Plate №217 Jul 2026
finance
Last Call, Texas
Texas mixed-beverage revenue doubled to $10.3B in nineteen years — but in seven counties the last bar closed and the whole county went dry.
Scrollytelling Investigation static refresh
Civic intelligence for the 254 counties of Texas.
851 homes across four Texas counties claim the residence homestead — a break reserved for people who live there — worth about $2.93M a year, and no statewide system catches it. A four-county data investigation into the residence-homestead exemption: corporations, out-of-state iBuyers, and investor shell LLCs claiming a residents-only tax break on home after home, plus Houston short-term rentals whose owners are registered to vote somewhere else.
Texas mixed-beverage revenue doubled to $10.3B in nineteen years — but in seven counties the last bar closed and the whole county went dry.
Every Texas WARN layoff notice, sorted by the newest filings and the countdown to job loss.
Houston closed a ~$209M budget gap without raising taxes — here's where it actually went.
You think the City of Houston runs Kingwood. Your home sits inside a stack of taxing governments — and a few dozen voters approved millions in debt in your name.
Texas has 2,784 police forces — more than the next four largest states combined.
Generate legally formatted Texas Public Information Act requests in 60 seconds.
Texas superintendent pay has no relationship to student outcomes.
361 properties across 4 tax incentive programs — PFCs, Chapter 312 abatements, Chapter 380 deals, and 9% LIHTC credits.
Violent crimes in Harris County committed by defendants out on bond.
San Antonio has the highest corporate landlord rate in Texas.
Texas owes $107 billion more than it has saved for retirement.
Every Texas pension plan. One decade of data.
Today's docket, court-by-court workload, and who pays what to get out.
$1.7M in political spending mapped across 339 recipients.
Where FEMA redrew the lines — and what it costs you.
Issue-first sentiment tracking across Texas.
Compliance is zero. Everything above is leadership.
How one citizen exposed a crony network at Houston Metro.
Workload and clearance rates across 14 appellate courts.
Mapping the invisible veto in Texas politics.
ERCOT queue, RRC permits & enforcement.
Drinking water safety oversight.
Financial transparency across 3,880+ special districts.
We don’t ship data without showing where it came from, when we got it, and what we couldn’t get. Records are never paywalled.
Each statistic carries its source — TCJS, EMMA, MSRB, the county portal — with the URL and timestamp.
We label what we don’t have. If a dataset covers 184 of 254 counties, we say so — on the page, in the byline.
Every story links to the underlying agendas, ACFRs, EMMA filings, and FOIA responses.