The CLR Charter

Version 1.0 · Ratified October 2, 2026.

The record speaks. CLR prints it.

The Council on Local Relations (CLR) publishes the public record of the governments that serve you: what they collect, what they spend, what they promised, who decides, and what actually happened. This Charter states what CLR is, what it will and will not do, the rules every page follows, and how a reader can hold CLR to them.

Preamble

Every government keeps records. Budgets, minutes, contracts, tax rolls, audits and codes are public by law, but most residents never see them, because reading them takes time, training and tools that most people don't have.

CLR exists to close that gap. It reads the record, cites it line by line, and puts it in front of residents in plain language. CLR does not tell anyone what to think about what they find. That choice belongs to the reader.

Article I: What CLR Publishes

1. The record of government, place by place. Cities, counties, states, school and special districts, and the governing bodies that sit across them, each arranged on a ladder from the neighborhood up.
2. The provision floor. For every place, CLR measures what can be measured about seven basic needs: food, water, energy, shelter, health, safety and work.
3. Frameworks, attributed. Where CLR uses an outside lens to ask its questions (for example, Strong Towns), it names the framework, says whose it is, and shows where it breaks. A framework is the question CLR asks; the town's documents are the answer CLR prints.
4. Primers. Plain-language background that puts a place's record in context: history, law and how things work. Primers follow the same evidence rules as everything else.

Article II: What CLR Will Never Do

CLR will never:

1. Advocate. No position on any candidate, party, ballot measure or policy.
2. Argue. No editorials, no threads, no debates. CLR states what the record shows and stops.
3. Sell. No coverage, placement or correction is for sale. No sponsor, client or donor shapes a CLR page.
4. Grade. No letter grades and no report cards.
5. Publish an unsourced claim. If an answer has no source a reader can check, it does not appear.
6. Hide its method. Every rule CLR follows is in this Charter or linked from it.

Article III: The Evidence Rules

1. Every claim carries its source. Each figure or statement on a CLR page links to the document it came from, at the page or line where possible. CLR calls this a locator.
2. The primary document wins. An original budget, ordinance, audit or minute governs over any summary, news report or estimate of it, including CLR's own.
3. Openable beats official. When two sources support the same figure, CLR shows the one a reader can actually open.
4. Every source meets the same test. Government documents, studies, scripture, news reports and CLR's own earlier pages are all held to one standard. What a text says can be documented. A claim about an event needs evidence, or it is attributed to whoever made it.
5. Arguments are attributed, never adopted. When CLR reports what a person or group argues, it says whose argument it is.
6. Every claim is stamped. Each claim on a CLR page carries one mark that tells the reader how solid it is:

Where a figure comes from a sample or survey, its reliability is shown as a separate mark beside the stamp, never in place of it. Items CLR has noticed but not yet certified are kept off public pages until they are.

Article IV: Measurements and Verdicts

1. Measurement is disclosure. CLR may score a place against published criteria, measure every place the same way, and list the results in order. That is disclosure, not a verdict.
2. A verdict needs a rule and a record. CLR may say whether a government followed the rules set out for it, using a defined verdict word, only when the criteria for that word are published in advance and the finding cites the record that meets them.
3. No support, no verdict. If a verdict can't be backed that way, CLR drops it and shows the facts alone.
4. Praise follows the same rule. A favorable finding is reported as a measurement. A record that praises is as compromised as one that indicts.

Article V: Corrections

1. What a correction is. A correction is a change to a figure or fact the public has already seen.
2. What it is not. Rewording a caption, re-pointing a headline or improving a layout is not a correction, as long as the underlying figure was right.
3. How corrections are handled. When a published figure was wrong, CLR fixes it, notes the change on the page, and records it in a public corrections log with the date, the old figure, the new figure and the source that settled it.
4. Corrections use CLR's announcement voice only. CLR's public channels carry announcements, corrections and notes on method. They do not argue.
5. Anyone can report an error. Write to the address in Article IX. Include the page and the source you believe is right.

Article VI: How CLR Uses Artificial Intelligence

CLR is built with artificial intelligence (AI), and says so.

1. The machine drafts; the record decides. AI tools read documents, extract figures and draft pages. No AI output is published on the strength of the AI. Every claim still needs a locator a reader can open.
2. AI can be wrong. AI tools can produce confident statements that are false. CLR treats every AI-drafted claim as unverified until it is matched to its source.
3. A person checks it like a resident would. Before a page goes live, it passes a citizen check that asks: who, what, when, where, why and how; who is affected; and what it means for someone who lives there. The standard for going live is truth: no wrong figure published.
4. People are accountable. Machines count, sort, draft and check. People ratify, act and answer for the result. In the Chairman's words: robots do robot things, people do people things.
5. The tools are named. CLR uses commercial AI models, including Claude by Anthropic, and open-weight models run on Council-owned hardware. When the toolset changes materially, this Article is updated.
6. The Council's seats are public. Pages carry the bylines of the Council seats that produced them (for example, The Analyst, The Herald, The Engineer). Those names are public on purpose, so readers know which part of the Council answers for what.

Article VII: The Firewall

The Council on Local Relations federation has more than one arm. CLR is only the record.

1. CLR is the record speaking. It answers only what can be proven or disproven.
2. Think and Act Locally (TAAL) is the action arm. Arguments, interpretations, calls to action, organizing and opinion live there, not on CLR.
3. The line runs along basic needs. CLR covers the measurable floor: the seven provisions in Article I. What a community builds above that floor (belonging, purpose, the life residents choose) is human work and belongs to TAAL.
4. CLR pages point to TAAL; TAAL cites CLR. A CLR page may say "act on this at Think and Act Locally." It never says what action to take. TAAL may build any argument it likes on CLR's facts, but it cannot change them.
5. No arm of the federation buys or steers the record. The federation's commercial work has no say over what CLR publishes.

Article VIII: How CLR Works in Public

1. Public first, then improve. CLR publishes a place as soon as its pages pass the citizen check. It then keeps checking and improving until every page is complete. A gap in coverage is marked as a gap, never filled with a guess.
2. No private previews. Every page ships through the same process: the responsible seat prepares it, the Chairman approves it, and it is verified live after publishing.
3. "Done" means live. A page is not finished until it can be opened at its public address and its figures match their sources there.
4. Records are kept. CLR keeps a versioned history of its pages, its decisions and this Charter. Earlier versions are preserved, not overwritten.

Article IX: Responsibility and Contact

1. The Chairman of the Council on Local Relations ratifies this Charter and every change to it, and answers for CLR's adherence to it.
2. Reports of error, questions about method, or a complaint that CLR broke this Charter go to chairman@councilonlocalrelations.org.
3. A complaint that CLR broke this Charter is handled like a correction. If the complaint holds, the fix and the finding are logged publicly.

Article X: Changing This Charter

1. Only the Chairman can change this Charter.
2. Every change gets a new version number, a date and a one-line reason in the change log below.
3. Earlier versions stay published and linked.

Change log

Council on Local Relations • Life by Design, Not Default