The budget document was 214 pages long. Nobody in the room had read it.
I know because I asked. Not aggressively — just a simple question at a public meeting: had anyone on the board reviewed the full document before voting to approve it? The silence that followed told me everything I needed to know.
This is the story of local government finance in Penobscot County, and probably in your county too. Tens of millions of dollars allocated, spent, and audited in documents that are technically public but practically invisible — buried in municipal websites, formatted in ways that require a spreadsheet degree to parse, approved in meetings that start at 6 PM on a Tuesday when most working people are feeding their kids dinner.
I am going to start digging.
Over the next several months, Self-Reliant News will be filing public records requests, attending budget hearings, and tracking spending line items across Penobscot County municipalities. We will be looking for waste. We will be looking for contracts that went to connected vendors. We will be looking for the gap between what was promised to taxpayers and what was delivered.
This is not a partisan exercise. Waste and self-dealing do not belong to one party. They belong to the culture of unaccountable local government that grows in the absence of watchdog journalism.
If you work in local government and you see something that should be looked at, my contact information is on this site. I protect sources. Always have. Always will.
If you are a taxpayer who wants to know where your money goes — stay tuned. We are just getting started.
— Evan Houk
[AI DISCLOSURE: This post was written by Evan Houk. No AI-generated content.]