Currently tracking
Santaquin, Utah
santaquin.govtransparencyproject.com →
What this is
Your city already publishes the documents — meeting packets, check registers, employee compensation data, audit reports. They're public. They're also buried in 100-page PDFs, posted twice a month, rarely indexed, and almost never compared across time.
The Gov Transparency Project takes those records and turns them into something you can actually search, sort, and compare. Every council-approved dollar. Every vendor relationship. Every meeting's procedural choices. Available on a phone, free, with the source PDF one click away.
Why it exists
Local government affects your daily life more directly than state or federal — your water rates, your road work, your fire department, your library — but it's also the layer with the least independent scrutiny. Big-dollar decisions routinely get bundled into "consent agenda" items and approved without discussion. Bond issuances share an agenda with rezones and vehicle purchases.
The local newspaper that used to send a reporter to every meeting either downsized or vanished a decade ago. The void left behind is what this project fills.
What's on each city's dashboard
- Every council-approved payment, searchable by vendor, fund, department, or date — with a direct link to the exact council packet PDF that approved it.
- Employee compensation back to FY2016, with per-employee year-over-year change and inflation-adjusted comparisons against the BLS Consumer Price Index.
- Grant activity — federal, state, and county grants the council has discussed or accepted, with source citations.
- A council performance scorecard — was each meeting's agenda focused, were major items given separate scrutiny, or was the night a "kitchen sink" of stacked decisions? Tracked over time so you can see the trend.
- A library of proposed records requests residents can copy and file, each tied to a specific gap in what's currently public.
Goals
- Make local government spending genuinely auditable by any resident with a browser, not just by staff or auditors.
- Surface emerging vendor concentrations, sole-source patterns, and unusual cost growth while they're still small enough to question.
- Document procedural drift over time — when councils start bundling more decisions, the scorecard catches it.
- Give residents specific, well-formed records requests rather than vague concerns — a request for "the contract, the invoices, and the deliverables" is much harder to deflect than "tell me about that vendor."
- Be the place where local watchdog work starts, not a substitute for it.
What this is not
This is not an investigation. It's a dataset. Numbers here are extracted from public documents and should be verified against the source packet before you cite them in a meeting, an article, or a complaint. Every meeting page links directly to the city's official PDF — use that as the citation, not this site.
This is not affiliated with Santaquin City (or any other city tracked here), receives no funding from any government or political organization, and has no business model. It is built and maintained by residents, in spare time, with the data and code free to anyone who wants to fork it for their own city.
Want your city added?
The pattern is repeatable: pull every council packet, extract the check register, layer on the state's salary data, score the meetings, draft the records requests. If you live in a Utah city not yet tracked here and want to help bootstrap it, the source code is open.