How we know what we publish.

01What this is — and isn't

Florida Works Better is an independent, public-records-based effort to help citizens understand how the state raises and spends money. It uses official documents and clearly-labeled analysis. It is not an official State of Florida system, and it does not speak for any state agency. It is the second WorksBetter locale, built on the same open Honesty Framework as the Colorado original.

Some public records are incomplete, delayed, or inconsistent. Where that is true, we say so on the page rather than papering over it. Our job is to make the public record legible — not to replace it, and not to claim more certainty than the record supports.

02How we label every number

We separate three different kinds of claim so you always know what you're looking at. Every figure on the site carries one of these chips.

The principle behind all four, drawn from our data rules: facts, calculations, and judgments are kept visibly separate. Facts come from public records. Calculations are labeled formulas. Any judgment is identified as WorksBetter analysis and is explainable on request.

NOT PUBLISHED is the sharpest kind of pending, and this site shows it. The publisher could report the figure and does not. The field stays blank, and no estimate goes into it.

Where a figure belongs and nobody publishes it, the page draws a block of watermarked question marks. An empty bar reads as a page that failed to load. The question marks read as the finding. That mark is only ever for a figure someone could publish and has not.

The Honesty Framework, the open standard behind this site, defines both.

03Provenance grades

Many Florida cost figures circulate in the press before they resolve to an official line item. Every figure on the site therefore carries a provenance grade, so you can weigh it — and media-only figures never enter our totals.

Figures shown with a ≈ are program-level or rounded numbers from a budget or overview document rather than a single audited contract; we grade these B and label them accordingly.

Cost basis is graded separately from provenance. A figure can be perfectly official and still mean something different from its neighbor: a contract award is not a program total is not an annual appropriation is not an economic-impact estimate. Every cost on this site carries its basis, and drift (first estimate vs. current) is only ever computed between two figures of the same basis — otherwise it reads PENDING. The EAA Reservoir is the worked example: its $2.87B embankment construction contract and its ≈ $3.9B program total are both real, and are never compared to each other.

04The rule that governs everything: appropriation ≠ spend ≠ performance

This is the single most important idea on the site. A budget document tells you what the legislature authorized. It does not, by itself, tell you what was actually spent, or whether a project is on time, over budget, or delivering value. Conflating these is the most common way spending dashboards mislead people.

Because of this rule, we will never publish a claim of waste, delay, or over-budget status unless the source record supports it — or unless the page clearly frames it as an open question for the state to answer.

05Reading the GAA’s fine print: budget entities, category codes, and the number that changes every year

Florida’s General Appropriations Act is addressed by Section → Budget Entity code → Appropriation Category code → Specific Appropriation number. Three of those are stable. One is a trap.

• The Specific Appropriation number re-sequences every single year. It is not a stable key, and any dashboard that joins across years on it will silently compare unrelated lines. We do time-series joins on the stable budget-entity and appropriation-category codes — never on the specific-appropriation number.
• The bill number changes too. Florida alternates SB/HB as the budget vehicle year to year (SB 2500 in 2025, HB 5001E in 2026). The durable citation is the chapter law — Ch. 2025-198, Ch. 2026-232 — and that is what we key on.
• Trust funds carry the budget. With no personal income tax, Florida runs on named trust funds — the State Transportation Trust Fund, Land Acquisition Trust Fund, Educational Enhancement Trust Fund, Federal Grants Trust Fund and many more — far more than a general-fund state. Our fund model tracks each named fund separately, so “where the money comes from” can be answered per line, not just in aggregate.
• “The budget” is not one number. The GAA-appropriated total, the Governor’s headline figure, and the after-veto signed total genuinely differ. We store all three as distinct fields — and every page says which one it is showing.

06How we choose which projects to track

The portfolio focuses on major commitments over $10 million — the level at which a single decision meaningfully moves taxpayer money. The portfolio spans four categories — transportation (FDOT and the toll authorities), water & environment (SFWMD/USACE restoration, DEP programs), buildings & facilities, and technology — and deliberately includes what is still only planned or proposed, labeled as such.

• We start from official budget and project documents, not from news coverage or memory.
• We prefer discrete, identifiable projects. Some GAA items are programs or fund transfers rather than single projects; those are tracked differently or excluded until the record is clear.
• One project can span many FDOT Financial Project IDs. The 11-digit FPID’s first six digits (the item number) name the real-world project; the rest name a phase or funding record. We roll cost up by item number, never by FPID — this is what prevents a phased expressway from being counted twice.
• Big projects here have multiple owners. Everglades restoration is SFWMD (a state water-management district) plus the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (federal); expressways are co-managed with authorities like CFX. Project cards name each partner and its role rather than pretending one agency owns everything.
• The batch grows over time. The seed batch is 26 verified projects; the full FDOT Five-Year Work Program plus GAA capital items take it to 50 by general availability. The count shown on the dashboard is the number we have verified so far — not a claim that it is the complete universe of projects over $10M.

07When we don't know, we say so

Florida does not publish spend-to-date line-by-line for every project in a single feed. Rather than estimate a percentage to fill the column, we leave it marked PENDING until we reconcile it from the DFS payment file and FACTS records. A blank we can defend is worth more than a number we can't.

Two Florida-specific unknowns, stated plainly: Florida PALM↗ — the state’s new accounting system — publishes no clean cumulative cost, so ours reads PENDING; and its published scope includes no public data access, so nothing on this site assumes a future feed from it. And Florida has no executive business-confidence index — so the portal’s Confidence page tracks UF BEBR’s Florida Consumer Sentiment Index↗ under its own name — a consumer measure, labeled as one, never presented inside a business-confidence frame.

The same discipline applies to schedules. Where a public milestone schedule exists, we show it; where it doesn't, the field reads "not yet ingested" instead of a guess.

08Where the numbers come from

Every source below is public. Links open in a new tab.

No Florida system offers a public API, so every source above is ingested by document parsing or export — the GAA by PDF parse, FACTS by CSV export, payments by fiscal-year export, Sunbiz by its bulk SFTP feed. Where a record isn’t online at all, Florida’s public-records law (Ch. 119, F.S.↗) is the backstop: any person may request records with no stated purpose, copies are capped at $0.15/page, and unlawful delay carries attorney’s-fee liability. There is no numeric response deadline, and 1,100+ statutory exemptions exist — when one blocks a figure, we say which.

Each project's detail panel on the dashboard also lists the specific record(s) used for that project, with the date we accessed them. Vendors in a project's "Who is being paid" table will come from FACTS contract records and the DFS payment file — never transcribed from press coverage — and per-vendor paid-to-date shows only published figures. The table's "Political giving" links open the Division of Elections' official campaign-finance database — contributions are legal and public, and a search link implies no wrongdoing by any vendor or official.

09Updates & corrections

The dashboard is refreshed as new public records become available, with weekly change summaries once the ingestion pipeline is live. We are not affiliated with the State of Florida, and we welcome corrections: if a figure looks wrong, tell us which project and which source and we will trace it and fix it.

The corrections log. A change that alters a published figure or a project's stage is never silent. Each one is recorded in the corrections log in The Fine Print with the date, the subject, the value before and after, and the reason — including whether the error was ours, an upstream source changing, or two official sources disagreeing. A correction is made once, at the source of truth, so every surface of this site updates together.

How we measure traffic — the full disclosure. This has been true since Aug 1, 2026. This site counts page views using first-party, cookieless analytics: aggregate counts of pages viewed, referrer, country and device class. No cookies, no fingerprinting, no identifiers, no cross-site tracking, and never any content you type. Calculator inputs stay in your browser. Why: watching aggregate patterns for anomalies, and for signals about what to improve. This replaced the earlier “no analytics” wording, and the change is logged in the corrections log — disclosed before the first count was collected.

We also measure how quickly pages load for real visitors: the timing of this page rendering in your browser, and with each timing the browser, device class, device operating system, network speed and country. No cookies, no identifiers, nothing that follows you from one page to the next, and never any content you type. Why: a page a reader cannot load is a page that publishes nothing, and we cannot fix what we cannot see.

What we count when you use the page. We also count a few interactions, not just page views: when a citation is followed out to its publisher; when the Honesty Framework is opened and from which page; when a data table is opened; how the question player on one prototype page is used; which question in that player is starred, as a total for each question and never tied to who starred it; which kind of next step a reader takes under an answer in that player, from the card or the question’s own page, never which one; which link is followed, and from which menu or part of the page; which way a reader shares, such as a social site, email or Copy link, and from what kind of page, never what they share; how far down a page a reader gets, by section; how far the guided tour is followed; what kind of answer a ZIP code typed on this site got (one county, a county line, another state and which one, a territory, a code from outside the country, too few digits) and the shape of the entry — never the code itself; when the link asking us to come to your state is opened, and which state; that updates were asked for, and from where; which folded section of a project page is opened; when the rating on a project page comes into view, and that a rating was sent — never which answer, and never the comment; how a county was opened on the Near You page (a ZIP code, the county list, the map, a saved county or a link), and whether a county picked on any page was saved on this device or forgotten, never which county; when the Help menu is opened and which of its lines is taken (a video, the guided tour, the Near You page or the help page); when the panel saying who runs this site is opened, and whether the corrections log or the About page is opened from it; the first step on a page after arrival: a second page, a ZIP code answer, a county, a project, a follow form or a rating; the first follow or rating started on a page; that a follow, a sign-up or a rating reached us, and for how many items, never the address and never the answer; when a follow did not go through, and why (the network, a refusal, or an email address that could not be used), never the address; and which broad region you are reading from, whether you came by a link we printed, emailed or posted or by another of our own web addresses that forwards here, and which social site, if any, sent you. Four rules bind all of it. Every event has a name from a fixed list, and anything not on that list is dropped. Nothing you type is ever recorded — not a ZIP code, not a search, not the words of a comment; where we count one of those, we count only that it happened. Location stays coarse: a county, a region or a state — never a postal code, never coordinates, never an address. A county is named only where your postal code sits wholly inside one and enough people live there for the answer to be about a place rather than a person. Location is worked out where your request first reaches us: a county where your postal code sits wholly inside one and enough people live there, otherwise a group of counties, more often a whole state, and outside the country nothing but that. The closer location your network reports is read there and thrown away in the same breath — it never reaches this page, it is never written down, and nothing about it is kept between one page and the next. If your browser sends the Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal, or the older Do Not Track (DNT) signal, we honor it. Nothing about your visit is counted: no page view, no page-speed timing, no interaction. We do not ask our edge where you are, so no region and no county is ever known. The two counting scripts are not loaded at all. We sell nothing and share nothing with anybody, under any setting. The address bar is stripped of anything after the path before a count is sent, so a value you typed cannot reach us even by that route. We also count whether a visit came from a social site, and which one, from a fixed list: Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Reddit, Nextdoor, Substack, Medium, TikTok or YouTube. A visit from any other site is counted only as another site. Your browser works out that one word from the address of the page you came from, or from a tag on a link we posted. Only the word is sent. The address you came from is never sent or kept, and the tag is taken out of the address bar. Our own automated checks of the site say so in the browser name they send. We do not count those visits, so our testing never adds to the traffic figures. Nothing is counted while somebody from this project is previewing a feature that is off for the public: those visits make no request for a location, send no event, and are not included in the page-view count.

The evidence archive. Every source document we cite — bill text, agency page, staff analysis — is archived as an immutable copy on the day we access it. Links can rot and pages can be edited after the fact; the archive means our citations cannot. Paired with nightly data snapshots, it keeps the question “what did this site say on date X, and based on what record?” permanently answerable.