Why Weatherford needs a ledger

A ledger is a plain thing. It records what came in, what went out, and what is still owed. That is the whole idea behind this one.

Weatherford's city secretary has posted the minutes of every council meeting since 2012, with the motion, the second and the vote on every item. The school district posts its board minutes on BoardBook. The county posts the Commissioners Court's minutes on its Agenda Center. Between them they describe every plat, every rate, every contract and every appointment that shapes the county seat, and they are read, for the most part, by the people who wrote them.

The Weatherford Ledger reads them instead, and writes each meeting up in plain language with the minutes linked, so that a resident can see what was decided without sitting through a Tuesday night. The city's proposed FY27 budget, for instance, projects $61.4 million in general-fund revenue and $23.6 million of it from sales tax, with a property tax rate held at $0.392246 per $100; that is in the Aug. 25 minutes, and now it is here.

The Ledger is not the Weatherford Democrat and does not want to be. It does not cover crime, it does not attend meetings, and it runs no opinion on local politics beyond this page. It links the Democrat, the Fort Worth Report and the city's, the district's and the county's own channels whenever they have the fuller story. What it adds is the record: the data series nobody keeps in one place, the archive of what each body decided, and a morning email that tells you what is coming up.

It carries my name, so it has one rule: everything published must be accurate, and anything that is not gets corrected in the open. The corrections page is linked from every page. If you find an error, write to the editor.