For every dollar a house, a storefront or a working acre pays your local government, something comes back out in services. The Cost of Community Services Model takes your adopted budget and your own tax digest, allocates every line across land uses, and returns one number per sector that a commissioner can read in a second and a skeptic can check line by line.
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Most cost-of-community-services numbers arrive with somebody else’s budget behind them — a national average, a neighbouring county, a study from 1997 — and one ratio standing in for every kind of development on the map. A board that cannot rebuild the allocation is approving a plat on faith. The COCS Model was built to end that.
The jurisdiction is described once. After that every scenario is a few minutes of input — and the answer comes back on your digest and your millage, not on a rule of thumb borrowed from someone else’s county.
In Georgia, the latest assessed values load straight from the state DOR files — all 159 counties, 2023 through 2025, in a click. Anywhere else the digest is entered directly and the model treats both identically.
Digest · budget · exemptionsEvery revenue and every expenditure is spread across residential, commercial and working land — by assessed value, by parcel count, by population and employment, or by a split you set. Overhead that can’t be assigned is redistributed in proportion to the costs that can.
Four methods · proportional poolOne number per land use, measured against the same line: the dollar it paid in. Then the break-even home value, the roads analysis, and the one-pager you hand across the table.
Workbook · one-pager · share linkThe ratio, the break-even, the roads and the working-land case — all from the same allocation, so no two exhibits in the packet can quietly disagree.
Public education is the largest single swing in any COCS study, and leaving it unstated is how these studies lose an audience. Run the actual budget, a balanced budget, and the with-schools case side by side in one exhibit — same digest, same allocation, three columns.
The model solves for the home value at which residential stops costing more than it pays — the one figure a planning commission can actually act on when a subdivision comes up for rezoning.
Conservation-use valuation, farm parcel counts and the services working land genuinely draws — so the acreage case is made with arithmetic instead of sentiment.
A dedicated roads analysis folds mileage by class into the land-use split, rather than burying the largest capital cost in general public works.
Export the full allocation workbook, the landscape one-pager built for the packet, or a read-only link a commissioner opens on a phone without an account.
Georgia digests load from the Department of Revenue files — 2023, 2024 and 2025, every county, no data entry. Everywhere else, the same model runs on a digest you enter once.
Open any result and the allocation method is right beside it. Every ratio traces back to a real budget line and a real assessed value — and every assumption is yours to change.
Thirty years of fiscal-impact practice, written down as arithmetic anyone in the room can audit.
The adopted budget as your finance director actually reports it — every fund, every department, every line. No national averages standing in for a jurisdiction the model has never seen.
Assessed values and parcel counts from the tax digest itself. In Georgia, all 159 counties load from the state DOR files in a click; anywhere else the digest is entered directly and treated identically.
Every line is apportioned by assessed value, parcel count, population and employment, or a split you set yourself — and the method used is shown beside the number, never buried.
General government and debt service cannot be assigned to a land use directly, so they are redistributed in proportion to the costs that can — with business-type activities held out of the base.
Public education is the single largest swing in any COCS study. It is a switch, not an assumption, so the board can see the ratio both ways in the same exhibit.
Open any ratio and follow it back through the allocation to the exact budget line and assessed value behind it. Nothing is hidden, and every assumption is yours to set.
Set the jurisdiction up once. Run every scenario after that in minutes. Walk into the hearing with a ratio you can defend to the board, the press and the developer across the table.