The deal, in plain words.

Who you are dealing with

Works Better Corporation, a Delaware public benefit corporation, trading as WorksBetter. A public benefit corporation is a for-profit company with a stated public purpose written into its charter. It is not a charity and not a government body.

These terms cover this website and every page under it. By reading it you accept them. If you do not, please do not use the site.

They are for the public site. A separate written agreement covers any paid subscription, government deployment, custom implementation, or data service, and where the two differ, that agreement wins for that engagement.

Our registered office, and the address for a notice on paper, is the one on our Certificate of Incorporation. It reaches our registered agent:

Works Better Corporation
c/o Corporation Service Company
251 Little Falls Drive
Wilmington, DE 19808

For anything that is not a formal notice, write to hello@worksbetter.org or use the contact page — both are faster and read by a person.

What this site is

We read the records governments publish about their own money, and we put them on a page a person can follow. Every figure carries a label saying how we know it:

• FACT — taken from a named source, on a named date.
• CALC — worked out by us, with the arithmetic shown.
• SAMPLE — an illustration, labeled as one.
• PENDING or NOT PUBLISHED — a real field, left blank.

The rule behind those labels is that a blank is better than a guess. The Honesty Framework is that rule written out in full.

What this site is not

It is not an official system of any government, and no government has approved it. Where our figure and a government's own figure disagree, theirs is the record. We link to it so you can see for yourself.

It is not legal, financial, tax or investment advice, and it is not a substitute for professional advice. It does not endorse or oppose any candidate, party or ballot measure. No party affiliation is read, worked out, counted or stored anywhere in how this site is built.

Using the site

Read it, share it, argue with it. Please do not:

• Try to break, overload or get around the site's security.
• Scrape it in a way that degrades it for other readers.
• Present the site, or a page of it, as your own work or as an official record.
• Use it to break a law, or to harass anyone.

We may block access that does any of these. We would rather write to you first. Reporting a suspected error, an accessibility barrier, a privacy issue or a security problem in good faith is always allowed.

What you send us through a form

Some forms on this site are on and some are off. A form that is off sends nothing. The privacy policy says which forms are on and what each one keeps. When a form is on and you send us a rating, a comment, a question or a document, you keep whatever rights you have in it, and you give us permission to store it, read it, and act on it — to answer you, to check a correction, to improve the site, to run the feature you used it in, or, where it is a rating or comment about a particular place, to show it — with nothing in it that identifies you — to the people who govern that place. We do not sell what you send us, and we do not pass it to anyone the feedback is not about. This permission does not let us identify you publicly unless your identity is part of what you asked us to publish, or you give permission.

We may publish summaries of what residents tell us about a place. If we ever do, it will be our own writing about what we heard. It will never be your rating, never your comment, and never a count, average or distribution of anybody's.

Sending us something does not make it a secret, and it does not create an attorney-client, employment, agency or other special relationship. Do not send us anything confidential, privileged, export-controlled, or unlawfully obtained. We may decline, edit, moderate or remove a submission, and we are not required to publish or respond to it.

Reusing what is here

There are two different things on this site and they have two different answers.

The government records

The budgets, contracts, fee schedules and reports behind our figures are public records. We did not write them and we claim nothing in them. Where a record is free for anyone to use, it stays free for anyone to use, and nothing on this page changes that.

Our own writing, design and analysis

The words, the design, the charts, the way we group and grade things, and the software behind them are ours. The terms on which you may reuse them are being settled: PENDING — a real field, left blank rather than filled with a guess.

Until that is settled, here is what you can rely on. You may quote us, with attribution and a link. You may reproduce a figure and its source. You may write about us, criticize us, and check our arithmetic. If you want to do more than that, ask us and you will get a straight answer.

As of today we have not posted a general Creative Commons license for our data; please do not infer one from public access to the site. We may adopt a separate data license after legal review, and it will apply from its own date and scope.

Our name and our marks

WorksBetter™ and The Honesty Framework™ are trademarks of Works Better Corporation. So are the locale names in the form “place Works Better” (Colorado Works Better™ and the other locale names). They are not registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The ™ symbol says we claim them; it does not say a government agency has agreed. We will use the ® symbol if and when a registration issues, and not before. A check on our build fails if the ® symbol appears anywhere on this site.

You will see the ™ symbol once for each mark on a page, on its first prominent use. For our name that is the wordmark at the top; for the framework it is where the page names it. Marking every mention would be unusual and would make the text harder to read. We do not use the ℠ symbol. The phrases that describe what we do — “taxpayer shareholder portal” and the like — are ordinary descriptive words. Putting a symbol on them would claim something we do not have.

Our name, our logo and our page designs are ours. You may use our name to refer to us — in an article, a citation, a link. You may not use our name or logo in a way that suggests we made, checked or endorsed something we did not.

The copyright line at the foot of every page covers our own writing, design and analysis. It does not reach the public records we report on, and we do not claim it does.

What we do not promise

We work hard to get figures right and we show our sources so you can check. We cannot promise the site is complete, current or free of error. Public records are themselves late, revised and sometimes wrong, and we say so on the page when we know it.

So the site is provided as it is, and as available. To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranty of any kind, express or implied — including accuracy, completeness, timeliness, reliability, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, security, or uninterrupted availability. Do not make a decision that matters to you on our figure alone. Follow the source.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss that follows from your use of this site, or from a source, an outage, or unauthorized access to a transmission. And if a court still finds us liable for something, our total liability to you for anything to do with the public site will not be more than the greater of what you paid us for it — which for the public site is nothing — or one hundred dollars. Some states do not allow these limits, in which case they apply as far as they can, and nothing here excludes a liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

What you are responsible for

If you break the law with this site, break these terms, or send us something that violates someone else's rights, you are responsible for the reasonable costs that follow from that, and we may take over the defense of such a claim with your cooperation. This does not make you responsible for anything we get wrong ourselves — our own unlawful conduct, our negligence, or our breach of these terms — only for what you do.

When we get something wrong

We publish our mistakes. Every correction goes in a public log, with the date, what was wrong, and what it is now. Nothing is quietly edited.

If you think a figure is wrong, tell us. Point at the number and the page. We would rather be corrected by you than found out by someone else.

Links to other sites

We link out constantly, because a figure with no source is worth nothing. Those sites are not ours. We do not control what they publish, and a link is not an endorsement of anything but the record we cited.

Availability of the site

We may add, change, correct, suspend, limit or discontinue any part of the site at any time. We do not promise that a source link, a report, a feature, a locale, or a particular historical version will stay available. A page may show information as of a stated date, and unless we say otherwise we have no duty to update it continuously or to tell any one person when it changes.

The law that applies

These terms are governed by the law of the State of Delaware, without regard to its rules on which state's law to apply. Delaware is where this company is incorporated. A dispute about these terms would be heard in a state or federal court sitting in Delaware. By using the site you agree that those courts may hear it.

Our charter already sends one class of dispute to Delaware. Article VII makes the Court of Chancery the forum for claims about the company's internal affairs. Choosing the same state here keeps one company under one body of law instead of two.

These terms do not force you into arbitration and do not take away your right to join others in a class action.

Nothing here takes away a right you have under the law where you live. That law may give you a right to bring a claim closer to home, or a protection this page does not. Where it does, that law wins and this paragraph gives way to it.

When these terms change

We will change this page when the site changes, and the date at the top will change with it. A change that matters will be announced on the site rather than slipped in. Carrying on using the site after a change means you accept it.

The rest

These terms, with the Privacy Policy, the Accessibility Statement, and any separate notice or license that applies to a particular feature or item, are the whole agreement between you and WorksBetter about the public site. If a provision is held invalid, the rest stays in effect. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign your rights under these terms without our consent; we may assign them in a merger, financing, or sale of assets.