Lucid Politics

Lucid Politics is a reader for a county's official record, live at lucidpolitics.org. The home page states the job in one line: what passed, who voted, and what it cost — each line linked back to the official file.

A project can be under construction in a neighborhood before residents find the vote that approved it. The decision is usually already posted, under a file number and a title written for the clerk. This site does that reading, and it leaves the source attached.

It is an independent explainer of public county records. It is not the county's website. A page here names the decision, the date, and the vote, then points at the official file. If the two disagree, the official file is the one to trust.

Find the seat

A supervisor is elected from one district, not from the county as a whole. The budget is countywide. The representative is not. The county finder opens San Bernardino County, then one of the five supervisorial districts. The district page names who holds the seat, the cities, and the unincorporated places.

The record for that seat

Once a district is open, the same record splits into supervisors, meetings, decisions, votes, flagged items, spending, vendors, and city books. A decision is one board action: what was proposed, and what the board did with it, including items bundled into a single vote. A vote row carries that district's supervisor, including whoever held the seat before the current term. Vendors group approved amounts by the other party. Spending lists dollar amounts in the Board minutes that name the district or a place in it.

The county budget

The budget pages stay with the county: what it planned to spend, how that figure changed, what was spent against the plan, the budget PDF and a transcript for each fiscal year, and a balance-it-yourself view. City books on a district use State Controller actuals, with a line a reader can lower.

A guide for the words

The guide at lucidpolitics.org/understanding-your-city walks the site, then the county: how a stack of business can pass in one vote, who agrees before the public does, ordinance versus resolution versus contract, who to contact, what happens after a vote, and a glossary. Several chapters use Bloomington, which has no city council, so the Board of Supervisors is its local legislature.

Spending totals are a floor, not a closed set of books. A derived sum is marked with a greater-than-or-equal sign, and the page says how many minutes files have been read out of how many exist. Countywide items that name no place in the district stay off that district's total.

A dollar taken from the minutes is kept only when that amount is printed in the item. The quote and the minutes URL are stored with it. An amount a model states that is not in the item is dropped. Scanned PDFs are read as text first; a thin scan goes through document OCR. That pass recovers words. It does not invent a figure.

Meeting video stays on the official player. Captions are fetched when a reader needs them and are not stored. Some contract PDFs are listed as unreadable rather than summarized from a blank file.

Coverage is one state and one county: California, San Bernardino. All five supervisorial districts are published, with 78 communities. Wrightwood stays off the list because the written district list and the 2024 district map do not name the same districts. Other county URLs do not resolve.

A place is assigned by overlap of Census geometry with the county's 2024 supervisor map. A place is split when no district holds at least 98 percent of it. Shares under 2 percent are treated as noise. Rows the sources disagree on are printed and not published.

A sync, then the files

The server pulls about every six hours. The Board calendar, decisions, votes, and the supervisor roster come from Legistar. Other public calendars cover bodies such as the Bloomington Municipal Advisory Council, the Planning Commission, and LAFCO. Meetings more than 120 days ahead are dropped.

Budgets are read from the county finance page and that year's budget transcript. Chart points are the adopted, recommended, or final figure from the year's summary. The line breaks where a transcript does not include the figure. City and county actuals come from the California State Controller; the checked-in file is fiscal year 2023–24. The county budget, a printed actual, and the Controller report are different years on purpose. "Not released" is a real state on the spending card.

Every page has a chat, and the budget years have their own. The chat plans a search, reads the local index of the record, and answers from that context. A file number has to be a link taken from a search hit. The instructions say not to invent a figure, a district, or a Legistar URL. Text a reader pastes is fenced so it cannot change those instructions.

Consent-calendar titles are flagged only against a fixed rubric: surveillance, sale or closure of a public facility, a new tax or fee, land use, data sharing, or a first contract for a new service. Proclamations, minutes, medical privileges, continuing amendments, routine grant renewals, and rate updates stay unflagged. The result is stored with the model name. The flags page calls it a review and prints the rubric. It is not the clerk's classification.

The composer says the answer is written by a model and can be wrong, that deadlines and dates should be checked against the linked county record, and that it is not legal advice.

The running product is the case study. San Bernardino County is the record it can read today.