# Portability: how to read a mega-project's cost curve and bond stack

The instrument here re-runs on any public authority's capital project. The steps that produced this record:

1. **Pin the cost curve.** Find each announced budget and its date (press releases, board minutes, capital budgets). The escalation is one subtraction; the story is often in the dates, not the total.
2. **Set demand against design.** A terminal, a stadium, a transit line each carries a designed capacity. Put the actual usage next to it. The gap, if there is one, is the accountability question the announcement skips.
3. **Reconstruct the financing the announcement rounds off.** Grants make the press release; bonds make the balance sheet. An authority's audited Annual Comprehensive Financial Report carries the bond series, the par amounts, and the debt-service schedule to maturity. MSRB EMMA carries the official statements and continuing disclosures. Between them, the number an official would not give at a ribbon-cutting is usually already public.
4. **Archive before you cite.** Every figure resolves to a hashed document, or it does not run. The harness in `03-harness/` is portable: point `sources.json` at the new project's documents and the same `capture / build / verify / gate / check` chain applies.
5. **Label the claims.** Jobs and economic-impact numbers are almost always a commissioned study. Archive the study, attribute the number, and let the reader weigh it.

The move that carries the piece: an authority can decline to total its debt at a podium, but it files the total, under audit, every year.