About Deflock Altoona

What this site covers

Deflock Altoona organizes public records concerning the Altoona City Council, automated license-plate readers, data sharing, public spending, and civic oversight. The project is independent and is not an official City of Altoona publication.

How conclusions are reached

• Local factual claims begin with an official City, Polk County, State of Iowa, court, or agency record whenever one is available.
• Pages identify the issuing body, document type, date, source link, and the relevant item, page, section, or quoted field.
• Agendas show proposed business. Minutes and recorded votes show documented action. Neither is treated as proof of implementation, impact, identity, affiliation, or motive unless the record itself supports that conclusion.
• Calculated values are labeled as calculations or estimates and show their source figures and limitations. External reporting and analysis are labeled separately from local primary records.

How structured data is reviewed

Meeting dates, roll calls, attendance fields, names, and other structured values are extracted from cited records and checked against the source. Obvious spelling, spacing, online-attendance, and combined-name variants may be normalized after review while the exact source text remains attached to the record. A documented appearance does not establish a person’s residence, employer, role, views, participation, or identity beyond the name printed in the cited document.

Where the data comes from

What we do not publish

• Private residents’ contact details, the messages people send us, or anything that identifies a tipster.
• Conclusions about motive, affiliation, or identity that the cited record does not state.

Neutrality and limits

The goal is to make records easier to inspect, not to assign motives or tell readers what political conclusion to reach. Labels distinguish verified records, external reporting, calculations, and unresolved questions. This project does not provide legal advice, and its summaries are not substitutes for the complete official documents. The site’s own position on the camera program is stated separately, and labeled as opinion, on Why this site exists.

Known limits

• A few meetings’ minutes are not on this site yet, so we record no votes for them. Each one is listed under Missing records below.
• A few sets of minutes the City posted are scans. This site reads them by OCR and has an AI model re-read every roll call from the page image; each of those votes says so, with the page, in its source line.
• When the clerk left a vote mark blank, we do not fill it in, even when the printed total suggests how the member voted. Where the printed total and the named votes disagree, we show the named votes as printed. Either way, the vote carries a note that says so.
• A member marked absent on a vote may have been at the meeting: members who arrive late are marked absent on the items before they arrive. The meeting line on the Votes page shows who arrived late or took part remotely.
• In a few sets of minutes the moved and seconded marks disagree with the written motion. We leave the mover and seconder blank for those votes.
• Vendor portals update on their own schedule. The tracker shows the date each figure describes, which can be a few days before we read it.

What the City’s online archive posts, by year

Our vote record can only be as complete as the Council documents the City posts. The table counts every known Council meeting since January 2020 and how many have an agenda and minutes in the City’s agendas and minutes archive.

Missing records

Every count on this site uses one list of known meetings. A known meeting is one City Council session since January 6, 2020 that the City’s archive lists or that a later agenda or minutes shows was held. Regular, special, budget, and workshop sessions all count, and a same-day budget session with its own minutes is a separate meeting. Every total says which types it includes; a figure that leaves workshops out says so. These are the known meetings whose minutes are not on this site yet.

How changes are recorded

Data fixes, data updates, and new features are dated on What’s new. We also keep an internal history of what each public dataset contained over time, so any published figure can be traced to when and why it changed.

What the project costs

As of September 27, 2026, building and running Deflock Altoona has cost under $1,000, paid personally. The site carries no ads, sponsorships, or outside funding.

Site traffic

The page-view counter at the top of every page, drawn out. Each page load adds one to a daily, an hourly, and an all-time counter, and each open tab that is on screen checks in every 30 seconds for “reading now.” No cookies, IP addresses, or visitor IDs are stored: only the running counts. Automated test browsers are left out, though some bots may still be counted. Days reset at midnight Central time.

Raw hits, beside the reads, come from the server’s own access logs instead: every page it served to anyone, people, search crawlers, link previews and AI fetchers alike, before any filter. They are tallied once a day, so the newest day or two can be blank.

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Related independent projects

Other people and groups tracking ALPR use and surveillance records. Deflock Altoona is not affiliated with any of them, and each is responsible for its own work.

• DeFlock: a national, community-built project on ALPR cameras.
• EyesOffCR: a Cedar Rapids, Iowa group documenting Flock cameras, contracts, and records.
• Eyes On Flock: collects data from Flock transparency portals.
• Restoring Democracy’s Promise: accountability journalism from an Iowa-based desk on surveillance and data sharing.

Start with the records

Review the Council vote and presence records, sourcebook, and ALPR tracker. Each is designed to lead back to the supporting source rather than requiring trust in a standalone summary.