The Transparency Gap: What El Paso Won't Publish

The Gap

A watchdog's most important page. This is the transparency scorecard for the two governments this site covers: what each one publishes, and what each one keeps from you.

The headline

Neither the City of El Paso nor El Paso County publishes a vendor-level checkbook. In a county where residents pay some of the highest property taxes in Texas, you cannot look up who got paid, how much, or for what. That is not an oversight. It is a choice, and this page exists to keep it visible until it changes.

Scorecard

What the public should be able to see	City of El Paso	El Paso County
Annual budget book	Yes OMB page, with Power BI dashboard	Yes OpenGov portal
Audited annual financials	Yes ACFRs, 20 prior years posted	Yes Via Auditor publications
Monthly or quarterly interim reports	Yes Quarterly reports, OMB	Yes Monthly, Auditor
Meeting agendas with spending items	Yes Legistar	Yes PrimeGov, incl. "audit and settle accounts"
Vendor-level checkbook (who got paid)	No Not published anywhere	No Auditor page references a check register; no working URL found as of Oct 7, 2026
Payroll detail by position	No	No
Purchasing-card transactions	No	No
Machine-readable spending API	No City open data portal is GIS layers only	No

Scorecard compiled Oct 7, 2026 from each government's public sites. Statuses change when the governments change behavior; this page will say so.

Data retrieval notes

County OpenGov budget book (Oct 7, 2026): the portal renders its data through an embed SDK with no server-side data in the page, so automated extraction is not currently possible. The portal itself remains linked above; department figures are read by hand until OpenGov exposes a data endpoint.
County auditor monthly reports (Oct 7, 2026): the auditor's "latest report" link served the October 2025 report at retrieval time. Our parser (scripts/parse-auditor.mjs) extracts the bonded indebtedness total automatically and carries the as-of date, so stale figures can never silently pose as current.

Why the checkbook matters

A budget book tells you what a government planned to spend, by department. Audited financials tell you what it actually spent, by category. Neither tells you who received the money. Without vendor-level detail, you cannot see which companies win city and county contracts, whether the same vendors keep winning, or how subcontract dollars flow.

Other Texas governments publish this. The City of Austin runs a public eCheckbook. El Paso, with higher tax rates than Austin, does not. The gap is the story.

What would close the gap

A searchable vendor payment register, updated monthly, from both the city and the county. Ysleta ISD already publishes one for its own spending. The model exists locally.
A public spending API, or at minimum a monthly CSV export.
Until then: this site will keep scraping what exists, curating what matters, and saying plainly what is missing.

Found a source we missed?

If either government publishes payment-level data we have not found, send the link with documentation and we will verify it, publish it, and update this scorecard. That is how a watchdog should work.

Demand the checkbook

Texas law gives you the right to ask for these records. This generator drafts a Public Information Act request for the vendor payment register. Copy it, fill in your name, and send it to the public information officer. If they produce the data, send it to us and we will publish it.

Request to:

Your name: Your email:

October 7, 2026

To the City Clerk, as Public Information Officer, City of El Paso
Re: Request under the Texas Public Information Act (Gov't Code ch. 552)

Dear Public Information Officer:

Pursuant to the Texas Public Information Act, I request the complete vendor payment register (check register), including payee name, payment date, amount, and purpose, for the most recent twelve months, in electronic CSV or Excel format if available.

If any portion of this request is denied, please cite the specific exception and release the remainder, as required by law. If the records exist in electronic form, I request them in that form.

I ask to be notified of any estimated charges before they are incurred, in accordance with the Act.

Thank you,
[Your name]
[Your email]

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Drafted with the El Paso Tax Watch request generator. This site is not a law firm and this is not legal advice.

Send to the City Clerk of the City of El Paso. Under the Act, the government must respond promptly, generally within ten business days.

Every request this site files is logged in the public records log, with the responsive documents when they arrive.