About
A record, not a campaign.
BetterBauan collects what Philippine national agencies already publish about the Municipality of Bauan, puts it in one place, and shows its work. It takes no position on any official, party or project.
Why this exists
Bauan's public records are not secret. They are scattered: population in PSA's OpenSTAT, budgets and statutory filings in DILG's Full Disclosure portal, infrastructure contracts in DPWH's publication. Each is public on its own. None of them is arranged around the town.
The municipality's own website, bauan.gov.ph, did not respond when checked for this project. That is not unusual, and it is not a scandal — but it means the most reliable picture of Bauan is assembled from national records, not from the LGU's own site.
So this site does the assembling in public. Every dataset is generated by a script in the repository, committed as JSON, and rendered at build time. Anyone can re-run the scripts and compare.
Independence
BetterBauan is volunteer-run and unaffiliated. It is not endorsed by, operated by, or funded by the Municipality of Bauan or any government agency. It carries no advertising, sets no cookies, and runs no analytics. The site is static except for one stateless assistant endpoint: a message you choose to send is passed to NYO, and no chat, account or audio is stored here.
It is part of the Better LGU directory, a wider effort to give every Philippine local government a public, verifiable record.
The mark and the seal
The BetterBauan mark is the sun, municipal hall, green ridges and sea drawn for this project. It is a resemblance of the town, not an official insignia. The Sangguniang Bayan seal appears lower on the front page, with its ownership stated, only so readers can identify the government whose record this site follows.
How a figure earns its place
Three gates, applied in order. A figure that fails any one of them does not go on the site, however plausible it looks.
01
Provenance
The figure must come from a tier A or B record — a machine-readable table published by the agency that produces it, or a primary document read by a person. Encyclopedia entries and news reports are leads, never citations. A tier C roster (the officials, for now) is labelled as reported and carries no derived numbers.
02
Reconciliation
The dataset must agree with itself. All 40 barangay populations must sum to the municipal total; a contract's coordinates must fall inside the town. Where they do not, the build fails or the record is flagged.
03
Withdrawal first
A disputed figure comes down before it is re-checked, not after. Reinstatement requires the same standard of evidence as publication. Git history records both moves.
Gate in practice · PSA
The PSA build sums the barangay rows and compares them to the municipal row. A mismatch aborts the build instead of writing a wrong total.
Gate in practice · DPWH
Contracts are kept only if the description names Bauan as a whole word. Coordinates outside the town are flagged, and pins are plotted only when the coordinate lands inside a barangay polygon; the unmapped remainder is disclosed rather than nudged into place.
What is deliberately absent
Municipal poverty incidence, the LGU's income class, and the ordinance index are missing. Each one is checked by someone as a matter of course and each one is easy to get subtly wrong. They stay off until a primary record is in hand. The 2025–2028 officials are published as a tier C roster; vote counts wait for the COMELEC proclamation — the sources page lists exactly what would unblock them.
Correcting us
A correction is more valuable than a compliment. If a figure here contradicts a document you hold, say which figure and attach the document — a scan, a link, a page number.
Open an issue atgithub.com/Arxenic/betterbauan/issues. Reports are triaged the same way records are: source first, then the fix.
Contributing data
The pipelines are plain Node scripts and a pull request is welcome. If an agency publishes something about Bauan and this site does not read it, that is a gap worth closing.
Correction and verification policy is documented in the repository, so a contribution can be judged against a rule rather than a preference.
Roadmap
- Extract the Statement of Receipts and Expenditures into typed revenue and expenditure lines, each with its sheet and cell.
- Verify the 2025–2028 officials against the COMELEC proclamation, then publish vote counts alongside the roster.
- Add locally funded projects from the Annual Investment Programme and the 20% development fund.
- Municipal poverty incidence, once PSA's small-area estimates are retrieved and cited by page.
Nothing on this list is promised with a date. A volunteer project that misses deadlines is worse than one that states its gaps.