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The Portland Record
Automated data, not yet fully editor-reviewed. Figures on this site are collected automatically from the linked official sources and currently publish without line-by-line editor review. Records about a named person's votes, attendance, or statements still appear only after the editor approves them — one at a time, or in a batch that is labeled as such. See the methodology and report errors via corrections .

Who keeps this record

About This Project

The Portland Record is an independent project that turns public records about Portland city government into something a resident can check in five minutes: where voter-approved tax money goes, how councilors vote and show up, and where council time is actually spent.

It is built to be checkable: every figure links its source, every dataset shows its age, and the entire data trail — raw documents, processing code, and review history — is public in the project repository.

How This Differs

The Record is defined by its method, described in full on the methodology page:

  • A final council vote is compared against two City sources, the council’s vote index and the item’s own page. A disagreement withholds the record. A roll call that exists in only one source, such as a vote on an amendment or on a procedural motion, or a ballot round in a council officer election, is labeled.
  • Nothing naming a person appears until the editor approves it, either one record at a time or in a batch labeled “Editor-approved in batch.”
  • Every figure links its source and shows an “as of” date. Aggregate figures publish automatically, and every page says so.
  • Errors are corrected in public on the corrections page.
  • No scores, grades, or rankings of officials, and no written characterizations of them.

Other Portland resources

  • City of Portland: City Council, the City’s own council pages: agendas, documents, and the vote records this site draws on.
  • Portland Civic Lab (Portland Civic Lab LLC), which describes itself as “Free, source-linked tools for understanding Portland, and paid decision work for the owners and institutions who run it, at published prices.”
  • Multnomah County Elections Division, the county’s elections office.

Funding disclosure

This project is self-funded by its editor. It accepts no money from the City of Portland, Multnomah County, Metro, any elected official, candidate, campaign, political party, PAC, or any organization that lobbies Portland city government. If that ever changes, this page will say so before the money does anything.

Ongoing costs are minimal by design: low-cost static hosting (S3/CloudFront, a few dollars a month), a domain registration, and modest API costs for transcript processing.

Who runs this

One editor, with automated pipelines doing the routine collection. Nothing naming a person is published until the editor has approved it. Since 25 September 2026 the editor may approve pending records in batches as well as one at a time; every record approved in a batch is labeled “Editor-approved in batch” wherever it appears. See the methodology page for exactly how that works.