Editorial standards

Where a fact has to come from

A rule, a fee, a date or a dollar figure on this site comes from a primary source or it does not appear. Primary means the text of 310 CMR 15.000 and MassDEP’s guides and forms; the Department of Revenue’s technical information releases and Schedule SC; Barnstable County’s pages for AquiFund and the I/A program; the Cape Cod Commission for watershed material; and each town’s board of health or DPW pages and codified regulations for local rules, fees and hours. A cost range is labeled with its source, and we say when that source is a national cost guide, a realtor blog or a news report rather than an agency, because contractors here do not publish prices.

We link the source in the sentence where the fact appears, so a reader can check the claim in one click, and every page lists the sources it used.

Dates, last-verified lines and the word “unverified”

Each page shows the date it was last updated, and a fact that depends on a date carries that date in the text: a regulation’s adoption date, a fee schedule’s effective date, the tax year a credit rule began. When a town document exists but we could not open it, or a program is listed but its terms are not published, we say so and tell you to confirm with the town rather than filling the gap with a guess. A number we could not confirm against a primary text is left out.

We re-check the money programs, the nitrogen-rule status and town fee schedules periodically, and sooner when an agency announces a change. A page’s updated date is the last time someone read it against its sources.

Corrections

If you find an error, a broken link or a rule that has changed since we last checked, write to info@capecodsepticexperts.com with the page and the source you are looking at. We correct the page, update its date, and reply to tell you what we did. A reader who shows us we were wrong has done us a favor. A request to change a fact without a source is not acted on until we can verify it.

Lines we do not cross

We do not invent fees, dates or rules, and we do not round a range into a single number a town never published. We do not copy text, headings or page structures from other websites, including contractors and referral services covering the same towns. We do not let a contractor, a lender or an equipment vendor review or edit a page, or publish a product claim because its seller asked. We do not give tax, legal or engineering advice; where a page touches money, it says that program terms are set by the agencies and change and tells you to confirm with the state or county page linked there. And we do not promise a result: a passing inspection, a permit, a loan approval or a price are decisions made by inspectors, boards of health, lenders and contractors, not by us.

The Title 5 guide shows what this looks like on a long page, the septic replacement page on a page about cost; the about page covers the site itself.