Since I’ve opened this can of worms, I figured I’d take a look at how other cities are handling their agendas. Rather than randomly picking cities, I decided to use the benchmark cities from Council member Carlson’s Tampa Scorecard. I break them down but Austin has the most digitally accessible and organized agenda system. Charlotte has the best agenda. I will be recommending Tampa City Council consider looking at how Charlotte uses time block and plain language in their agendas.
Charlotte
The city of Charlotte uses a “weak mayor” form of government, that is they have a city manager that answers to council so their agendas slightly differ than Tampa’s. First, they present all of their meetings going back to 1981 with an agenda, video, audio and mp4 video.
The agenda is a pdf linked through Google Docs. Generally speaking a simple document of text and links is accessible to screenreaders. What’s really nice is how they are formatted and written. Time blocks! Clear explanation of what action is required for the item, who the staff resources are and plain language explaining what the item is about as well as what would change. No legalese.
Additionally they use what seems to be a similar platform to Onbase, called Legistar. There they have a full list of their meetings and a meeting detail view.
Austin
Starting with the Austin Council Meeting Information Center everything appears integrated into the city website. Clicking on an agenda for meeting from that page takes you to a stand alone web page for that meeting. PDFs are provided as well as a fully integrated agenda that can be navigated by item number. Very smart. Language is direct with backup/supporting docs linked to files that resolve on austintexas.gov urls.
Atlanta
Atlanta provides city council with a subdomain so starting with their meeting agenda page there’s an iframe with the Meeting Calendar that goes back to 1994. Agendas are PDFs with no links. Agenda packets are pdfs of all related docs with no correlation. Security issues aside, SIRE is a better product than what Atlanta City Council provides.
