How Aurora Works Better knows what it publishes
Every figure on this site traces to a public record. Each one carries a label saying what kind of claim it is. Before it appeared here, we checked it against something the publisher printed itself. This page is that record, generated from the pipeline rather than written about it.
01What this is — and isn’t
Aurora Works Better is an independent, public-records-based effort to help people see how the City of Aurora raises and spends money. It uses official documents and clearly-labeled analysis. It is separate from the City of Aurora and from every party and campaign, and it does not speak for any agency.
One word recurs on every page here. An appropriation is money the legislature authorized to be spent. It is never a record of money actually spent, and the two are kept apart throughout this site.
Some public records are incomplete, delayed, or inconsistent with each other. Where that is true, it is said on the page rather than papered over. The job is to make the public record legible — not to replace it, and not to claim more certainty than the record supports.
This page is generated from the same validated records the figures come from. So it cannot describe a source the site does not read, and it cannot omit one it does.
02How every number is labeled
Three different kinds of claim, kept apart so you always know which one you are looking at. Every figure on this site carries one of these chips.
The number is copied from a public record you can open, with the record named and the date we read it. Nothing about it is ours except the reading.
We did the math, and the math is printed next to the number: what went in, what was done to it, and where each input came from. A CALC you cannot check is not a CALC.
Never estimated. The field is real and empty. Nobody has published the number, or we have not read the source yet. We leave it blank rather than guess. A blank has more than one cause, and the blanks section tells them apart.
NOT PUBLISHED is the sharpest kind of pending, and this locale shows it. The publisher could report the figure and does not. The field stays blank, and no estimate goes into it.
NOT ELIGIBLE is not a pending at all. The figure cannot exist at this level, so no amount of work would close it. Pending would promise something nobody can deliver.
The Honesty Framework, the open standard behind this site, defines all of these.
03Source confidence grades
Every source carries a grade, and the grade governs what the figure is allowed to do. A media-graded figure may be displayed and is excluded from every total.
The publisher’s own document for the period in question, read directly.
Something an agency said, a news report, or something we inferred, that no primary record has yet confirmed. It is shown as C until one does, and a C-graded figure is excluded from every total.
04What this locale refuses to publish
A refusal is a finding, not a gap in the work. Each of these is asserted by the harness, so it cannot be dropped by a later edit without the build failing.
- A city corrections budget, or the Detention Division presented as one. — the dashboard says so in these words: “no jail system and no corrections department”, “a substitute, not the measure”, “$7,799,910”.
- Any jail population or incarceration rate at the city level. — the dashboard says so in these words: “No publisher states how many people from Aurora are in custody”, “The field stays blank rather than estimated”.
- A vehicle theft rank for this city, or any rank built by ordering a chosen set of cities. — the dashboard says so in these words: “does not exist at the city level”, “so none is produced”.
- Adding any Aurora figure to any county figure, or reading county functions as city money. — the dashboard says so in these words: “never summed”.
- Mixing the all-funds appropriations total with the audited government-wide expense figure. — the dashboard says so in these words: “counts a transferred dollar in both funds”, “different quantity on a different basis”.
- One combined ’Aurora sales tax’ rate. — the dashboard says so in these words: “No single “Aurora sales tax” figure exists”.
- Any education figure for the city as a whole, or one district’s figure under the city’s name. — the dashboard says so in these words: “No district’s boundary matches the city’s, in either direction”, “each labeled with the overlap”.
- Any figure produced by joining Aurora to one county. — the dashboard says so in these words: “every single-county join breaks”.
- Any Douglas County figure on this page. — the dashboard says so in these words: “no jail figure and no figure this site can date”, “in no dollar table in the book”.
- A capital ledger presented as the city’s whole capital program, or any Aurora Water figure presented as a project. — the dashboard says so in these words: “without Aurora Water”, “(Excluding Aurora Water)”, “$289,188,498”.
- Any spend-to-date figure for a single project, and any figure from the four planned years presented as an appropriation. — the dashboard says so in these words: “The city publishes no spending by project”, “those are plans, not appropriations”.
05Every calculation, with its formula
A CALC shows its arithmetic. These are the formulas the pipeline actually ran, not a description of them.
aurora-crime-mvt-rate-fbi
- Annual offense count reported by the police department, divided by the population the department itself serves, as published in the same FBI response, times 100,000. The agency endpoint publishes no per-agency coverage series, so the 90% gate the state locales apply cannot be applied here; a year whose reported count falls below a non-report floor of 500 would be published as a gap instead (no Aurora year does — the smallest is 1,063 in 2014). Deliberately NOT the same calc_version as any state rate, because the denominator is a different quantity — an agency’s population served, not a state’s FBI matched population.
aurora-receipt-total
- Each fund type’s 2026 Adopted appropriations (the Grand Total row of the budget book’s "2026 Expenditure Appropriations by Department and Fund Type" matrix, p. G-3) divided by the all-funds total, times 100, rounded to cents. The five rounded shares must sum to exactly $100.00 or the run stops — a person then decides how to restate the rounding. The Debt Service Funds column is empty in 2026 and carries no share. The city’s own fund-type pie (p. G-2) prints whole percentages that sum to 100 by rounding capital projects up to 6%; the exact figure is $5.49 per $100, which is why the receipt here carries cents.
aurora-population-arapahoe-share
- A county part’s residents divided by the city total, times 100, rounded to one decimal. Parts and total are the Census Bureau’s own subcounty estimates and the parts sum to the total exactly before any share is computed.
06Where the numbers come from
Every source below is public, and every link opens in a new tab. This is the reader’s list. The full register covers every system read across all locales, including the ones out of reach and why. It is generated from the pipeline and kept in the repository’s source register.
Budget and appropriations
- 2026 Operating and Capital Improvement Budget (adopted) — City of Aurora, Office of Budget and Financial Planning, grade A, read as a export.
- 2026 Arapahoe County Adopted Budget — Arapahoe County, Colorado, grade A, read as a export.
- 2026 Budget Book (OpenGov budget story) — Adams County, Colorado, grade A, read as a machine-readable API.
- 2026 Adopted Budget book — Douglas County, Colorado, grade C, read as a export.
What the money buys
- Subcounty population estimates, Colorado file (Vintage 2024, sub-est2024_8.csv) — U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates Program, grade A, read as a export.
- CDE summarized offense API, AGENCY endpoint (Aurora Police Department, ORI CO0010100) — FBI Crime Data Explorer, grade A, read as a machine-readable API.
Other public records
- 2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (year ended December 31, 2025) — City of Aurora, Finance Department, grade A, read as a export.
07What is measured about you
Nothing that identifies you. No cookies, no identifiers, and no storage of anything you type, except what you choose to send us through the forms described below. The one disclosed exception to that is aggregate, cookieless page-view counting, first-party only.
This site counts page views using first-party, cookieless analytics: aggregate counts of pages viewed, referrer, country and device class. No cookies, no fingerprinting, no identifiers, no cross-site tracking, and never any content you type. Why: watching aggregate patterns for anomalies, and for signals about what to improve.
We also measure how quickly pages load for real visitors: the timing of this page rendering in your browser, and with each timing the browser, device class, device operating system, network speed and country. No cookies, no identifiers, nothing that follows you from one page to the next, and never any content you type. Why: a page a reader cannot load is a page that publishes nothing, and we cannot fix what we cannot see.
What we count when you use the page. We also count a few interactions, not just page views: when a citation is followed out to its publisher; when the Honesty Framework is opened and from which page; when a data table is opened; how the question player on one prototype page is used; which question in that player is starred, as a total for each question and never tied to who starred it; which link is followed, and from which menu or part of the page; how far down a page a reader gets, by section; how far the guided tour is followed; what kind of answer a ZIP code typed on this site got (one county, a county line, another state and which one, a territory, a code from outside the country, too few digits) and the shape of the entry — never the code itself; when the link asking us to come to your state is opened, and which state; that updates were asked for, and from where; which folded section of a project page is opened; when the rating on a project page comes into view, and that a rating was sent — never which answer, and never the comment; how a county was opened on the Near you page (a ZIP code, the county list, the map, a saved county or a link), and whether a county picked on any page was saved on this device or forgotten, never which county; when the Help menu is opened and which of its lines is taken (a video, the guided tour, the Near you page or the help page); when the panel saying who runs this site is opened, and whether the corrections log or the About page is opened from it; the first step on a page after arrival: a second page, a ZIP code answer, a county, a project, a follow form or a rating; the first follow or rating started on a page; that a follow, a sign-up or a rating reached us, and for how many items, never the address and never the answer; when a follow did not go through, and why (the network, a refusal, or an email address that could not be used), never the address; and which broad region you are reading from, whether you came by a link we printed, emailed or posted, and which social site, if any, sent you. Four rules bind all of it. Every event has a name from a fixed list, and anything not on that list is dropped. Nothing you type is ever recorded — not a ZIP code, not a search, not the words of a comment; where we count one of those, we count only that it happened. Location stays coarse: a county, a region or a state — never a postal code, never coordinates, never an address. A county is named only where your postal code sits wholly inside one and enough people live there for the answer to be about a place rather than a person. Location is worked out where your request first reaches us: a county where your postal code sits wholly inside one and enough people live there, otherwise a group of counties, more often a whole state, and outside the country nothing but that. The closer location your network reports is read there and thrown away in the same breath — it never reaches this page, it is never written down, and nothing about it is kept between one page and the next. If your browser sends the Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal, or the older Do Not Track (DNT) signal, we honor it. Nothing about your visit is counted: no page view, no page-speed timing, no interaction. We do not ask our edge where you are, so no region and no county is ever known. The two counting scripts are not loaded at all. We sell nothing and share nothing with anybody, under any setting. The address bar is stripped of anything after the path before a count is sent, so a value you typed cannot reach us even by that route. We also count whether a visit came from a social site, and which one, from a fixed list: Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Reddit, Nextdoor, Substack, Medium, TikTok or YouTube. A visit from any other site is counted only as another site. Your browser works out that one word from the address of the page you came from, or from a tag on a link we posted. Only the word is sent. The address you came from is never sent or kept, and the tag is taken out of the address bar. Nothing is counted while somebody from this project is previewing a feature that is off for the public: those visits make no request for a location, send no event, and are not included in the page-view count.
How we handle what you send — the full disclosure. The sign-up on the dashboard, and Follow and Feedback on each project page, send what you give them to a store this project controls, and to nothing else. Ratings and comments are stored with no name, address or identifier. A rating is counted into a total, so the people who govern this place can see how residents read their spending. No rating and no total is published on this site, and a comment is never published on it. We may publish summaries of what residents tell us about a place. Those are our own writing, never your rating or your comment, and never a count, average or distribution of anybody’s. Names, emails, phone numbers and street addresses are stripped from a comment before anyone reads it. A sign-up or a follow keeps your email address and what you chose to follow, and nothing else about you. A confirmation link is sent before anything else, every email carries a one-click unsubscribe, and no email is sent until you click. We do not record IP addresses, and we do not track whether an email was opened or a link was clicked. Nothing you send is used to train or tune any model. The store is controlled by this project and by no other company. The day these forms opened is recorded in the corrections log.
Some sources are person-level: a licensing register, a custody feed. We read those as a count and nothing else, and we publish only the total.
08Updates and corrections
When a published figure turns out to be wrong, we correct it and log it publicly on the dashboard. The log says what it was, what it is now, and why it moved. It is part of the product, not an apology for it.