Trust
Your Houston-area government actions, translated and sourced. Nonpartisan, always. That is the whole promise, and this page is where we show our work — the rules we hold ourselves to, the things we refuse to do, who builds this, and who pays for it.
You have no particular reason to trust a website about your government. So don’t: check it. Every claim below is one you can test on this site in under a minute.
These came first and everything else was built around them. They are not marketing copy; they are the instructions the site is built to, and when one of them makes a page worse, the rule wins.
We never invent a fact about your government.
Every fact on this site is either generated from an official record by our pipeline or checked by hand against an official source. Nothing is written from memory, from news coverage, or from what seems likely. Where a page still shows placeholder content while a data source is being built, it carries a visible demo data badge. If we can’t verify it, we don’t show it.
When we don't know, we say we don't know.
An agenda item that has been posted but not voted on says “no outcome recorded yet” — never a guess. When the record doesn’t say who benefits from a contract or which fund pays for it, the page says the record doesn’t say, rather than filling the gap with something plausible. Blank spaces on this site are usually deliberate.
Every summary links to the record it came from.
The plain-English version is our writing; the underlying fact is the government’s. So every item links to the record it was drawn from — the City Secretary’s minutes or posted agenda for a city item, the county’s or the school district’s own Legistar meeting record for theirs — and every campaign-finance figure links to the filing. If our summary and the record ever disagree, the record is right and we want to hear about it.
Nonpartisan — structurally, not just in tone.
We publish no party label on any person, anywhere, including on the ballot. The software cannot do it: there is no field for it in our data. Candidates are listed alphabetically by surname, never grouped by party, because listing one side first in every race is itself a signal. Colours mean outcomes — red for a failed vote, green for a passed one — and never a team.
The Ask feature answers only from the records in front of it.
When you ask a question, the site retrieves the most relevant official records and answers from those alone, citing each one. If the records don’t cover your question it says so and points you at the official source to check yourself, rather than answering from general knowledge. It is not a chatbot with opinions about Houston.
A shorter list than the rules, and in some ways more useful — this is what we have decided to give up.
The front page leads with a rotating handful of recent items. Software chooses them by a fixed, public score — nobody hand-picks the lede, and the score never reads the news. Four criteria, all neutral:
What is deliberately not on that list: controversy, conflict, and anything partisan. An item being argued over does not make it worth your attention here; what it costs and whom it touches does. Each pick shows a “Why this?” tag naming the criteria it scored on, so the rule is visible on every pick — and the items it passes over are unchanged, one click away on the meeting page.
The edition number in the masthead is computed the same honest way: one edition per council meeting on our record. It isn’t a marketing counter — it only goes up when the pipeline publishes another meeting’s worth of official records, so the number is itself a claim you can check against the meetings on this site.
PlainDocket is built and run by Brad Farrar, a Houston resident building it on his own time. It is not a newspaper, a campaign, a political action committee or a nonprofit with a board. It is one person’s project, which is worth knowing when you weigh it.
Nobody is paid to write a summary a particular way, because nobody is paid at all. The plain-English summaries are generated from the official text by software and reviewed against the record; the rules above exist precisely because one person with software could otherwise put a thumb on the scale without anyone noticing.
Out of one person’s pocket, plus readers’ donations. There is no advertising, no sponsorship, no grant and no political money — and no plan to take any of those in a form that could shape what appears here.
The running total is published in the footer of every page rather than hidden on this one: as of July 24, 2026, $0 donated against $1,212 invested in build costs and time. Both numbers move, and neither is flattering by design — a transparency site that hid its own balance sheet would be a strange thing.
We will. Minutes get parsed badly, a summary lands on the wrong emphasis, a link rots. The commitment is not that this site is never wrong — it is that a mistake is checkable, because the record is always one click away, and that a correction is treated the same whoever reports it.
If an official’s office writes to us about a page, it gets exactly the same treatment as anyone else: verify against the record, fix what’s wrong, thank them. Being contacted by someone powerful does not change the tone of a page.
Official sources only. Not aggregators, not news write-ups, not other civic sites: