Your local officials have to tell you what they plan to vote on.
We’re going to check whether they voted on anything they didn’t tell you about.
BeaverCountian.com is proud to announce it is adding agenda monitoring to its innovative Community Dashboards. Every night, we check Beaver County’s municipalities and school districts for newly posted meeting agendas and publish them on that community’s dashboard. Then, once a meeting’s minutes come out, we compare what officials actually voted on to what was on the agenda, looking for votes that never should have happened.
The rules behind it are simple. Pennsylvania law requires any municipality or government body with a website to post the agenda for a public meeting at least 24 hours before it starts. Officials are then prohibited, with few exceptions, from taking official action on any matter that was not on that agenda. If it is not listed, they generally cannot vote on it. And residents have a legal right to be heard before those votes happen. Together, those rules make the agenda your early warning. It is how you learn that the zoning change, the tax vote or the contract you care about is coming up, while there is still time to show up and speak.
The comparison is still in testing and development. Agenda posting is live. Checking votes against agendas is what we are building and proving out, because it is brutally hard.
Every municipality and school district posts its own agenda, on its own website, in its own format. Some are clean documents. Some are scans. Some are a few lines in an email. Minutes are just as inconsistent, and they arrive days or weeks later. Then the two have to be matched. Every motion in the minutes has to be matched to an item on the agenda, but the two rarely use the same words. An agenda might list only “Road Department Business,” while the minutes record a motion to award a paving contract to a specific company. Was that vote covered by the agenda? Someone has to decide, and the answer is not always obvious. Items get tabled, reordered, combined and added. Some additions are legal, such as emergencies and certain routine matters. Some are not. Telling the difference means reading both documents the way a lawyer would, for every meeting, in every town. Multiply that by 54 municipalities and 14 school districts, meeting twice a month or more.
Doing it by hand would take a full newsroom, and few newsrooms even exist anymore. Even those that do can not spend the time to sit with two sets of documents for every meeting, in every town, week after week. So the comparison simply has not been done. We are not aware of any hyperlocal news organization in the nation attempting to do what we are doing with our Community Dashboards. That is why we think it is innovative, and why we are building it in the open.
Here is what you get today. On each community’s dashboard, a “Next Meeting” strip shows the date, time and agenda status of the next meeting, even when no agenda has been posted yet. A full-text agenda page puts the entire agenda right on our site. We do not link to the municipality’s original file, because those links move, change and vanish. The agenda we publish stays, which is what makes a later comparison possible. And agendas are free to read. The public has right to know what officials plan to do and we do not believe that should sit behind a paywall.
When we cannot find an agenda, the dashboard shows the meeting without one. That is information too. Some municipalities do not post agendas at all, or post them too late to matter, and residents deserve to know which officials make it easy to see what is coming and which do not.
Agendas tell you what officials are about to do. Minutes and voting records tell you what they did. Put them side by side and you get something extraordinarily rare in local government: accountability that does not depend on someone happening to be in the room. That is the idea behind everything on the Community Dashboards.
BeaverCountian.com believes that watched towns behave better.
Find your community on the Community Dashboards and check what your officials have on the table. Then go to the meeting.
If your local officials refuse to provide the information to the public that we rely on to craft your community’s dashboard, you will have the opportunity to vote them out of office in 2027.
See Also: Introducing Community Dashboards – Because Watched Towns Behave Better
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