About and method
Epomena takes its name from the Greek for “the things that follow”: what a public decision commits people to after the vote. It is an independent evaluation practice for Northwest Florida’s eight Triumph Gulf Coast counties, run by Virtuous Cycle LLC, and it asks every project the same three questions of the public record.
What it is
Three questions, from the public record
- Can it repay what it borrows? Revenue pledged to the loan against its payments, year by year.
- Is it fully paid for? Funding by how firm it is, against what the project costs.
- Is it worth it to the public? Benefits with evidence against costs. Taxes and grants are transfers, not benefits, and an unmeasured benefit is reported as unknown, never as zero.
For jobs grants, a fourth question: would the deal have happened anyway? For health, a desktop screening structured after the published standards for health impact assessment. Each answer links to its working.
What the record shows so far
Three findings, each from one document
- 8 counties, Escambia to Wakulla
- 381 proposals followed to their outcome
- $328.8M paid out by the end of 2025
- $25.0M for 500 jobs at Panama City’s airport. Award #338 pays for an aircraft-maintenance facility for IAG Aero Group. The company must add 500 net new jobs paying at least $60,000; if it falls short, part of the money comes back by a formula in the agreement. The award’s terms.
- 46% of Gulf County’s revenue comes from outside. In FY2024, federal and state money made up 46% of the county government’s operating revenue; Walton’s share was 13%. Gulf County’s ledger.
- Six of the eight counties set this year’s tax rate above the rolled-back rate. Franklin went more than 10% above it, which the new law says needs a unanimous vote or a referendum; its minutes record 5–0. Every county’s rate against the ceiling.
How the record is read
Every figure is cited or labelled
- Published: copied from a public record, with a link.
- Derived: worked out from published figures; the working is shown.
- Assumption: Epomena’s own figure where the record is silent, labelled wherever it is used.
No AI model computes or changes a number; every calculation runs in tested code. The Triumph Gulf Coast agreements and score sheets were read from their PDFs with AI assistance, 28 of them from scans by OCR, and spot-checked against the documents, not line by line. An error rate has not yet been measured. Check any figure against its source before citing it.
What Epomena is not: legal, financial, investment, engineering or municipal-advisory advice, or a recommendation to build or not build. Sources lists every file with its date, licence and checksum.
Who makes it
Virtuous Cycle LLC
- Funding and conflicts of interest
- No policy has been published yet. Until one is, weigh this site as you would any analysis whose funding you do not know.
Report an error
How errors are corrected
When something a reader could have relied on is wrong, it is fixed and the change is listed, dated, in the corrections log: what it said, what it says now, and why.