The Scout — Austin

Where this comes from

Every figure on this site is a field on a government record or an attributed report. This page names the sources and says plainly what we cannot reach.

The order we work in

Records first. A newspaper reporting on a permit filing is a second-hand account of a document that is already public, and it arrives later and carries less. So the scan reads the filing.

Where a records source can be searched directly, it goes first and news is used only to confirm. Where it cannot, a news mention is how a project is found, and the primary record is pulled immediately afterward. We never stop at the newspaper’s version of a filing that has a record behind it.

What we read

Source	What it gives	How often
City permit feeds	Valuation, square footage, scope in the filer’s words, appraisal-district parcel number, and the contractor’s company and contact. Reaches past the city line into the two-mile extraterritorial jurisdiction.	Daily
State construction registry	Owner name and address, tenant, design firm, registered accessibility specialist, estimated cost, square footage, start and completion dates. Covers every Texas county, including those with nothing else online, and it fires before construction starts.	Weekly
County plat and subdivision records	Submission and approval dates, acreage, lot counts, and which city’s extraterritorial jurisdiction a tract sits in. The earliest signal there is for growth outside city limits.	Weekly
Appraisal district parcels	Owner of record, situs address, legal description, acreage, land and improvement value, and deed date.	Monthly, plus a pass when values certify
Meeting agendas	Planning and zoning, council and commissioners court. The only forward-looking source.	Weekly — the Texas Open Meetings Act requires 72 hours’ notice
Federal filings	Highway and environmental notices, and Army Corps permits for work touching creeks and wetlands. Published before the work begins.	Weekly
Regional media and economic development	Corroboration, quoted people, and announcements that never reach a filing.	Daily

What we cannot reach, and we would rather say so

Some county systems publish nothing a machine can read. Others sit behind a licence we do not hold. Where that is true, the record says so rather than leaving a blank that looks like an answer.

Clerk and deed indexes Some appraisal search portals A small number of counties with no open endpoint

For those, the alternative is a public information request, and the request path for each county is written down. Nothing is inferred to fill a gap.

Empty is not the same as unknown

This is the part that matters most. A field on one of our records is in one of three states:

Sources and attribution

Much of what we publish is copied from Texas state, county and municipal government records. Each figure carries the agency it came from, that agency’s web address, and the date we read it. No government agency endorses The Scout, and where a public record and our reading of it differ, the public record governs.

What we will not do

• We do not guess. If a parcel number will not resolve, the record shows the queries we ran and the fact that they returned nothing.
• We do not translate a county’s language. Each county files things its own way and uses its own words. We use the county’s word, as filed, because that is the word you already know.
• We do not merge two projects because they share a name. Two different developments in one county can carry the same building number. Records are joined on a parcel, an owner entity or an address, never on a name alone.