🗺 Every page — the whole flow
Bastrop County already posts every check — as PDFs. Should it publish that same spending as open data anyone can download and search, and meet the state’s own transparency standard?
Local · Bastrop County — advisory signal to your county — Commissioners Court, a city board, or the school board.
Your answer — fifteen seconds, no account, nothing asked Rules of engagement
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The count so far — aggregate only, always
| Answer | Count |
|---|---|
| Yes | 0 |
| No | 0 |
| Skip | 0 |
0 total · all Tier 0 (open sentiment) · all via web · updates instantly
Who's answering, self-reported (not verified): 0 live in Bastrop County · 0 work here · 0 have family here · 0 other or unsaid
Every answer moves this bar in real time — including yours. At 1950, the result is printed and hand-delivered.
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Bastrop already publishes every check with vendor, amount, date, and item description — but only as monthly PDFs. Publish the same data as a downloadable, machine-readable dataset (spreadsheet/CSV) covering the last three fiscal years. That is exactly what the Texas Comptroller’s Contracts & Procurement Transparency Star requires, and what Tarrant County (the only Texas county with all six stars) already does, alongside a live vendor-payment lookup. It is a format change to data the county already produces — low cost, and it lets this platform ingest the feed directly instead of parsing PDFs.
The frontier no Texas government has crossed: no Texas local government publishes purchase-card transactions at the item level (Oklahoma is the lone benchmark). Pay discretionary/procurement spending from authorized, line-attributed accounts whose feed publishes by default, so the itemized receipt is generated by the payment itself. Reaches ~15-30% of the budget (the operating slice), framed as audit and anti-diversion, not control.
→ Read the full brief, with every precedent and the honest limits.
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The traction rule: at 1950 responses, the result gets printed and hand-delivered to the relevant body, and the delivery is stamped on the docket. 0 of 1950 and counting — every share moves it.
The context — why this question exists
Bastrop County is already unusually open: it posts a monthly, itemized AP check register — every vendor, check number, amount, and item description — more than most Texas counties publish. But it posts them as PDF files, and its transparency award is the 2014 Leadership Circle Platinum honor, from a program the Comptroller replaced in 2016. Bastrop holds no current Transparency Star. The gap is one step: publish the same register as a machine-readable dataset. That single change would meet the Comptroller’s Contracts & Procurement star criteria and put Bastrop alongside Tarrant County — the only Texas county with all six stars.
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