Public water portals

Most water-data software lives behind a login, seen only by the agency staff who run it. These face the other direction: a river map explorer, a monitoring map, an interactive annual report, a rainwater harvesting calculator, every one of them built for the general public. Every one of them is linked above, too, because a public portal you cannot go and look at is just a claim.

That flips the constraints. Internal users tolerate density and jargon; the public does not. A portal has to make monitoring data legible to someone with no hydrology background, stay accessible, and carry the agency's brand: it is often the only part of the organization's work a resident ever sees.

Public-facing surfaces on the same platform foundation:

• —“Your Yampa River”: a map explorer and dashboard for the Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District, letting visitors browse the river's monitoring data spatially instead of in tables
• —The Keep It Clean Partnership monitoring map: public water-quality monitoring presented on an interactive map
• —KICP's interactive annual report: the yearly results published as an accessible web report rather than a PDF nobody opens
• —The Cherry Creek Basin water quality dashboard, alongside that authority's annual report on activities, published as an interactive web report with Executive and Section 508 accessible PDF versions beside it
• —Middle Trinity's rainwater harvesting calculator: a public sizing and cost tool wrapped in an educational site, for residents rather than district staff. Its captures sit with the Headwaters monorepo study, which is the toolchain it was built on
• —Branded public sites with CMS-managed content, so the agencies keep their portals current without a developer

Public portals look simpler than operational dashboards. They are not:

• —Translating monitoring data into something a resident can actually read
• —Accessibility as a requirement, not a checkbox: the interactive annual report had to work as a published, accessible document, not just a demo
• —Map performance on the open internet: vector tilesets and symbology tuned for whatever device a member of the public shows up with
• —Serving public surfaces from the same platform that runs the agencies' internal operations, without leaking anything that isn't public

Not the way it is now. Like the rest of the platform work, these portals predate the spec-and-loop workflow, though not AI itself: it has been in the work since roughly 2022, at whatever level I had learned to trust it by then. They are here as evidence of the production judgment that workflow now leans on.