Only the suppressed word is dangerous.

Karl Ludwig Börne

Everything contained in this website, including text, data, analyses, and visualizations is available to download as reproducible source code from a public GitHub repository
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Budgets and Elections

   2024-10-11

New Resources

I’ve added sections for Budgets and Elections under a new Resources tab.

  • The Budgets page contains links to budget information for all major governmental entities in the county, as well as a “Quality” rating of how accessible, transparent, and useful their publicly available data is.
  • The Elections page is just getting started, but is intended to eventually be a “one stop shop” for anyone interested in learning more about running for public office, including what positions are up for election, how to file for them, and what it takes to run a campaign.

New Taxes FAQ item for BISD and CISD

  • “How Does [Boerne/Comfort] ISD’s Tax Rate Compare to Neighboring Districts?”

Initial ISD FAQs

   2024-09-22

I’ve published the initial Tax FAQs for Boerne and Comfort ISDs. This initial set of questions is small, but I will be adding to them over time. There’s a useful set of questions I’d like to address that require public data from the Kendall County Appraisal District (KCAD). I’ll be requesting these data from them next week. Assuming I can obtain the data, it will likely take a couple of weeks for me to analyze it and publish additional questions in the FAQ.

Update 2024-10-10 - I’m putting KCAD efforts on the backburner for a bit. There’s plenty of other questions that folks could find helpful that I can answer with data I already have or can easily obtain. This is also another example of things that annoy me about “public” data… if it’s not easy to get, it’s not public.]

We have (some) data

   2024-09-01

I’ve collected various datasets relevant to public school finances and taxes. Descriptions of the datasets and data downloads are availbale from the Datasets -> Source Data -> Texas Public Schools menu option.

I’ve also started working on the first FAQ. Since public schools is what I know the most about and what I have the data for, I’ll start with Boerne ISD and then Comfort ISD. I’ll post an update when the first FAQ is published.

What is this place?

   2024-08-16

Things that annoy me about “public” data and information

  • Good data is hard to find
    • Governmental entites typically lack the resources (and sometimes motivation…) to make data easily accessible
    • Most people don’t have the time or skills to collect and analyze raw data from many sources
  • A lack of data doesn’t imply a lack of opinions
    • Source data is often manipulated and obscured in ways to support an author’s arguments and make them difficult to verify
    • Limited access to source data makes it easier for those that do have the access to present a biased narrative
    • Limited access to source data doesn’t stop people from forming and expressing strong opinions based on invalid assumptions or understanding
  • Public data should belong to… the public
    • It’s not enough for public data to be available, it should also be accessible
    • Public data that is difficult to find, requires special privileges or formal FOIA processes to access, or is in difficult to use formats (e.g. providing financial tables as a .pdf rather than a xlsx, csv, json or other formats that are easy to analyze) is effectively not public

What I’m trying to do about it

  • Collect public data relevant to local government in Kendall County, Texas and make it easily accessible
  • Create data-centric FAQs relevant to local government which will:
    • Address common questions citizens have about their government (e.g. “How have tax rates changed in recent years?” or “How can I run for public office X?”)
    • Never provide opinion on local politics (e.g. “Here’s why public official X is the greatest!” or “Here’s why the city, county, school districts, etc are the worst!”). The whole point is to help citizens make up their own minds, not to tell people what to think… However, I will give my opinion on political and civic processes, e.g. that information like taxes and budgets should be easily and publically available.
    • Always provide original raw data sources and references
- Joe