Welcome to CivicPrinciples

Local government is where decisions actually touch your life — zoning, budgets, police, roads, water — yet it’s the layer almost no one watches. The meetings are long, the agendas are opaque, and the votes scroll by faster than anyone can follow.

CivicPrinciples exists to change that. We score your city council and county commission against 15 nonpartisan governing principles after every meeting, so accountability doesn’t depend on sitting through an eight-hour session.

What we publish here

• Methodology — how the 15 principles work, and how a vote becomes a score.
• Market notes — what’s happening in the councils and commissions we cover, starting with Colorado Springs.
• The record — patterns across meetings that a single headline would miss.

We’re nonpartisan by design and grounded in public records. The goal isn’t to tell you what to think — it’s to show you what happened, clearly enough that you can decide for yourself.

More soon.