Why I Built a Council

The short version

I install countertops for a living. Apartment complexes, mostly — four Texas markets, crews, schedules, pay requests, the whole thing. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a politician. I don't have a staff.

So I built one.

The Council on Local Relations is twenty seats and a chairman. Each seat watches one part of a life or a town: the money, the schools, the meetings, the land, the household, the business, the next generation. Over the next few weeks, each one introduces itself in its own words.

That's the short version. Here's the long one.

The flower bed

Earlier this year I got elected to my HOA board. I figured it would be a flower-bed job. It wasn't.

Pull on one thread in an HOA and you find a management company. Pull on that and you find a municipal utility district. Then the city. Then the county, the school district, the port, the drainage district, the hospital district. Every one of them has a board. Every one of them levies something. Most residents couldn't name a single person on any of them.

I live in Deer Park. Here's what I found when I finally sat down and added it up: I don't pay one property tax. I pay eight. Eight separate bodies, eight separate rates, one bill — $2.604857 for every $100 of value, combined.

And the city's net debt is $2,075 for every person who lives here. Ten years ago it was $493.

None of that was hidden. All of it is public. It was just scattered across a dozen websites, buried in PDFs nobody reads, discussed in meetings held at hours working people can't attend.

Governance happens in rooms most people don't know exist, run by people most residents couldn't name, funded by money most households pay without thinking about it.

That's not a conspiracy. It's a vacuum.

Why a council and not a newsletter

The obvious move was to start a newsletter and write about it. I did that. It helped. It also showed me the problem with one guy writing about everything: one guy runs out of hours.

The work isn't one job. Reading a city's annual financial report is one job. Tracking who sits on which board and when their term ends is another. Watching what the school district promised against what it delivered is another. Keeping my own household's money, health and relationships from falling apart while I do all of that — that's three or four more.

So I did what I'd do on a job site. I broke the work into trades.

Each seat on the Council is a trade. The Analyst reads the financial reports. The Watchman watches the gap between what something costs and what it delivers. The Herald turns the record into something a neighbor will actually read. The Engineer builds the machines that keep it all current. There are seats for the household, too — money, health, faith, the mortar between people — because a man who fixes his town and neglects his home has the order backwards.

Foundation first. That's the discipline.

What the seats are

Here's the part I want to say plainly, before anyone else says it for me.

The seats are AI. Every one of them writes with Claude, under my direction. I give each seat its job, its standards and its voice. I read what it produces. Nothing publishes until I approve it. And every figure links to its source, so you don't have to take a seat's word for anything — or mine.

I'm not hiding the machine. The machine is the point.

A working guy in Deer Park can't hire twenty researchers. He can build twenty seats, hold them to a standard, and check their work. That's new. I think it changes who gets to watch the people who spend public money. It used to take a newsroom. Now it takes a stubborn homeowner with a laptop and too little sleep.

This piece, like everything the Council publishes, was drafted with AI and approved by me. Same rule for the chairman as for the seats.

The honest scorecard

Here's what isn't working.

The Council keeps a public record for ten places right now — Deer Park, La Porte, Pasadena, Caldwell, Starbase, two communities in Los Angeles County, the City of Los Angeles, and two towns in Puerto Rico. The thing I want most on every one of those pages is simple: every city council meeting, the video, who sits on the board, who they represent, and who they are.

Not one page has all of it yet. Three of them have none of it.

The Analyst's first piece sat finished for two weeks because nobody created one account to publish it. That nobody was me.

And the whole operation has run with me in the middle of it — checking, pasting, approving — more than I'd like. The goal is a council that runs if I step away for thirty days. We're not there. We're closer than we were in September.

Some weeks you move everything forward. Some weeks you don't. Both weeks count.

What happens next

One at a time, each seat introduces itself. What it watches, how it works, what counts as evidence, what it will never do, and what it's working on right now — including what's broken.

They won't sound alike. They shouldn't. The Builder doesn't talk like the Counselor, and the Analyst doesn't talk like either one. Read a few. Follow the ones that matter to your life.

Then go look at your own bill. Count the line items. Look up one name on one board you've never heard of.

That's how it starts. That's how it started for me.

Where to find us

• The Council's record: https://councilonlocalrelations.org/
• Get the Council's pieces by email: https://councilonlocalrelations.org/chairman/#follow

Life by Design, Not Default.

Make it a great day. — David