About

An independent record of how Utah cities spend

The Gov Transparency Project turns the public records twenty-two Utah cities already publish — council packets, check registers, employee compensation, and audit reports — into dashboards anyone can search, sort, and trace back to the original document.

Why this exists

Utah has one of the best state-level finance portals in the country, but it stops at annual totals. It can't tell you which meeting approved a contract, whether a vote was bundled into a consent agenda, or which vendor took the biggest share of a fund. For decades a local newspaper covered that layer. Across Utah, that beat has mostly disappeared. When no one reads the packet, a decision can be entirely legal, entirely public, and entirely unwatched. This project fills that meeting-level gap, city by city.

Who runs it

It's independent and resident-built — not a government program, a PAC, or a news outlet, and not affiliated with any of the cities it covers. The work is deliberately reproducible: every figure links to its source document, so you never have to take our word for anything. If you'd like to know who's behind a specific analysis or want to reach the operator directly, use the contact form on the home page.

How it stays independent

The cities being covered never pay for their own dashboards. Costs are covered by optional civic sponsorships and reader support, and a sponsorship never changes how a city's spending or meetings are presented. The data and the scores are the same whether a city is sponsored or not.

How the data is made

Every number is extracted from public records and linked to the source. The full pipeline — where the data comes from, how meetings are scored, how often it refreshes, and its known limitations — is documented on the methodology page.