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Houston
The Question · Houston, TX

The largest city in Texas, and the AG rulings it asks for

Houston is the biggest public body in the state, and under the Public Information Act a body that wants to withhold must ask the Attorney General within ten business days and say why. Those requests and the rulings on them are themselves public. The pattern of what a city routinely asks permission to withhold is a map of what it does not want read.

This is a question, not an accusation

No one at this Foundation has alleged that anybody in Houston has done anything wrong, and nothing on this site should be read that way. Chapters are opened on structural risk — large capital programmes, fast growth, a single dominant employer, a utility or authority that meets away from the council — because those are the conditions under which decisions get made with nobody watching. That is a statement about attention, not about anybody's conduct.

Naming a city next to an accusation we have not documented would be precisely the thing this project exists to oppose. So the page you are reading names the question and the record that settles it, and then we go and ask for the record.

The record that answers it

Attorney General open-records rulings naming the City of Houston, cross-referenced against the City's own GovQA request log.

How this gets resolved

  1. Ask. A request goes to the City of Houston under Tex. Gov't Code ch. 552. The City has ten (10) business days.
  2. Publish what comes back, whole. Released public records go up unredacted. We do not summarise a document in place of showing it, and we do not redact what the government already released.
  3. Publish what does not come back. A missed deadline, a refusal with no statute cited, an estimate that prices a resident out — those get published too, with dates. Silence is a finding.
  4. Rewrite this page. When the documents are in, this page stops being a question and becomes what the records showed — including if they showed nothing. A chapter that only ever reports wrongdoing is not doing arithmetic, it is doing marketing.

What you can do right now

You do not need us. The statute is yours, and a request from a resident of Houston is harder to wave away than one from a nonprofit two states over.

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