What you pay, where it goes, what never gets billed, what the county keeps, what gets given away — and what you're allowed to build. One site holds all of it, in plain language, and every figure links back to the state filing, audited statement or assessment roll it came from.
The Comptroller's budget filings, the state assessment roll, the sales database, the IDA's annual reports, the council's minutes, the zoning ordinance, the county's parcel maps — every number a resident might want lives on a different website, in a different format, under a different name. Any one of them can be dug out by someone willing to spend a weekend on it. The work is in making them line up.
That work is done, and it's free. What follows is a tour of what's on the site — one section at a time.
And it's New York City. Corning — eighteen miles down the road — taxes property at a rate 41% lower than Elmira's.
The equalization rate is the state's measure of how far assessments have drifted from market value. It falls a little every year a roll sits still — and snaps back the year a city reassesses. Elmira did that in 1995. Then the drift started again.
Each point is what homes in that price band were assessed at, divided by what they actually sold for. A fair assessment is 1.0. Anything higher, and the owner is taxed on value that isn't there.
The line rises as houses get cheaper. That's the tax falling hardest on the least valuable homes in the city. Every sale behind it is on the site's J-curve page.
Everyone assumes a reassessment means a bigger bill. Look at what actually happens to the rate: the assessments roughly double, so the rate roughly halves. You can run any house through the site's calculator — here is the whole city at once.
Nobody's world ends. The whole redistribution runs in the hundreds of dollars a year, in both directions — that is what a fair roll would cost the people it currently favours, and it is far less than the argument against reassessment implies. The relief lands on the cheapest homes in the city; the increases land in the middle.
And one number we deliberately don't give you. This slide used to say 56% of homes would see a lower bill. A reader refused to believe it, we went back, and the model turned out to be wrong — it took ratios sorted by sale price and applied them as though they were sorted by assessed value. Rebuilt properly, the split lands somewhere between and , and it genuinely cannot be pinned down: Elmira's assessments pile up right where the winners and losers divide. So we give you the range and the bands, not a headline.
This is the 2025 General Fund. In the site's budget explorer you can click any bar to open its departments, and click again to split those into salaries, benefits, contractual costs and equipment — for any year back to 1995.
Public safety is over a third of it, and almost all of that is salaries.
Most of that is prisons, schools and government — exempt under state law, not by any choice the city made, and not something a council could undo. The two largest private holdings are a different question.
Under state law neither of them owes a cent of it, and the city can't send either one a bill. The point is the size of the gap, not the absence of a payment.
Chemung County collects the sales tax for everyone, then passes a share of it back to its municipalities — the city, the towns and the villages. For eight straight years running that share was exactly 37.5%: a round three-eighths, which is a contract, not a coincidence. From 2015 it steps down.
The city's slice of what gets shared never breaks. What shrank was the pot. The year-by-year reconciliation is on the site's City & County page.
All 49 deals are itemized across the site's five-page IDA section — project by project, board seat by board seat.
The zone names promise more — one zone is literally named One–Two Family. But the minimum-lot table is what binds, and on the lots Elmira actually has, it takes back what the names give: only of the lots in the two-family zone can legally hold two families. Downtown, the modern code the council adopted in 2020 drops that limit to under 1%.
The city's official zoning map will tell you that you're in Residence B. It can't tell you your lot is too small to build what Residence B is named for — it's a scanned drawing, and that answer depends on your own lot. So the site built a map you can click: it computes the answer for each of the city's 9,813 parcels and names the rule that binds. Zoning, Explained shows the work.
Everything in this talk is live on the site right now, next to what a talk can't hold — an interactive budget explorer, a reassessment calculator for any address, seven parcel-level maps, the council's minutes flagged for tax-relevant items, a plain-language glossary, and a sources page that serves every primary document.
If a number here is wrong, tell me and I'll correct it in public. That's the only thing that makes it worth anything.
The ones that would take a week of somebody's time are what this is built for — how a single line item moved over thirty years, what a proposed exemption would cost across all three levies, how Elmira's numbers compare with a city our size.
Fair warning: I'm one person working on this in my spare time, around a full-time job and a young family. I can't promise I'll crack every question. I can promise I'll give it a real go — and that whatever I do find, you'll get the documents it rests on.