OK. I got the variables working within the Layer and following the $Wealth$ property. It doesn’t seem that I did anything different. I am able to either increment or set values directly using the variable property name. Perhaps it had to do with case sensitive property names that I had wrong by mistake.
Now I have to work thru how to make each Control counter actually update from the wealth property for the zone they are located in. They presently use the $Wealth$ property from the zone where the last counter was selected.
Thanks for the encouragement to keep me plugging away 'til I got it. This is so like writing computer programs, only harder.