A county the size of Parker should not tell people about a burn ban on Facebook

What the record shows

Parker County's Alert Center carries a Burn Ban Status category whose current notice, dated Sept. 3, 2026, directs residents to the Parker County Office of Emergency Management's Facebook page for current status.

The Texas A&M Forest Service publishes the statewide list of counties under a burn ban as a plain text feed, updated through the day. On Sept. 5 and 6, 2026 the list carried 208 counties including Parker and all of its neighbors. The Ledger's burn-ban page reads that feed each time it is opened.

Under Local Government Code Section 352.081 a commissioners court may prohibit or restrict outdoor burning in the unincorporated area for up to 90 days when it finds drought conditions; the order itself is a court action and appears in the court's minutes.

The county's minutes for 2025 and 2026 are scanned documents without a text layer; the Ledger converts them by optical character recognition to report the east Parker County items.

The burn ban, live · Parker County on the record · Parker County Alert Center · Commissioners Court reports

Assessment

The county's answer to this piece writes itself: the state already publishes the burn-ban list, so why should Parker County keep one too? Here is why. The state's list tells you whether a ban exists. The county's order tells you what it forbids, when it expires and what it costs to break it, and that order is the county's own act, taken in its own court, carrying its own penalty. A resident who does not use Facebook has no way to read it. The county's Alert Center, the place built for exactly this, has a Burn Ban Status category whose entire content is a pointer to a social media page.

Three things are wrong with that, in order of how much they matter. First, a rule that carries a fine has to be findable by everyone it binds, and a social media account is not everyone's. Second, a Facebook post cannot be linked from a county page, searched a year later, or produced as the record of what the county said on a given day; the Ledger reports the county's business from scanned minutes for the same reason, because the county's record is hard to reach even when it exists. Third, the county already owns the fix. The Alert Center is live, categorized and empty. Posting there costs nothing the county is not already spending to post somewhere else.

So the ask is simple and it is not about burn bans alone. Every emergency notice the county issues, the burn ban, a boil-water advisory, a road closure, a shelter, should go on the county's own site first, with a date and the order behind it, and to Facebook second, with a link back. Facebook is a fine place to repeat a notice. It is no place to keep one.

The Ledger will keep its own burn-ban page reading the state's list every time it is opened, and each quarter will report which county notices appeared on the county's site and which lived only on social media.

Right of reply: Parker County Judge and Commissioners Court; the Office of Emergency Management received this piece the morning it ran and have a standing offer of the same space to respond. Corrections to the record section run at the top and on the corrections page.