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Where your money goes

Clark County appropriated $21,386,230 this year. It's your money. Until now, finding out where it goes meant reading a scanned courthouse document that's hard to find and harder to read.

We read it. We organized it. Now you can click from the total down to the line where a deputy's salary lives, and every number links back to the county's own filed pages so you can check us.

Go look. That's the whole pitch.

Who built this

A dry cleaner. Really.

Ozark Cleaners has been washing this county's clothes for years — you may know us from the counter. A while back we got tired of paying thousands a month for software that treated us like inventory, so we built our own register. It worked. We gave it away free to any small shop that wants it.

Then we did something stranger: we started publishing our own books. Sales, costs, what the owner takes home — posted publicly, every month, straight from the register. Our accountant said, "normally people ask me to hide things, not show them." That's exactly why we did it.

And once our own books were open, we felt we'd earned the right to ask a bigger question: what if you could see the county's books the same way?

Turns out the law already says you can. The records were always public. They just weren't readable. Making them readable wasn't anyone's job.

So we made it ours.

What this is

Three things, all free:

A budget you can walk. Every fund, every department, every line — clickable, in plain language, cited to the source page. Where the trail runs out (and it does), we say so and list it as an open question we're chasing. When we get the answer, we post it and stamp it done. You can watch the record get more complete in public.

A way to be counted. Clear yes-or-no questions about local priorities — deputy pay, roads, buildings, whatever this county is actually deciding. You choose how much of yourself to attach: answer anonymously, verify you're a real Clark County resident, or put your name on the record like signing a petition. The more you attach, the more your answer weighs — and that's shown honestly. Picture a result that reads "212 verified residents said yes — 37 by name": once the verification tiers are live, that means exactly what it says, and officials can check the math. (Today the count is open sentiment, labeled as such — the live tally is on every question page.)

Help finding help. If you're in a hard spot — the light bill, food, housing — one question gets you the two or three real local options with phone numbers and hours. Works on any phone, including by text. No forms, no runaround.

What we will never do

No candidates. No campaigns. No attacking anyone by name. No ads, ever. No selling anything, including your information — your details stay locked away from your answers, built so that even we can't see how any person voted. The full list of nevers is published, and it was written before anyone was watching, on purpose.

This isn't against the courthouse. Most of the people in it are doing their jobs. It's for the county — including them. They can use everything here without installing, buying, or signing anything. Results arrive on paper, like a letter.

Who pays for it

Ozark Cleaners sponsors it, including the AI that answers your budget questions. Every dollar it costs is posted nightly. A transparency project ought to show its own receipts first — so we show ours, down to the penny, and our business books besides.

Why we truly did it

Because opacity is a test, and too much fails in the dark — everywhere, always, not just here. Not because people are bad. Because dark corners grow things, and sweeping them was nobody's job.

We can't fix that everywhere. We can sweep one county, in public, and show our own corners while we do it.

And because the most important thing any of us can do is say the truth out loud. That's the whole site. The truth, out loud, with receipts.

What it could become

Every standard started as one place doing it differently. Public budgets used to be locked drawers; now they're PDFs. Maybe next they're something you can walk through on your phone, in every county, with your answer counted honestly at the end — and maybe businesses that show their books become normal, and closed ones start drawing the question.

We don't know if that happens. It's not up to us. Our job was to prove it's possible, affordable, and survivable — in one county, run by a dry cleaner, for less than the shop's coffee budget.

And the biggest goal was always the simplest one — one this county has had all along: we work together, and we have something to show for ourselves. The gym that filled to cheer the Promise. Two universities grown up across the street from each other. The pantries that feed neighbors every week, quietly. None of that is new here. It's just moving into collaborative technology and finer transparency — the same neighbors, with better tools and brighter light.

The rest is up to whoever's watching.

Go look.

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Everything above is checkable: every budget number cites its source, our books are posted, the cost log updates nightly, the code is public, and the full methodology — counting rules, verification, privacy design, moderation charter — is one click away. If you find an error, tell us; corrections get published, not buried. If you want to talk to a person, the operator is at the dry cleaners most mornings.