How Fort Collins 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
Fort Collins Works Better is an independent, public-records-based effort to help people see how the City of Fort Collins raises and spends money. It uses official documents and clearly-labeled analysis. It is separate from the City of Fort Collins 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.
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.
- Any Larimer County figure — the jail, the courts, human services — published under this city heading. — the dashboard says so in these words: “has no corrections budget line to publish”, “in the county’s own budget”.
- A jail or corrections figure for Larimer County, or the county’s Sheriff’s Office presented as one. — the dashboard says so in these words: “no jail figure at all”, “single undivided row”, “not the jail”.
- A corrections budget or an incarceration rate for this locale. — the dashboard says so in these words: “sentenced prisoners under state jurisdiction”, “no rate is produced”, “not eligible”.
- 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: “no rank is produced”, “no amount of work closes it”.
- Any enrollment, per-pupil or graduation figure published under this city heading. — the dashboard says so in these words: “does not match the city line”, “no education figure is published yet”.
- Any breakdown of the 4.35% city sales tax rate into its dedicated taxes for 2026. — the dashboard says so in these words: “The rate is published alone, deliberately.”, “a blank beats a guess”.
- The budget book’s own p.26 narrative totals ($921.4M / $863.9M), quoted as the city’s budget. — the dashboard says so in these words: “summary prose is never quoted”, “does not say what it excludes”.
- Poudre Fire Authority presented as a city department, or its pass-through counted as city operating spend. — the dashboard says so in these words: “not a city department”, “a contribution”.
- A Net City Budget, or any other de-duplicated total, for the 2026 appropriation as amended. — the dashboard says so in these words: “no amended net is shown here and none is invented”, “Ordinance No. 186, 2025 states no net figure”.
- The city’s capital project offers presented as the city’s capital budget, or the difference between them published as a figure. — the dashboard says so in these words: “not the total amount of capital included in the budget”, “no project-by-project account”.
- A spend-to-date, encumbrance or prior-year actual against a named Fort Collins capital project. — the dashboard says so in these words: “The city publishes no spending by project.”, “An offer is money assigned, not money spent.”.
05Every calculation, with its formula
A CALC shows its arithmetic. These are the formulas the pipeline actually ran, not a description of them.
fc-receipt
- Each fund group’s As-Amended 2026 appropriation, divided by the ordinance’s own Total 2026 As-Amended figure ($889,115,826), times 100, carried to cents with a largest-remainder adjustment so the six lines sum to exactly $100.00. The group figures and the total are all the publisher’s own; the division is ours, so every line is CALC. THE BASIS IS GROSS by the City’s own design — its glossary says a dollar "may be counted twice, occasionally three times in arriving at total appropriations" — and two of the six slices are that duplication under their own names rather than netted out of sight.
fc-budget-duplication-removed-adopted
- The as-adopted appropriation less the Net City Budget for the same year, over the as-adopted appropriation, times 100: ($876,247,295 - $657,860,360) / $876,247,295 x 100. The difference is the publisher’s own "Less" block — internal service funds, transfers, the two general improvement districts, the urban renewal authority and the downtown development authority. AS-ADOPTED ONLY: that is the one basis on which the City publishes both a gross and a net total, and the amending ordinance restates no net figure.
fc-passthrough-pfa
- The city’s 2026 line for Poudre Fire Authority in Expenditures by Area ($41,598,084) divided by the Net City Budget ($657,860,360) and by Total City Appropriations ($876,247,295), times 100: 6.32% of the net and 4.75% of the gross, as adopted. The line is counted INSIDE both totals and is never added to or subtracted from either. That is a decision, made 2 October 2026: the city levies the tax and agrees the payment, so the line is counted as the city’s own money and named. The property tax figure is 66% of the 2026 Property Taxes line in the Revenue Summary ($51,730,356), which the book says is given to Poudre Fire Authority by intergovernmental agreement: $34,142,035. It is part of the line, not an addition to it. The offer page for the same line (offer 70.1) prints $42,070,635, $472,551 above the area table; the publisher does not reconcile the two, and the area table is the figure used because it is the table the total itself is read from.
fc-crime-mvt-rate-fbi
- Annual offense count reported by Fort Collins Police Services, divided by the population the agency 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 25 would be published as a gap instead (no year in this window does). 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.
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
- 2025-2026 Adopted Budget (adopted by City Council November 19, 2024) — City of Fort Collins, grade A, read as a export.
- Ordinance No. 186, 2025 — the 2026 annual appropriations ordinance, amending the biennial budget — Fort Collins City Council, grade A, read as a export.
- 2026 Adopted Budget (2025 Revised and 2026 Adopted Budgets) — Larimer County, Colorado, grade A, read as a export.
What the money buys
- CDE summarized offense API, AGENCY endpoint (Fort Collins Police Services, ORI CO0350300) — FBI Crime Data Explorer, grade A, read as a machine-readable API.
Other public records
- Sales Tax — current and historic rates (fortcollins.gov/Business/Sales-Tax) — City of Fort Collins, 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.