Few municipalities can fund a dedicated economic research function, and none can afford to go without one during a session that touches state-shared revenue. Alt-30 serves as fractional economic staff to local governments nationwide: predictive fiscal analysis, legislative risk mitigation, and the implementation work that follows.
Most states return a share of income or sales tax collections to their municipalities. Arizona calls it Urban Revenue Sharing; the label differs by state, the exposure does not. A town receives a share of a revenue stream it does not levy, cannot forecast, and has no standing to protect — and the legislators adjusting that stream are rarely thinking about a town of nine thousand when they do it.
A full-time chief economist costs upward of $130,000 a year. The session does not adjust for the fact that such a town cannot carry one.
Our Municipal Partnerships & Research practice exists to close that gap: economic staff shared across the jurisdictions that need it, at a cost a council can approve.
Municipal engagements draw on the same econometric models we maintain for national firms and legislative caucuses, directed at the questions that determine whether a town's budget holds through the next session — and, where it will not, what the council can do about it.
The firms lobbying on shared-revenue formulas, the caucuses debating income tax, and the vendors bidding on state contracts all draw on these models. A municipal engagement places the same analysis on the town's side of the table, for a fraction of what a single analyst would cost to employ.
We will prepare a fiscal outlook for your town without fee, showing what the proposals now before your legislature would do to the general fund over the next decade.