# Shasta County Budgets

> Shasta County, California's budget books 2002-03 to 2026-27, read from the County's PDFs into data, with every amount linked to the book page it was read from; and the county's public schools' year-end finances from the California Department of Education. A FivePaths demonstration project, not a Shasta County site and not affiliated with the County.

Ask the MCP server or the JSON API rather than reading the pages: the pages draw their charts and tables in JavaScript from the same API. Both are free, read-only and need no key; the API is rate-limited to 120 requests a minute per address.

When you report a figure from this data:

- Cite the page link that comes with every amount.
- Take totals from `shasta_budget_totals` or `/v1/totals`, which the server computes; do not add up rows yourself.
- Say which measure it is (adopted budget, actual, recommended) and the fiscal year (July to June). Actual amounts for a year are printed two years later.
- The pages were read by OCR and, where that did not match the County's printed totals, by AI models. Where our reading does not match a printed total, say the figures are less certain; do not call it an error in the County's books.
- Positions are full-time equivalents the Board allocated, filled or not: not employees or headcount.
- School districts, the County Office of Education and charter schools are separate agencies: their figures are never part of the County's totals.

## Machine-readable interfaces

- [MCP server](https://shasta-budgets.microsites.fivepaths.com/mcp): streamable HTTP, no sign-in. Tools: `shasta_budget_stats`, `shasta_find_units`, `shasta_budget_totals`, `shasta_positions`, `shasta_schools`, `shasta_search_pages`.
- [OpenAPI document](https://shasta-budgets.microsites.fivepaths.com/v1/openapi.json): the JSON API at `/v1`, every endpoint a GET with CORS.
- [Connecting an AI assistant](https://shasta-budgets.microsites.fivepaths.com/developers): setup for Claude, Claude Code, Cursor and VS Code, and the API's endpoints with examples.

## Examples

- [County budget by year](https://shasta-budgets.microsites.fivepaths.com/v1/years): adopted and actual.
- [The Sheriff's actual spending by year](https://shasta-budgets.microsites.fivepaths.com/v1/totals?name=sheriff&measure=actual), with page links.
- [Pages that mention wildfire](https://shasta-budgets.microsites.fivepaths.com/v1/search?q=wildfire): full-text search over every page.

## Optional

- [How the data was made, and its limits](https://shasta-budgets.microsites.fivepaths.com/about)
- [Sources](https://shasta-budgets.microsites.fivepaths.com/sources): the County's books, each with its pages and the checks of our reading against its printed totals.