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.

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. Every published record naming a person was individually approved by the editor. See the methodology page for exactly how that works.