The Taxpayers Accountability & Transparency Project (TATP) presents rankings for Florida cities and counties in five distinct categories: government spending, government debt, government size, crime and education. Each category is made up of two or more individual factors (as follows):
GOVERNMENT DEBT FACTORS
- 6-year average per capita spending
- Total dollar increase in spending
Source: Florida Office of Economic & Demographic Research - Local Government Financial Reporting
Data: “Government Spending Per Resident Local Fiscal Years 2019-20 to 2014-15”
GOVERNMENT SPENDING FACTORS
- 6-year average per capita debt
- Total dollar increase in debt
Source: Local Government Financial Reporting
Data: “Government Debt Per Resident September 30, 2019 to September 30, 2014”
GOVERNMENT SIZE FACTORS
- Percent government spending on salaries and benefits,
- Full-time government employees per 100,000 residents
- Average public employee salary
Source: Florida Office of Economic & Demographic Research - Local Government Financial Reporting
Data: “Salary, Benefits, and # of Employees - FY 2019-20 Final Adopted Budget Regular or Permanent Employees # of FTE Employees,” “# of Active Dependent & Independent Special Districts,” “# of Active Special Districts, per 100,000 persons,” “Avg. Salary of Regular or Permanent Employees,” “% of Budget Spent on Salaries & Benefits,” “# of FTE Employees per 100,000 persons.”
CRIME FACTORS
- Violent crime rate
- Property crime rate (including arson)
- Total crime clearance rate
Source for city-level data: FBI Florida, Crime in the United States
Source for county-level data: Florida Crime Report, FDLE
Data: “Violent crimes per 100k persons,” “Property crimes (incl arson) per 100k persons,” “Clearance rate (any crime).” Note that clearance rates were not available at the city level and therefore not included in city grades.
EDUCATION FACTORS
- Average school grade
- Graduation rate
Source: Florida School Accountability Reports
Data: “Numerical School Grade 2019” and “Graduation rate”
Methodology
Data was collected from counties and municipalities throughout the latter half of 2019; all publicly available data was collected during January 2020. Only raw and per-capita data was considered with no value judgments made regarding the relative importance of any one factor over any other.
To calculate overall rankings, each factor in a category was ranked. These were then averaged together and ranked again. Grades were then assigned where “A” represents the top quartile of performers, “B” the second highest, “C” the third highest, and “D” represents the bottom quartile of performers. “F” was reserved for counties and cities that failed to deliver their data. For this project, 100% of counties delivered their data, so no counties received an “F” grade.
Some cities are too small to have certain data points – for instance, a small beach town might not have any schools within its borders. This comparison process does not penalize any city that may lack some of the data points being addressed. Instead, such a community is left ungraded and unranked in the category for which it is missing data, and the information shows up as “N/A” on the report card.