Last night we built something that Hampton City Hall doesn’t have: a way for any resident to see exactly what they pay in city taxes and utility fees — now and through 2030 — and compare that burden across income levels.

It took about three hours. The data is all public. The code is open source. And it surfaced information about Hampton’s land that a city councilmember told us she couldn’t find anywhere.

Here’s what we did and why it matters.

The Problem

Hampton’s FY27 budget cycle is underway. The City Manager’s recommended budget drops around April 15. Public hearings are April 22 and May 6. The council votes May 13.

Every year, residents show up to these hearings and speak in abstractions. “Utility rates are too high.” “The burden falls on working families.” These are true things. They’re also easy to dismiss.

What’s hard to dismiss is a number. Your specific number. What your household pays, what it will cost in three years, what that represents as a share of your income — compared to a household earning twice as much, paying the exact same fees.

No tool existed to show Hampton residents this. So we built one.

OpenFisca: Legislation as Executable Code

OpenFisca is an open-source framework used by governments in France, Australia, the EU, and elsewhere to encode tax and benefit rules as runnable Python code. The idea is simple but powerful: instead of a PDF that describes what fees you owe, you write code that calculates what fees you owe — parameterized, versioned, testable, and open.

We built openfisca-hampton: the first OpenFisca model for any Virginia locality.

The model encodes:

  • Real estate property tax — Hampton’s rate per $100 of assessed value (currently $1.14, down from $1.24 in 2022)
  • Wastewater fees — city sewer maintenance fee + DEQ regulatory surcharge, per hundred cubic feet of water used
  • Stormwater fees — per Equivalent Residential Unit, with the council-approved schedule: +$1/month every year through at least 2031
  • Solid waste user fees — weekly rate (standard and recycling discount)

Every parameter is a YAML file with a date-indexed value history and a citation to the source document. You can see exactly where each number came from and when it changed.

The key finding: Hampton’s utility fees are completely flat. Everyone pays the same dollar amount — no income-based discount, no age exemption, no disability reduction. The city’s own website says it explicitly: “There are no exemptions or reductions to the [sewer] fee due to age, income, or disability.”

That means the fee burden is deeply regressive. A household earning $25,000/year pays the same utility fees as one earning $120,000 — but for the lower-income household, those fees represent nearly 7% of gross income by FY30. For the upper-income household, it’s about 1.4%.

The Calculator

The model powers a public tool at ppuva.org/tools/budget-calculator.

Enter your household details — home value, annual income, monthly water usage, whether you recycle — and get:

  • Year Comparison: your utility fee burden in FY25, FY26, FY27, and FY30, with year-over-year deltas
  • Fee Breakdown: the full table showing property tax, wastewater, stormwater, and solid waste across all years
  • Income Impact: a bar chart showing fees as a percentage of income across five income tiers — 30% AMI through upper-income — using your inputs, making the regressivity case visually obvious

Every number is correct to the cent. The QA was done by an automated agent that verified all calculations against expected values independently.

The big jump already happened: FY26 (which started July 2025) brought a +$2.74/CCF wastewater increase — roughly $18/month for a typical household, $209/year. That’s already in your bill. The stormwater fee goes up another dollar a month every year through 2031 whether or not the council does anything new.

The Land Book

While we were in the data, we went further.

Hampton publishes an annual Land Book — a PDF containing every parcel in the city: owner name, address, land value, improvement value, assessed value, tax amount. All 50,561 of them. It’s public record. It’s a 41MB PDF.

We wrote a parser, extracted all 50,561 records into a SQLite database, and ran the obvious query: how many parcels in Hampton have zero improvement value?

3,729 undeveloped or vacant parcels. $375 million in unimproved land.

This answers a question that, when we asked a Hampton City Council member this week, she said she didn’t know. The data is public. Nobody had extracted it.

The breakdown:

  • City of Hampton: 572 vacant parcels, $91M in land value
  • Hampton Economic Development Authority: 94 parcels, $47M
  • Hampton University: 11 parcels, $11M
  • Private LLCs: 493 parcels, $57M
  • Private individuals and estates: 2,559 parcels, $172M

Some notable private holdings sitting completely undeveloped: a Texas estate (Thompson Rutherford B Est, c/o Ryan LLC) holds six parcels totaling roughly 125 acres in the Harris Creek / Mallory area, assessed at $5.9 million, paying $83K/year in taxes, nothing built on any of it.

This is the kind of intelligence that Ohio development firms were buying from data brokers to find Hampton acquisition targets. We pulled it from a public PDF in an evening.

Why This Matters

Local government is opaque not because the data doesn’t exist, but because nobody builds the tools to make it legible.

The Land Book has been published every year. The budget documents are online. The fee schedules are posted. But the gap between “the data is technically public” and “a resident can understand their own situation” is enormous — and that gap is where misinformation lives, where apathy festers, and where well-connected developers get advantages over everyone else.

What we’re building at PPUVA is a civic intelligence layer. Not a political platform. Not an opposition research operation. A set of tools that answer the question: what is actually happening in Hampton, and what does it mean for the people who live here?

The budget calculator is the first public-facing piece. The parcel database is the foundation for a land use analysis tool. The OpenFisca model is the infrastructure for simulating future policy proposals — what would an income-based utility discount cost the city? How much would a low-income exemption reduce fee burden for the bottom quartile? Now we can calculate it.

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