The public balance
What the community gives against what it is documented to get — a verdict over the chapters.
This page sets the whole trade on one sheet, as verdicts rather than totals. Each row is a chapter of this study. The balance reads those chapters and adds no arithmetic of its own. Where a row reads gap, this study cannot supply that number, because the record it would come from has not been produced.
What the community givesPart II · The environment
What it is promised, and who paysPart III · The economy
The sheet totals nothing, deliberately: pricing the trade requires the fiscal instruments the record does not carry. A number here would be an invention — the refusal is the finding.
Fourteen of Lima’s fifteen chapters stand on the record. That is an unusually complete reconstruction, and it makes the one gap sharper rather than softer.
Everything the community gives can now be screened. The water is quantified, at a fifth of the city’s plant output, and it cuts the zero-refill drought reserve from 960.9 days to 761.8. The heat is quantified, against a reach that can absorb 0.1 MW. The runoff is quantified, at 115 impervious acres feeding a basin that barely attenuates a flood. The air is bounded by a permit caprec that one plausible runtime band breaks. The grid share is quantified, at 5.64 % of a utility serving 1.5 million customers.
What cannot be quantified is what the community gets, and how much it paid for it. The fiscal chapter is the only gap on this sheet, and it is the half of the trade the public actually voted on.
Why the sheet totals nothing
A total requires both columns in the same units. The environmental column is in cubic feet per second, degrees, acres, and megawatts. The economic column would be in dollars, and the dollars are the missing chapter.
A number here would have to be invented. This study does not invent numbers, so the sheet stops at verdicts.
One document changes this page
The county’s cost-benefit analysis, withheld as public-records item 4, is the single record that would move this chapter from a verdict table to a balance. Twelve chapters of work sit ready for it. It is not a study anyone has to commission. It already exists, in a county office, written.
Learn to read the record behind this chapter → Project BOSC, Chapter 5: What it costs the public
The record behind this chapter
What this chapter stands on: the records it reads, the inputs its modeled figures rest
on, and the reference data behind its baselines — the same pages the record screens
serve, not a second copy. A figure the record does not support stays [open] and links nothing.