Dearest reader,
Last week, I wrote about why Lady Budgetdown is anonymous.
Apparently, the universe decided I needed an illustration.
The email exchange in tonight's graphic is real. The gentleman writing is Dana Beaman, a former mayor of the City of St. Johns.
The subject line he chose was:
"School bond challenges."
His questions were:
"Who are you?"
"Where are you located?"
And that brings me back to the reason for the spectacles, the silhouette and the anonymity.
My identity does not change a number.
My address does not change an audit.
Where I live does not change a district's debt, its expenditures, its salaries, its enrollment or the language of a bond proposal.
And examining a bond is not the same thing as challenging a bond.
Lady Budgetdown is not anti-bond.
There are a number of bond proposals headed to voters this November, and you will probably see more of them on this page. Not because I intend to tell anyone how to vote. I don't.
I intend to do exactly what I've been doing: find the records, put the numbers in one place, provide the receipts and let voters decide what those facts mean to them.
Sometimes those records may support what a district is telling its community. Sometimes they may raise additional questions. Either result is perfectly acceptable.
What I will not do is decide the answer before I open the ledger.
And if something I publish is factually wrong, there is a very simple way to get my attention: bring me the receipt.
I have said from the beginning that corrections will be made publicly. Receipts aren't very useful if we only keep the convenient ones.
But my name?
My address?
My employer?
My politics?
My personal life?
None of those establish whether a number on this page is correct.
That is precisely why Lady Budgetdown remains anonymous.
There is, however, one consequence of doing this anonymously that I don't talk about very often: it makes building and sustaining something like this a little more complicated.
The volume has grown far beyond anything I expected when I started. There are districts waiting, messages waiting, documents waiting, a website to maintain, and now The Ledger, a permanent home where this work can be organized instead of disappearing into Facebook's abyss.
Several readers have asked how they can help.
So, if you believe this work is useful, there are two ways to do that.
Keep sending breadcrumbs. Keep sharing the work. Keep checking my numbers. Keep asking questions.
And for those who have asked about financially supporting the work, there is now a place to do that as well. There are one-time support options and a supporting membership for those who want access to more of what is being built inside The Ledger.
There is no obligation. There never will be.
The public work stays public.
But every bit of support helps keep the website running, the research moving, and, perhaps most importantly, the identity behind it completely irrelevant.
You don't need to know who I am to support what I'm doing.
You only need to decide whether the work is worth having.
☕ Support Lady Budgetdown / The Ledger:
https://ko-fi.com/ladybudgetdown
Keep the identity private.
Keep the receipts public.
With receipts and respect,
Lady Budgetdown
#LadyBudgetdown #TheLedger #WithReceiptsAndRespect #MichiganSchools #SchoolTransparency #PublicEducation #SchoolBonds #TaxpayerTransparency #FollowTheReceipts #KeepTheReceiptsPublic