How Blue Fine Print works
Texas's largest cities post their council agendas, minutes and roll-call votes online. Almost nobody reads them. This site does, every hour, and logs what each council did with your money and your rules.
Which cities
The cities whose voters backed the Democratic candidate in the 2024 presidential race, by the official county returns. Each city's sheet shows the result and its source. A city stays on the list only if the official numbers support it.
What gets flagged
- New Rules
- Ordinances, fines, bans, permits, code enforcement
- Money
- Taxes over no-new-revenue, fees, debt, certificates of obligation
- Surveillance
- Flock, plate readers, cameras, data sharing
- Land Control
- Zoning, annexation, development limits, master plans
- Strings Attached
- Grants and programs with conditions
- Secrecy
- Closed sessions, consent-agenda burying, missing minutes
- City-run programs, guaranteed income, rent and price controls, "equity" spending
- NGO Payouts
- City money to nonprofits, advocacy groups and NGOs
- Police Budget
- Police funding, staffing and oversight changes
- Rollback
- Cuts, repeals and votes against control
The Fine Print Score
Each council earns points for control items it passed in the last 12 months: money and surveillance 4, new rules, land control, socialism-watch programs and NGO payouts 3, strings-attached programs and secrecy 2. Rollbacks take 3 off. Police budget changes are tracked and charted but don't count toward the score. Members get a personal score from their roll-call votes.
DSA endorsements
A member is marked DSA-endorsed only when a Democratic Socialists of America chapter's own endorsement list, or a news report quoting it, shows the endorsement. The source is linked on the city's sheet.
Where it comes from
Only published public records: posted agendas, minutes, roll-call votes, budgets and court filings. Where a city's agenda site loads with JavaScript, the reader goes to the data feed behind it (most big Texas cities use Legistar, which publishes every vote by member). Every entry links to the original and to our saved copy. Summaries stick to the facts: no adjectives, no party labels.
Ghosts in the machine
A city whose records can't be read by machine stays on the map anyway, marked GHOST, with its population. Its score reads UNSEEN, not zero. The mark clears by itself once the records can be read.