About This Site

This site is a running record of local government covering about 25% of the US population: what the boards are deciding, which issues keep coming back, and who is involved. It is meant to help residents follow their town without sitting through every meeting.

Right now this is a personal project from one engineer running systems in the basement. (Full disclosure: cloud scale engineer whose basement has better systems than most medium sized businesses, but still....) In the future, if this proves useful to people and we can find a way to pay for it, it may grow.

What's here

Each town has its own section with two kinds of pages:

Meetings (Upcoming and past): one page per scheduled or recorded meeting built from agendas, minutes, and recordings, with a short summary organized by topic, a link to the recording, and the full transcript.
Issues: one page per topic that comes up over time (a budget item, a zoning case, a project). Each starts with an "At a glance" box, then the background, and ends with a dated log of every meeting where it came up.

Pages link to each other, so you can start from a meeting and follow a topic back through its history, or start from a person and see what they have worked on.

Some towns also have a plain-language guide to a Town Meeting warrant, explaining each article and what a yes or no vote does.

Towns covered

The full current list is on the Locals home page. We currently cover:

all state capitals
the 100 most populous cities/towns
the most populous city in each state
a number of other cities significant in their area
other cities by request.

Start from the town page. It shows upcoming meetings and open issues.

How it's kept up to date

Every town is checked about once a week, and any town with a meeting that day is checked again that morning for new or changed agendas.
New meeting recordings are added as they become available, summarized, and used to update the related issue and people pages.
Everything here comes from public sources: town and city websites, posted agendas and minutes, and the public recordings of meetings.
The site is rebuilt hourly from these pages.

Please keep in mind

Transcripts are automatic. They come from auto-generated captions, so names, numbers and technical terms are sometimes misheard. Where a spelling is uncertain, the page says so.
Summaries are not the official record. They are a reader's aid. For anything that matters (a vote count, a legal deadline, a dollar figure), check the official agenda, minutes or recording, which are linked where available.
Agendas can change. A meeting may be amended, postponed or cancelled after an agenda is posted.
Coverage is uneven. Some towns publish video, agendas and minutes; others publish little, and the pages reflect that.
Nothing here is legal advice or an endorsement of any position.

See also: Locals for the home page and the most recently updated open issues.

Why we exist and what we do

We track municipal governments. We do not address state and federal level governments or issues -- there's already a lot of computing power going into that.

We aren't tracking you. Specifically, this site will never be used to collect and target demographic information. We'll track access, as any site does, to improve our site, figure out what's useful, and defend ourselves against attacks. We're not going to sell any of that data.

We aren't partisan. We have political opinions. We hope you do, too. But this site isn't here to promote certain political opinions -- it's here to provide information to citizens so they can engage and impact what matters to them.

We still need to figure out how to cover costs. Right now this is a personal passion project that runs mostly on free services or subscriptions whose cost is covered another way. As we scale, we'll certainly outgrow that. We will likely accept donations. We might implement a "sponsor a town" model, but if you sponsor it, you're going it to make the information available to everyone -- we're not going to keep it private to the sponsors. We might eventually have some subscription services (i.e. personal updates for towns or topics you're interested in), but the general information is here to support all citizens to engage with their towns, not to lock information behind a paywall.