City and county agenda changes

Public sample6 governments · 456 agenda changes caught · newest seal 29 Aug 2026

A council publishes its agenda, then replaces it in place. The address stays the same, the file behind it does not, and the site says nothing. Between 11 Jun 2026 and 29 Aug 2026 we caught 456 changes to meeting records across these 6 governments. Here are 12 of them, biggest kind of change first, each kind once before any kind repeats.

Every body name, every meeting date and every pair of sealed dates on this page was read out of our own dated copies at the moment the page was built.

Whose records these are

We did not write any of this down first. Every row above began as a public meeting record kept by one of six governments: Chicago, Seattle, Austin, Phoenix, Columbus, and Los Angeles County. We read them through Legistar, the council-records system run by Granicus, and the Chicago City Clerk's ELMS records system. The records belong to those governments. What is ours is the dated copies and the comparison between them.

The City of Austin publishes this material free and without restriction and asks to be credited for it. They asked; we are crediting them, here and on their own page.

Two governments were taken off this feed on 24 August 2026 after we read their written terms: King County, Washington, whose terms forbid republishing their material, and the City of Mesa, Arizona, whose agenda site is published under a licence that does not allow commercial use. Their records are not on these pages and are not in the file you would be sent. Nothing about that is a fault in the data, and it did not cause any gap in what we hold for anyone else.

What we catch, and how many of each

Every kind of change below is counted from our own dated copies. Nothing is rolled into a bigger number to make it look better. One more kind, a meeting record swapped for a brand new one, is in the section after this because it needs explaining.

• 158 agendas stamped published again at the same addressThe government’s own “last published” time moved while the web address stayed the same. Whatever was at that address before is not there now, and nothing on the public site marks it.
• 36 agendas posted for the first timeThe meeting was already on the calendar with no agenda. Now there is one, and you know the day it went up.
• 8 agendas moved to a different address, and 1 had the link taken downOften a supplemental agenda replacing the first one a few days before the meeting. The first address stops being the agenda and no redirect tells you.
• 22 meetings changed statusIn the words the government uses itself — Tentative to Final, Final to Final Revised, Scheduled & Published to Cancelled. We do not translate them.
• 163 meetings appeared on the calendarBetween one of our reads and the next. Five more were added after the meeting date had already passed.
• 2 meetings were pulled before they happenedOff the calendar while the date was still ahead, and never back on a later list. It left this list; it does not mean the meeting was cancelled. Another 4 dropped off and returned on a later read; those are labelled as coming back, not as withdrawals.
• 56 meetings had minutes postedThe record of what happened going up, with the day it appeared.
• 1 meetings moved to a different date and 5 changed where they meetSmall numbers, and real ones. We would rather print three than round three up.

That is 456 change rows in all. A row can carry more than one thing that moved, so the list above adds up to slightly more than that.

What a meeting dropping off the list does not mean

Items on those agendas move too3,789 item changes caught

An agenda is a list of items, and the items move independently of the agenda. We caught 3,789 changes to individual items: a stage change in the government’s own words, or the wording of the item itself being rewritten after it was already published.

Which governments we hold66 bodies · 525 meetings · 6,018 items

Six governments. This is the whole feed, not a sample of a bigger one.

Ask for the city or county you actually work in. If we do not hold it we will tell you that instead of selling you one of the six we do.

What this page cannot tell you

Doing this yourself

You can open any of these meeting lists right now, for free. What you cannot open is yesterday’s. The list is replaced in place, the agenda file is replaced in place, and neither keeps a history you can reach.

To get what moved you would have to read six meeting lists every day, keep every copy, and then work out which differences are real. That last part is most of the work: these records carry a version number that moves when nothing else has, and meetings drop off the list for the ordinary reason that the date has passed. Count either of those as a change and your alerts become noise.

What you get

• Every meeting record that moved, with both sealed datesBody, meeting date, what moved, and the two days we sealed either side of it.
• Every item that changed stage or had its wording rewrittenItem number, the full subject before and after, and the body it sits in.
• Meetings that were pulled before they happened, kept separate from meetings whose date simply passedOne of those is news. The other is a calendar.
• The governments you name, not all sixAnd we tell you what we hold for each one.

How it works

1. You email us and name the governments and the bodies you follow.
2. We tell you what we hold for them and since when. There is nothing to buy today, so there is no checkout link to send.
3. A person emails you the changes file, and names anything we could not collect that day.