% of the cohort is within a mile of the city line, so the best places to serve it are already built. At four County stations, mobile homes are covered 75.8% against single-family 89.5%: the two defensible objectives, household count and vulnerability, select almost disjoint maps.
Status: answered. Shared facilities are an addition problem, not a relocation problem; the candidate evaluation and sequencing are in the August synthesis (Deliverable 5).
Asked: an operational, programmatic and fiscal comparison against the alternatives. Answered: every cost of leaving had been published separately and nobody had added them up. Over the first five years after separation, FY2029–FY2033, County-side and unfinanced modelled: a successor agreement at the 30% offer $76.5M; the realistic band $80–100M; a lean standalone department $137.5M; a same-service standalone $170M; and standalone with purchased aid and four new stations — the only path that puts a station back within five road miles of the 10,678 — $217–249M. Against the 30% offer those are +$4–24M, +$61M, +$94M and +$140–172M. The County’s own adopted plan carries $12,598,661 in Fund 145 for FY2029, the first year it must provide the service itself; five years of that fund held flat is about $63M (ours, and labelled so — the County has not published FY2030–33 fire figures), against a restoring path of $43–50M a year. Nothing has been budgeted for any of it. Both recommendations (item F) land inside $15–18M a year all in, the order of money the fund is already in.
| Path | Five-year total | Against the 30% offer |
|---|---|---|
| Successor agreement — the 30% offer | $76.5M | — |
| Successor agreement — realistic band | $80–100M | +$3.5–23.5M |
| Standalone — lean default | $137.5M | +$61M |
| Standalone — same service | $170M | +$93.5M |
| Standalone + aid + four stations (restores the reach) | $217–249M | +$140.5–172.5M |
| Five years of Fund 145 held at its FY2029 level ($12,598,661) — ours, labelled | ≈ $63M | the money that exists |
The cheaper way of standing alone is the expensive one. Lean saves a household $130 on the assessment against same service, but lean does not restore the reach and the ISO grade follows the reach; a frame home on a private carrier then pays $1,450–1,830 more a year in premium and is $1,320–1,700 worse off net. The fee is the number that gets voted on; the premium is the number that follows from the vote, and nobody votes on it. Status: answered. The two-minute table in the August synthesis puts every alternative on consistent measures (cost per household, annual operating, startup capital, units beyond five miles, rural response, ISO outcome, staffing, transition risk, reversibility).
Asked: a timeline for adoption — policies, licences and certification, personnel, capital, the fiscal model and collection. Answered in part: for the deadline itself the constraint is the calendar rather than the budget — no amount of money buys the service on October 1st, 2028 — and it has two gates in different tenses. (From that day forward the binding constraint is the other one, money: item C prices it.) The apparatus gate has already closed. The City’s own agenda item, citing lead times for the County’s benefit, puts an engine at more than 28 months, a tanker at about 24 and a ladder truck at up to 32 documentary. From the fire services workshop, proposed for October 27th, 2026, to separation is 23.1 months. An engine ordered in that room arrives about February 2029; the last date to order one was around June 2026, and it has passed; a ladder truck’s passed in February. This does not say the County cannot provide fire service on October 1st, 2028 — the County has said there will be no lapse — it says the County cannot buy new apparatus into service by then; used, leased, a successor agreement and mutual aid are outside this finding and none is priced here. The academy gate is still open: a recruit class seated after late 2027 does not put firefighters on an engine by October 1st, 2028, and that is the decision still in front of the Board. Fixed by statute: a resolution of intent under §197.3632 in early 2028, the assessment roll certified by September 15th, 2028, the agreement’s own end on October 1st. Nothing begun now opens a station before 2030. The IAFF contract runs to September 30th, 2027, so the next bargaining round opens in early 2027 — which is where the 42-hour week belongs (item F).
| When | What | Note |
|---|---|---|
| already past | Apparatus window closed | City’s own lead times: last engine order ≈ June 2026; ordered at the workshop, an engine arrives ≈ February 2029 |
| October 27th, 2026 (proposed) | Fire Rescue Services Workshop — proposed by Consent Item 4, 15 Sep 2026 | Change how the charge is collected · fund the service and make the written offer · start the 42-hour-week process · send the payroll records request |
| FY2027 | No-regrets set (~$1.5–2.5M) | Volunteer programme · Exhibit E appraisals · Chief recruitment · ISO letter · land-bank Woodville site |
| late 2027 | Academy seated | The last start that staffs 2028 — the one gate still in front of the Board |
| early 2028 | Resolution of intent (§197.3632) | A funding-instrument defect found mid-2028 is a ~$25M hole |
| September 15th, 2028 | Roll certified | Statutory deadline for the assessment roll |
| October 1st, 2028 | Separation | Agreement ends 30 Sep; the County delivers fire protection with or without the City |
| 2030–31 | First new station opens | Nothing built now opens before 2030 |
Asked: efficiencies in the current model — service delivery, the structure of the agreement, the assessment, the method of collection. Answered: this is where the record is sharpest, because the instrument is a decision the County has never put on an agenda in its own right. A flat per-dwelling charge is regressive. It takes the same dollar from every home, so it takes a much larger share of a cheap one: on the whole unincorporated roll District 1 holds 4.0% of the market value and pays 9.6% of the bill while District 4 holds 46.9% and pays 29.2%; a District 1 household pays $2.03 for every $1,000 of market value and a District 4 household 52 cents; a mobile home pays 4.8 times the share of its value that any other residential parcel pays measured. And District 1 is not only paying more per dollar — on the one incidence claim that survives a significance test, its structure-fire rate over 2021–22 runs at 1.97× District 4’s (4.91 against 2.49 per 1,000 units; 95% CI 1.15–3.37); every other district overlaps the county rate and their differences are noise. Tract statistics describe neighbourhoods, not households.
| District | Units | Fires | Per 1,000 (2 yr) | 95% CI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| District 1 | 4,481 | 22 | 4.91 | 3.08 – 7.43 |
| District 2 | 9,214 | 24 | 2.60 | 1.67 – 3.88 |
| District 3 | 9,886 | 39 | 3.94 | 2.80 – 5.39 |
| District 4 | 13,638 | 34 | 2.49 | 1.73 – 3.48 |
| District 5 | 9,549 | 22 | 2.30 | 1.44 – 3.49 |
| County | 46,768 | 141 | 3.01 |
The County already knows how to charge on value: the $41.1M ambulance fund runs on an ad valorem MSTU at 0.750 mills. That EMS levy went from 0.500 to 0.750 — a 50% increase — for FY2024 in a final hearing of thirteen minutes, and three years have now been collected at the higher rate; the fund balance rose $5,339,787 in the first year and more than doubled in two, from $6,995,592 to $15,524,853, funding an ambulance fleet replacement programme ($5.33M of EMS capital in FY2024, $7.74M in FY2025). Accumulating a balance to buy a fleet without borrowing is good practice; the criticism is of a public record that made a large decision easy to miss, and of a performance-reporting practice — no EMS response-time measure is published — that makes its stated justification impossible for anyone, including the Board, to test. The City’s consent to that levy on city property is keyed to the same Current Term of the same 2009 agreement: it remains in effect “until the last day” of that term and is then “deemed revoked without further action” (Ordinance 23-O-22 §3(D)) — September 30th, 2028, the day before separation, taking about $13M of a $19.5M levy with it unless the City has consented afresh first. One date, two funds; only the fire half is on an agenda. On the 2023 precedent the County gave the City sixty days’ notice before it legislated, which puts the real decision in the first half of 2028.
How the County raises the money is a second decision, separate from how much. Holding the total constant on the whole unincorporated roll, four instruments modelled: today’s flat charge puts 29.3% of the bill on Districts 1 and 2, which hold 11.9% of the taxable value; levied on value they pay 11.9%, and a District 1 household pays about $84 where a District 4 household pays about $369 — but an MSTU is a tax, with TRIM notice, hearings, a millage cap, and a base that Amendment 3 will move unevenly; half flat, half on value lands at 20.6% with no district rising by more than about $73; and a square-foot tier — $148.81 up to 1,600 square feet plus $0.13 a foot above — reaches 24.2% without leaving assessment law at all: no MSTU, no TRIM notice, untouched by Amendment 3. Under it a District 1 household goes from $223 to $182, District 2 to $185, District 3 to $207, District 5 to $210, and District 4 — the only one that rises — from $223 to $282. Revenue-neutral does not mean nobody pays more; it means the County raises the same total. 7.1% of units carry no recorded building area and would pay the base only.
| Instrument | Districts 1+2 share of bill | District 1 household | District 4 household | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flat per dwelling | 29.3% | $223 | $223 | What the County charges now. |
| Square-foot tiered — $149 up to 1,600 sq ft, then $0.13 a foot | 24.2% | $182 | $282 | Stays inside assessment law — no MSTU, no TRIM notice. |
| Half flat, half on value | 20.6% | $154 | $296 | No district rises by more than about $73. |
| Levied on value — pure ad valorem | 11.9% | $84 | $369 | Districts 1 and 2 hold 11.9% of the taxable value, and would pay 11.9% of the bill. |
On the method of collection: the County moved its fee onto the property-tax bill in November 2025 under the uniform method, which carries tax-certificate enforcement. The same design question — whether a flat per-household fire charge regardless of value is a fee or a tax — is being litigated on the City side of the line: Inman-Johnson v. City of Tallahassee, filed November 17th, 2025 in the Second Judicial Circuit by the ACLU of Florida and the Southern Poverty Law Center; on March 12th, 2026 the court denied the City’s motion to dismiss as to the three individual plaintiffs, and the case is in discovery. It binds nothing the County does — the complaint’s theory is that the City followed neither the tax nor the assessment procedure and charged utility customers rather than property owners — but flat charging regardless of value is a design somebody is already testing in court. On the structure of the agreement: the 22% the City asked for in January 2025 carried one identified, separately costed element, $8.5M toward ISO Class 2, with no data behind it; the County, rather than demand the data that would make it verifiable, deleted the deliverable, 4–3, and the counter-offer was the same ask with the only service element taken out. Nothing in the record shows four-person staffing ever attached to the 22%, the 17%, or anything exchanged since. Status: answered — arguably the strongest answer in the study.
Asked: a final report with recommendations, timelines, fiscal implications and revenue options. Our answer, and it is ours, not any government’s; the costings are the study’s own components, the terms are proposed, not negotiated, and no government has agreed to any of them.
Parity first, and not the 42-hour week, for three reasons: it reaches a firefighter for about 56 cents on the dollar against the shift change ($22,701 or less against $40,580 per firefighter); it is cash the County can specify, verify and claw back; and shift length is a City–IAFF bargaining subject the County cannot buy however much it offers. The 42-hour week is on the path as an OPTION, not a recommendation — a good idea on the wrong table at the wrong time: it buys no minutes, it costs $10.1–11.3M a year, and it arrives properly in early 2027 when bargaining opens for FY2028, with the County’s published arithmetic available to both sides. Most of the department’s overtime is arithmetic before it is anyone’s choice — a 24/48 rotation averages 56.2 hours a week against the §207(k) threshold of 53.0, which alone would generate 43,212 hours a year against 38,322 booked in the last published payroll — and cannot be hired away; the discretionary part is concentrated in 28 people, one of whom worked 1,357 hours of overtime in a single year.
The path from the workshop: change how the charge is collected (the square-foot tier, revenue-neutral); fund the service and make the written offer to the City within 30 days — Recommendation 1’s items with the Recommendation 2 parity share; direct staff to put the 42-hour week on the 2027 City–IAFF table as an option; send the payroll records request. October — the offer delivered with the specification attached. November–December — the wage tables return and parity converts from a range to a price. FY2027 — the no-regrets set ($1.5–2.5M): the volunteer programme, Exhibit E appraisals, Chief recruitment, the ISO letter, a land-banked Woodville corridor site. Early 2027 — City–IAFF bargaining opens and the 42-hour question arrives on its proper table. Late 2027 — the academy gate, the one still in front of the Board. October 1st, 2028 — either a successor agreement is in force or the County delivers alone. Every step is useful in both branches, and none requires settling the buildings argument first. And ask for the four things that are missing, because the last exchange failed for want of them — and ask in writing, because “no deliverable in the production” is a statement about the records the County produced, not a claim that no deliverable exists, and only a written request closes that difference: one written question to ISO; the Consolidated Dispatch Agency records the County holds and has not published; a deliverable before the study’s remaining $54,997.50; and the instrument decision on an agenda in its own right. Status: answered — as this study’s recommendation.
Asked: presentation to the Board, senior staff and other groups. A consultant deliverable, noted for completeness and not claimed. This paper and its companions are public; whether they are presented is the Board’s call. Status: the consultant’s.
| Item | What the County asked | Where | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Current level of service under the Interlocal — operation, personnel, finance, capital | §4.1 | answered |
| A.1 | Call volume, response time, resources and equipment, staffing | §4.2 | answered |
| B | Alternative delivery models at a comparable level of service; most cost-effective options | §4.3 | answered |
| B.1 | Potential impact on the current ISO rating | §4.4 | answered |
| B.2 | Utilisation of the volunteer fire departments | §4.5 | gap |
| B.3 | Automatic aid and closest-unit response across the boundary | §4.6 | answered |
| B.4 | Shared, co-located stations in the boundary areas | §4.7 | answered |
| C | Operational, programmatic and fiscal comparison against the alternatives | §4.8 | answered |
| D | Timeline for adoption — policies, licences, personnel, capital, fiscal model | §4.9 | gap |
| E | Efficiencies in the current model — service, agreement structure, the assessment, the method of collection | §4.10 | answered |
| F | A final report with recommendations, timelines, fiscal implications and revenue options | §4.11 | answered |
| G | Presentation to the Board, senior staff and other groups | §4.12 | the consultant’s |
Ten of the twelve items are answerable from public records and are answered above with sources. The two that are not need one letter and one line on a schedule — neither is a new study, and both sit in the risk ledger. “Answered” is not a claim of equivalence to a professional fire-service engineering study, and it says nothing about the County’s commissioned consultant, whose work this study has not seen. It means the Board is not choosing between this and nothing; it is choosing between this and a deliverable that has not arrived.
The solicitation asks for the level of service, the alternatives and their cost; it does not ask what the two governments’ exchange left off the table, because in November 2025 nobody knew. Three things did. The thing that actually changes what happens at a working fire — a fourth firefighter on every county-facing engine — was never priced by either side: it is attached to neither the 22% nor the 17% nor anything exchanged since, and it is the largest omission in the file. The instrument — how the money is raised, as distinct from how much — was never put on an agenda in its own right, although it moves more money between households than the rate does and the County already uses the alternative for its ambulances. And nobody has costed the separation, on either side: the County’s own study has yet to deliver a page, and the one item that changes what happens at a working fire was never priced by either government. Our answer to item F begins with those three.
The public argument is about six stations and whether a termination at a reasonable cost or an expiration transfers them. Whichever reading is right, 98.6% of the affected households sit behind stations that stay City property; the purchasable buildings serve 1.4%. Every remedy that matters is a service arrangement — staffing, volunteer credit, automatic aid — and each has a measured price. The optimiser makes the same point from the other side: left free, it puts the stations the County would need where the City already has them.
Until September 7th, 2026 every surface of this study placed a single apparatus gate in mid-2027 — in the future. That took Station 15’s replacement apparatus — one line in the transition schedule, about a single City truck already in a replacement cycle — and generalised it into a gate on a whole County fleet, and it put the deadline in the future. On the City’s own lead times the engine window closed around June 2026 and the ladder window in February. The correction is published in the figure basis (§2r) and in every edition, and the audit that guards the corpus now matches the claim rather than the date, because the claim had survived one sweep by being worded with a pronoun. The academy gate stands, and it is the one still in front of the Board.
The decisions already taken have narrowed the County’s options, and the narrowing is the point, not anyone’s motive. On May 27th, 2025 the motion that carried excluded all ISO-related costs, 4–3, and the cheaper figure is the one that left the room; the consequence was not disproved, it was removed from the estimate, and it is now the largest number in this study. On August 12th, 2025 unincorporated rates were held flat. On September 3rd, 2025 the City raised in-city rates only. On July 14th, 2026 the Board directed the County Attorney to begin terminating for cause, and the two governments now read the agreement differently. Four things are still open going into the workshop: the ISO costs excluded in May 2025 can be put back in the estimate; the termination-versus-expiration question is contested and undecided; the Verisk letter; departmental registration. Two are closing — the fund, held flat since August 2025, and the academy. One is not the County’s — the City’s in-city rates, fixed to 2028. Two are shut — the apparatus window, and the date. Nothing here is an accusation; every row is a vote taken in public, a filing, a lead time or a question not yet asked.
It does not establish that separation is wrong, that either government has acted improperly, or that any figure here is the number a licensed fire-service engineering study would produce. It establishes what the public record supports about what ends on October 1st, 2028, what it would cost to replace, who pays now and who would pay after, and what the County can still decide — and it names, in §7, what it cannot answer and what would.
| Limitation | Effect, and what reduces it |
|---|---|
| The $122,000 loaded cost per FTE is unverified — the binding limitation on every staffing figure. | Sets the fourth-firefighter cost, both 42-hour figures and the personnel share of every standalone operating figure. 277 positions at that rate is 53% of FY26 Fire Services revenue where fire personnel is normally 75–85%; if the true loaded cost is X% higher, every staffing figure is X% higher and the ordering of the paths does not change. Request A (payroll by rank, employer benefit rates). |
| The pay gap has no fixed vintage. | $44,178 may pre-date up to four wage awards; the gap to a $60,000 deputy is $4,826–15,822 and every parity figure is a range with no midpoint quoted. The error runs toward the low end. Request A’s wage tables convert it to a price. |
| The 39% inner-city first-arrival share is a proxy. | Six volunteer zones, calendar 2021, City production only; volunteer-only responses absent. Consistent across two cuts (39.1% all calls, 39.2% fire-type) and the STRUCTURE FIRE-typed subset (10 of 24). Request C’s CAD tables replace it with the countywide share for every retained year. |
| Base-versus-gross is declared, not resolved. | A 24/48 firefighter works 147 hours a year above the §207(k) threshold; whether $44,178 already covers that premium is unknown. The gap is narrower, not wider, in every case. Request A item A.3. |
| Every incident-level figure rests on two productions, not the complete CAD record. | Rural incidence and response figures are floors, because volunteer-only responses are absent; no multi-year trend may be asserted from a two-year window. A full CAD request covering all years and all agencies is drafted (Request C). |
| The second-unit interval and the entry clock are modelled. | Road-network travel at apparatus speeds, no dispatch or turnout time; a 2021 CAD sample makes the model pessimistic today (7.7 modelled against 3.7 measured in Woodville, n=5) and unverifiable for 2028 by construction. Stated as modelled wherever shown; never mixed with measured first-unit arrival. |
| Volunteer ISO credit is unknown. | The public band is 12,051–16,930 beyond five miles because of it; whether Woodville and Fort Braden keep their insurance class turns on it. One written enquiry to Verisk. |
| Three household bases are in circulation. | ~50,300 (the $234 → $597 ladder), 46,768 (the roll, the instruments, +$77), ~52,800 billed (the $1M ≈ $19 conversion, $11–35 for parity); 152,160 county-wide (+$24). Each figure keeps its base and names it; none is restated as another. The County’s billed-unit count fixes it. |
| The five-year window and its phasing are the analyst’s. | FY2029–33 is the first window in which every component appears once; a longer window widens the gap between agreement and standalone paths. No inflation, financing or debt service — which understates the standalone paths relative to the agreement paths. The ordering is the robust result; the exact figures inside each band are not. |
| Station counts are greedy upper bounds; capital is an extrapolation. | An exact solver could reach the same coverage with fewer sites; $7–10M per station is the study’s own $28–40M ÷ 4, a planning band and not a bid. Crewing dominates the annual figure, so rankings do not move. |
| The square-foot curve is borrowed, not fitted; 7.1% of units have no building area. | The $0.13 slope is Florida district precedent; only the base is solved locally. The County’s own roll and rate model would replace every instrument figure in an afternoon. |
| Tract statistics describe neighbourhoods, not households; incidence is not risk. | No statement is made about the race, income or tenure of any household. The fire rate is unadjusted for building age, construction, heating or occupancy; only the District 1 against District 4 comparison is statistically distinguishable. |
| Establishment figures, not payroll. | 81.5 = 21 posts × 3.88 FTE per post; 277 = shift-rank positions from the City’s force-by-rank production. Filled positions may differ; the County’s July 14th, 2026 request for authorized and filled positions at Stations 10–15 is unproduced. |
| Retention is not converted into response. | No data in the record links pay to turnover to response performance. The recommendation changes the denominator of a cost; it does not claim an outcome. |
| Measurement | What it takes | What it resolves | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| One written question to ISO/Verisk on whether the six volunteer departments earn credit, and whether the county-facing companies count in the graded-area staffing average | One letter; a draft exists | The $12.0–16.9M band; whether ~3,000 households in Woodville and Fort Braden keep their class when their distance does not change; whether County-funded staffing earns grading credit | Cheapest, highest value. Drafted, not sent — and the risk figure says so on its face |
| Request A (City, Chapter 119): IAFF wage tables and step schedules since October 2021; the salary schedule with the hours it covers (A.3); payroll by rank FY2022–26 with overtime and out-of-class hours and dollars; employer benefit rates | One request to the City — drafted | Converts parity from a range to a price; settles base-versus-gross; replaces the $122,000 loaded cost; replaces the 2019 payroll vintage; makes the structural/discretionary overtime split a measurement (“no such record” is itself the finding) | Drafted, not sent |
| Request C (Consolidated Dispatch Agency): the CAD incident and unit-status tables, every retained year, every responding agency, exempt fields excluded at the query | One request to the CDA — drafted; feasibility established by PRR2026-877 | Replaces the 39% proxy with the countywide first-arrival share; replaces the modelled second-unit interval with observed; lifts the rural floors; sizes the ambulance interval behind the engine | Drafted, not sent |
| Request B (Leon County): LCEMS response-time data by incident and jurisdiction; the current ALS first-response payment (last produced $736,938 in FY2014); the Fund 135 fund-balance policy target; the fleet replacement schedule | One request to the County — drafted | Makes the EMS levy’s stated justification testable for the first time; states what the County pays now for fire-based ALS | Drafted, not sent |
| The consultant’s deliverable under B-26-069 | Delivery under the existing contract; $54,997.50 remains | A commissioned standalone cost and a consultant’s successor-agreement figure to set against the study’s model; the deployment analysis this paper does not claim | No deliverable in the production; the Board sees it at the workshop |
| A written aid price from the City for 2028 onward | One letter, or the outcome of the Recommendation 2 offer | Fixes the $0.5–1.5M aid line and decides the entire station programme; refusal is decision information in its own right | Not asked |
| The County’s own assessment roll and rate model run for a square-foot tier at the current revenue requirement | A staff afternoon with the roll the County maintains and the consultant it retains | Replaces every instrument figure with the County’s number; fills the 7.1% no-area gap; fits the curve locally | Not published |
| The County’s billed-unit count for the Fire Services Fee, by zone | County OMB; a public record | Reconciles the three household bases onto one denominator | Not requested |
| Authorized and filled positions, and minimum daily staffing, Stations 10–15 | Already requested by the County, July 14th, 2026 | Firms the 81.5 and the six-station end of the parity range; the first direct retention measure in the record | Not produced |
| Departmental registration on the critical path — FDID, NFIRS, the FSRS submission | One line on the adoption schedule | Closes RFP item D | No draft exists |
Ten of the County’s twelve scope items are answerable from public records, and are answered here with their sources; the two that are not need a letter and a line on a schedule. Measured on the county’s own street network, 10,678 dwelling units cross the ISO distance line on October 1st, 2028; they are fringe homes on municipal water, 96.9% within a mile of the city limit, one in eight a mobile home holding 2.1% of the value. The clock that moves is not first arrival but the wait for the crew that makes lawful entry possible: about 24 minutes with three aboard after separation, about seven with four, and the fourth firefighter — $2.80M a year — is the only costed intervention that buys any minutes before the deadline. The grade falls by distance alone, two thirds of the cohort to Class 10W because the water stayed; the buildings both governments are arguing over cover 1.4% of the homes at stake; the only path that restores the reach costs $217–249M over five years against $12.6M in the fund, and the apparatus that path needs could no longer be ordered in time even on the day of the workshop. The flat charge is regressive, and the free instrument change is the largest act of fairness available. Our answer to item F is two tiers the County can act on at the workshop — $3.55–3.65M a year inside its own authority, and a written offer that buys 3.4 times the workforce for the same dollar — with the 42-hour week labelled an option on its proper table. Nothing here alleges impropriety. The four places this work is most vulnerable are named in three records requests, and the cheapest item on that list is a letter.
T26-0654_production_2026-08-17/SHA256SUMS.txt.TLC_OverlayStreetCenterline_D_WM/0), address points, parcels (TLC_OverlayPropInfo_Enhanced_D_WM/1), city limits (TLC_Overlay_Citylimits_WM_D/0, 4,628 vertices), hydrants (TLC_OverlayFireHydrants_D_WM, September 2nd, 2026), non-ad-valorem building area (BASE_SQ_FT).FIGURE_BASIS_CANONICAL.md — the study’s canonical figure basis, Rev 3.1 with §2c–§2r; every number in this paper traces to it or to a companion paper below. SPINE_2026-09-06/CONTENT_SPINE.md — every fact, finding and recommendation in reader order with status and carrier. AUDIT_2026-09-05/ — the corpus audit: figure register, dead variants, contradictions.REPORT_2026-09-06_LEON_FIRE/SHA256SUMS.txt): Who actually answers the county (paper_firstdue, item B.2/F); The disparity is real, and the instrument is the free fix (paper_disparity, item E); What each path costs over five years (paper_allin, item C); Modernising the workforce that answers the county (paper_workforce, item F); What to buy before 1 October 2028, version 2 (paper_options, items B and F; corrected September 8th, 2026 — path row); The levy nobody watched (paper_ems, item E); 1001 San Luis Road — who pays what now (paper_whopays, item E, released with errata); Where a standalone county fire system would put stations (paper_siting, items B.4 and C); What the grading schedule says (paper_iso, item B.1). Fire Protection in Unincorporated Leon County After 2028 v2 (PAPER_POST2028) is the August predecessor; its recommendation section is superseded by paper_options v2.DATA_stations_2026-09-07 (CC BY 4.0; METHOD.md, RESULTS_stations.json). August synthesis: Closing the RFP: Middle-Ground Options, the Successor Agreement, Automatic Aid, Shared Facilities, and the Board Synthesis (August 27th, 2026) and Design and Policy — Standalone Department (August 27th, 2026); both pre-date the September 7th apparatus correction and the parity range, which govern where they differ.assemble_bundle.py); no number was typed from memory. Hand-rolled SVG, no external library, no network call — until a reader opens the living map in Figure 1, which loads Leaflet 1.9.4 from unpkg.com, OpenStreetMap base tiles, and the LIVE/ data folder beside this file (the executive brief’s own map, ported unchanged); everything else works offline and prints. Colour is the document’s argument: grey is how things are now, teal is what this study recommends, brick is standing alone (and mobile homes on the class map), gold is money actually budgeted, blue is single-family. Corrections are published with the source named and never quietly patched; the register is FIGURE_BASIS_CANONICAL.md. License: text, figures and data of this study are published under CC BY 4.0 — reuse with attribution to Max Epstein / MAXAI LLC. Its companion, Two Leon Counties — the Disparity Study, is the same study in our order. Version 2, September 8th, 2026 — folds in the executive brief: its eleven findings as highlights (anchors #fact-1 … #fact-11), its board of figures rebuilt from this paper’s bundle, its living map as the second stage of Figure 1, and one figure of its own (2b, the rank inversion). Version 1.1 of the same day had sixteen figures and no board; version 1 had ten.