A proposal for the Town of Paonia · June 2026
Small-town government is genuinely complicated — grants, audits, licenses, records law, a hundred deadlines, and very few people to hold them. We can't make that world simpler. We can build the tools to navigate it.
This is not a pitch to let software run the town. It's the opposite: a sober plan to take the most repetitive, lowest-judgment work off the staff's plate — the mail-merge, the filing, the deadline-chasing — so the people we hired can finally finish the work that's been frozen for years.
And because that work, done right, leaves a record, the same plan makes the town visible to the people who live in it — and hands residents working tools to act on what they see. It's all free and open source, because the tools that hold power to account can't belong to the people in power. The proof is below, built from Paonia's own files.
Source: every Departmental Scorecard the Town has published, July 2023 – February 2026, parsed line by line.
I. What it costs to do it the hard way
The Town Administrator keeps a monthly scorecard of every project. Read three years of it and three costs come into focus — none of them on any invoice, all of them real.
The frozen backbone. The biggest structural projects don't move. By the office's own ledger, the municipal code rewrite has sat open for 21 months, the ADA transition plan for 20, the records-management system was worked for over a year and then quietly dropped. These aren't luxuries; they're the legal foundation of the town.
The record that went dark. The scorecard is supposed to be monthly. From April through December 2025 — nine straight months — it simply wasn't published. A transparency tool you can't see isn't one.
The busywork tax. Of 75 Clerk's-office items, most aren't projects at all — they're renewal letters, vendor notices, annual certifications, the same correspondence on a loop. That work has to happen, so it does; the structural work waits behind it.
The frozen backbone — open, by the town's own count
The nine-month blackout
Filled = published. Red = no record found.
II. The plan — de-complicate the job
The target is narrow on purpose: the tasks that are repetitive, deadline-driven, and already run off existing records. That's where software is genuinely good and the risk is low — because a person still reviews, signs, and sends everything. On those tasks, a clerk gets two to three times faster. Nowhere else.
| Mundane task | What the tool does | What the clerk still does |
|---|---|---|
| License & permit renewals | Tracks every license and expiry; drafts the renewal and compliance letters from the town's own templates. | Reviews, signs, sends; handles the non-routine case. |
| Records & retention | Files and tags each document by one naming convention; flags retention deadlines; builds a searchable index. | Decides classification edge cases; approves disposal. |
| Recurring certifications | Keeps the compliance calendar; pre-fills CIRSA / CJIS / CBI / CEBT forms; reminds before each deadline. | Verifies and submits. |
| Agendas & minutes | Assembles the packet from submitted items; drafts minutes from the meeting recording. | Edits for accuracy; certifies the minutes. |
III. The CORA pipeline — submission to fulfillment
Nothing has cost this town more trust than how it handles public-records requests — the delays, the disputes, the records that surface late or not at all. Colorado law gives the town a statutory three-working-day clock. The tool's whole job is to never miss it, and to do the request in public view.
A resident files a request through a plain form. It's logged the instant it arrives — no email lost in an inbox.
ResidentThe statutory clock starts automatically and shows publicly. The request is routed to the responsible staff.
AutomaticWorking from the same indexed records, the tool assembles the likely-responsive documents into one place.
Tool draftsA person checks the set for redactions and legal sufficiency. The judgment call stays human.
Clerk / attorneyRecords go to the requester and the request closes on a public log — what was asked, when, how long it took.
Public recordThe dividend: a town where every records request is visible and timed can't quietly let one expire. The clock is the accountability.
IV. The other direction — tools for the governed
Transparency runs both ways. Residents already have powerful tools to act on their government — the ballot initiative, the referendum, the recall — but the processes are arcane by design: strict signature thresholds, exact formatting rules, unforgiving deadlines. Miss one and a year's effort is void. Docket guides each one the way it guides a records request: the rules made plain, the count kept honest, the status posted in public.
Walks residents through the petition format the law requires, tracks valid signatures against the threshold in real time, and flags every deadline before it passes.
Starts the moment an ordinance passes, opens the referendum window with its clock visible, and shows exactly how close a repeal petition is to qualifying.
Handles the hardest process — the grounds, the threshold tied to the last vote total, the timeline — and keeps the petition's progress in plain view for everyone.
These live outside town hall on purpose. A citizenry's accountability tools should not depend on the goodwill — or the servers — of the officials they're meant to check.
V. The byproduct is transparency — meet Docket
Here is the honest version of the argument. The efficiency case is ordinary — every office wants to save time. The case that should win residents over is this: the same systematization that removes the busywork is what produces the open record. You don't get one without the other.
Docket is that record — a living public ledger of every matter the town is working on, generated from the staff's own tracker, updated as the work moves. No one assembles it by hand, so it can't go dark for nine months. Below is a slice of it, live, from Paonia's real data.
VI. How a town runs it
Staff work the queue in a private console — the renewals, the records, the requests. Every action they approve writes to one shared record. The public side is simply a read-only window onto that record: the ledger you just used, plus the CORA log. Same source, two audiences.
It starts small. Pick the two most painful loops — renewals and records, say — run them through the tool for a quarter, and measure the hours returned and the backlog cleared. Expand only what earns its place.
Free, and open source. Every part of this — the ledger, the CORA pipeline, the petition and recall tools — is public code any town or any citizenry can run, inspect, and fork. No license fees, no vendor lock, no single company sitting between a town and its own record. Accountability infrastructure should be a commons, not a product someone can switch off.
We can't make the world less complicated.
We can build the tools to navigate it.