About

About ketchikan.app

An independent site that gathers public records about where public money goes in Ketchikan, Alaska, and makes them searchable. Every number links to the record it came from, so you can check our work.

What this is

ketchikan.app follows public money: budgets, payments, contracts, grants, leases, tax shares, and campaign contributions. It covers the City of Ketchikan and KPU, the Ketchikan Gateway Borough, the port, police, and courts, the State and federal governments where their money reaches Ketchikan, tribes, nonprofits, and the businesses and officials on either end of each payment. Tourism and the cruise docks get extra attention.

The site is published anonymously. We ask readers to judge it by its sources rather than by who we are. That is why each figure links to a public record, and why the data is free to download.

Where the data comes from

Everything here comes from public records. These include adopted budgets and financial reports, audits, payment registers, contracts, leases and bids, council and assembly minutes and packets, state corporation filings, campaign finance, lobbying, and financial disclosure reports, cruise passenger statistics, and records we request from agencies.

Our collection scripts save each record with the address it came from and the date we retrieved it. Where we are allowed to, we keep an archived copy in case the original moves. A build step then turns those records into the files this site reads. A record we could not download is still listed in the document library, marked with why.

Records have gaps and errors, and so may our reading of them. Totals on this site add up only the flows we have found. A payment we have not found is missing from every total that should include it.

How oddities are made and checked

An oddity starts with something in the records that raises a question. Examples are several awards to one vendor just under a bidding limit, or grants from a board going to a board member's company.

Before we publish an oddity, we re-read each fact against the record it cites and note the date we checked. Each fact on the page links to its source. Each oddity carries one of two labels:

  • Pattern. Facts from the records, with no conclusion drawn.
  • Opinion. The publishers' view of what the facts suggest, labeled at the top of the piece.

An oddity is a question worth asking. It is not a finding that anyone broke a rule or a law. Many patterns in public records have ordinary explanations. People and organizations named in an oddity can respond, and we publish their responses on the oddity's page.

Opinion disclaimer

Pieces labeled Opinion are the opinions of the publishers of ketchikan.app. They are built on the public records cited in each piece, and every fact in them links to its source. They are not statements of fact beyond those records. Read the cited records and reach your own view.

Privacy

People in the records

  • We do not publish home addresses. Places appear at the city level, such as Ketchikan, AK.
  • We do not publish who owns residential property.
  • Rank-and-file public employees appear by job title only, not by name.
  • Elected and appointed officials, candidates, lobbyists, and business officers appear by name for their public roles and the public money connected to them.

Readers

  • The site sets no cookies and runs no analytics, ads, or trackers.
  • Pages load nothing from other servers: no outside fonts, scripts, or images. Your browser enforces this through the site's content security policy.
  • If you switch between light and dark themes, your browser remembers the choice in its own storage. It never leaves your device.
  • Links to original records go to other websites, which have their own policies. Our pages ask your browser not to tell those sites that you came from here.
  • The server that hosts the site may keep standard access logs, as most web servers do.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, email with the page and the correct information, and a public source if you have one. Each record page has a "Report a correction" link that fills in the subject for you. We fix errors and note the change on oddities.

Data downloads

The data behind every page is free to download, so you can check the numbers yourself. The files follow the format described in SCHEMA.md.

Record pages with long flow lists also link to a CSV of every flow for that record.

Contact

Tips, documents, responses, and corrections: .

If you need to stay anonymous, write from an email account that is not tied to your name.