The CLR Charter

Version 1.2 · Ratified October 3, 2026.

Earlier versions: v1.0, v1.1.

The record speaks. CLR prints it.

The Council on Local Relations is a small group of related projects based in Deer Park, Texas. CLR is the part of it that publishes the record. In this Charter, "CLR" always means the record and nothing else.

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, the state, school districts, special districts (such as water, drainage, port and hospital districts), and the boards and agencies that govern across them. Each place shows which of these governs it, from the neighborhood up.
2. Seven basic needs. 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, a nonprofit that studies whether cities can afford what they build; CLR's Strong Towns primer explains it), 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.
5. CLR's perspective. CLR has a perspective, and it says so. Residents should be able to see and check how they are governed, and the decisions that shape a life are best made as close to home as possible. That perspective decides which questions CLR asks and which records it goes after. It never decides the answers. The record does, and CLR publishes what the record shows whether or not it fits the perspective.

Article II: What CLR Will Never Do

CLR will never:

1. Advocate. No position on any candidate, party, ballot measure or specific policy proposal. CLR's perspective (Art. I.5) chooses its questions; it is not a position on any of these.
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. The mark gives the survey's margin as a percentage (for example, "CV 8%"). Between 12% and 30% it adds "use with care." Above 30% the figure is too unreliable to publish, and CLR leaves it off. Items CLR has noticed but not yet certified are kept off public pages until they are.

Article IV: Measurements and Verdicts

1. A measurement is not a grade. CLR may measure every place with the same published yardstick and list the results in order. That shows how places compare on that one measure. It says nothing about whether a place is good or bad.
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 test for that word is published in advance on the same page and the finding cites the record that meets it.
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 counts. Any of these, once the public has seen the page, is a correction: a figure changed; a label changed so the figure means something different; a stamp changed (for example, from Certified to Conditional); or a claim withdrawn because its source couldn't be shown. The log says which kind each one is.
3. What doesn't count. Rewording a caption or headline, or improving a layout, is not a correction, as long as the figure itself was right. Neither is publishing an item for the first time after it was checked.
4. How corrections are handled. CLR fixes the page, notes the change on it, and records the correction in a public log with the date, the kind of change, the version first published, the corrected version and the source that settled it.
5. CLR's social accounts don't argue. They post only announcements, corrections and notes on method.
6. 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 openly available AI models that run on computers the Council owns. When the toolset changes materially, this Article is updated.
6. The Council's seats are public. The Council divides its work into named roles called seats (for example, The Analyst, The Herald, The Engineer). The seats are AI tools working under the Chairman's direction. Pages carry the byline of the seat that produced them, so readers know which part of the Council answers for what.

Article VII: The Firewall

The Council on Local Relations has more than one part. 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 what can be measured about the seven basic needs in Article I. What a community builds beyond those needs (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, David Campbell, 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