Start with the records behind our first investigation: the Flock camera emails and contracts →
What it does
CivicIntel collects the public record of Trempealeau County government — county board and committee agendas and minutes, documents produced under Wisconsin’s public records law, contracts, budgets and official correspondence — and organizes it so that questions can be answered with documents rather than memory.
The Pioneer’s reporting is built on this archive. When the paper cites an email, a contract term or a line in committee minutes, CivicIntel is where that citation lives. What the Watchdog desk has asked for, and what came back, is logged on the records log.
Methodology & policies
Records here are obtained under Wisconsin’s public records law, Wis. Stat. §§ 19.31–19.39, which makes the records of Wisconsin’s state and local authorities open to any requester.
Documents are published as produced. Where a page arrives redacted, the redaction is the producing agency’s; the Pioneer adds none of its own. Where a production arrives as scanned images rather than searchable text, the stories built on it say so.
Errors are handled under the newsroom’s corrections policy: we correct in the same place the error appeared, and we do not quietly rewrite what we have published.
CivicIntel is not a separate outfit. It is the records-research arm of the Trempealeau Pioneer, run by the same newsroom, under the same standards — see about this paper.
Request records or research
Looking for a county document, or want to know whether one exists? Write to publisher@trempealeaupioneer.com with what you’re after. If it is public and we have it, we will point you to it; if we don’t, we may file for it.
Contribute
Records productions, meeting recordings and official documents from Trempealeau County governments are welcome. Send them to publisher@trempealeaupioneer.com. We verify provenance before anything enters the archive.