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Amarillo council directs city to begin publishing check registers, bank ledgers
Summary
The council agreed to publish monthly check registers and quarterly bank-account ledgers beginning with transactions from Jan. 1, 2025, and staff will research a 36‑month lookback for older records.
The Amarillo City Council on Tuesday directed staff to publish monthly check registers and quarterly bank-account ledgers to increase transparency about city spending.
City finance staff briefed the council on two report options: a canned monthly check-register report that is quick to produce but omits wire transfers and deposits, and a more detailed bank-account ledger that includes checks, ACHs, wires and deposits but takes longer to prepare and may require redaction. Laura Storrs, who led the presentation, said staff recommends posting the monthly check register for Citibank accounts and posting the full bank-account ledger quarterly.
Storrs told the council the city switched financial software on Jan. 1, 2025, and recommended the city begin the online publications with data from that date. "We would like to start with January 1, 2025, building forward until we got to 36 months," Storrs said, while noting some historical data would come from an older system and appear in a different format. Councilmembers asked that the first quarter (Jan.–Mar. 2025) be posted as reconciled statements with ACHs and wire transfers included; Storrs said staff expects to publish those within a few weeks and then continue rolling updates.
Councilmembers discussed whether to publish a full 36‑month lookback immediately. Several members warned that posting partial data (for example, check registers without accompanying deposits and wire details) could prompt a wave of public-records requests. Staff said it would investigate what the legacy system can export and return to council with examples; in the meantime the council directed staff to move forward with the current-year publication plan.
City staff said the monthly check-register report will be provided in a raw, unedited form directly from the financial software and that the quarterly bank ledgers will be more comprehensive and redacted where legally required. The council also asked staff to provide data in machine-readable formats if feasible; Storrs said she will check whether exports to Excel or CSV are possible and confirm options with IT.
The council’s direction did not require a formal vote; members signaled general support for starting with current-year reports and for staff to return with details and examples for the proposed 36‑month lookback.
What’s next: staff will publish the reconciled January–March 2025 reports in the coming weeks, research legacy exports for prior years and return to the council with examples and a timeline for a 36‑month retrospective if practical.
