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Austin
The Question · Austin, TX

A city that publishes a lot, and what still is not in it

Austin is unusually good at publishing — eDIMS, an open-data portal, a full Legistar instance, a televised archive going back decades. That makes it the right place to ask the harder question: with all of that published, which categories of record still require a request, and what do the AG rulings say the City asked to withhold anyway.

This is a question, not an accusation

No one at this Foundation has alleged that anybody in Austin has done anything wrong, and nothing on this site should be read that way. Chapters are opened on structural risk — large capital programmes, fast growth, a single dominant employer, a utility or authority that meets away from the council — because those are the conditions under which decisions get made with nobody watching. That is a statement about attention, not about anybody's conduct.

Naming a city next to an accusation we have not documented would be precisely the thing this project exists to oppose. So the page you are reading names the question and the record that settles it, and then we go and ask for the record.

The record that answers it

Attorney General open-records rulings naming the City of Austin, read against what eDIMS already publishes.

How this gets resolved

  1. Ask. A request goes to the City of Austin under Tex. Gov't Code ch. 552. The City has ten (10) business days.
  2. Publish what comes back, whole. Released public records go up unredacted. We do not summarise a document in place of showing it, and we do not redact what the government already released.
  3. Publish what does not come back. A missed deadline, a refusal with no statute cited, an estimate that prices a resident out — those get published too, with dates. Silence is a finding.
  4. Rewrite this page. When the documents are in, this page stops being a question and becomes what the records showed — including if they showed nothing. A chapter that only ever reports wrongdoing is not doing arithmetic, it is doing marketing.

What you can do right now

You do not need us. The statute is yours, and a request from a resident of Austin is harder to wave away than one from a nonprofit two states over.

Build the letter → Where to send it → Send us something anonymously →