Hi, I'm Wade. I run the Move Weight Foundation, a federally recognized 501(c)(3), and this campaign funds public records access in Abilene.

This work started in Miami, Oklahoma, when I tried to find out how my own city was operating and learned what it costs an ordinary person just to ask. So I built a way for people to ask without putting their name on anything.

At abilene.exposetexas.org there are 230 indexed public meetings, 229 of them with the agenda document attached and 92 with the minutes, refreshed automatically every week. There were fifteen until recently — not because fifteen was all the City had published, but because its agenda portal hands out fifteen records per request and nothing had paged through the rest. That is the ordinary shape of this problem: the record is public, and still nobody has it.

Abilene sits in the same West Texas water basin as San Angelo, where we already run a chapter deep enough to have standing pages on the water supply and the data centre buildout. Large industrial and data centre development in this region is a water question before it is anything else, and water allocation is decided in documents. That is the question this chapter is built to follow.

Requests cost money, and that is the honest obstacle. Cities and districts bill per page, per hour of staff time, per certified stamp, and you do not learn the price until after you ask.

Every dollar goes to records fees. The bill arrives, we pay it, and what comes back is published whole and unredacted — linked to the body's own copy so you can check us. I file in the Foundation's name so nobody in Abilene has to attach their own name to a request.

Your donation is tax-deductible. The Move Weight Foundation is a 501(c)(3).