Policy BriefFor clients & partners
Governing the Gap
- Nine sections on how public capital is governed in North Texas
- 38 verified citations, primary-source throughout
- The oversight gaps — named, mapped, and ranked
Research
How we read public money.
Public capital is decided in language designed not to be read — bond propositions, facility-corporation filings, tax-increment schedules. Our work turns that language into something a voter, a funder, and an investor can all hold in their hands.
The Why
The fine print is where power hides.
Every year, billions in public money move through instruments most people never see: general-obligation bonds, public improvement districts, public facility corporations, tax-increment financing. Each one is legal. Each one is public. And almost none of it is legible to the communities who carry its cost.
That illegibility is not an accident — it is the gap where extraction happens quietly. We were the first to put a number on one piece of it: $701 million a year in tax-base erosion from public facility corporations across Dallas and Tarrant Counties. The point of the research is not to be clever. It is to make the invisible decidable — to give the people who pay for public capital the same information the people who structure it already have.
Methodology
Sourced. Verified. Contextualized. Published.
The same four-step standard governs everything — a public platform, a policy brief, or a client engagement.
01
Source
We work only from primary records — official statements, LBB data, county tax rolls, board filings. No aggregators, no secondhand summaries.
02
Verify
Every figure is traced to a citable origin and stress-tested against senior practitioner review before it leaves the desk.
03
Contextualize
Numbers become meaning: who benefits, who pays, who decides — read in dual register for civic and institutional audiences at once.
04
Publish
The work goes into public where it can be checked, used, and built on. Proof before product; the record before the retainer.
dfwbond.guide
Our live platform covers $7.9 billion in bond authority across four North Texas jurisdictions, through eleven analysis routes any voter can use — the methodology above, made walkable.
Validated by stakeholders across elected office, community leadership, and industry · Used through the May 2026 cycle
Open the platformDeep Research
Two reports, written for decisions.
These reports show the depth we bring to a question. Book a scoping call and we'll put that depth to work on yours — and build a Statement of Work from there.
Special ReportFor clients & partners
Capital from the Ground Up
- Public Improvement Districts as instruments of community capital
- Who names them, who controls them, who benefits
- The guardrails that turn a PID from extraction into ownership
Need a question answered that isn't in a report yet?
That's what a Research Sprint is for — one question, forensic depth, your timeline.