Articles on the Brown Act, SB 707, agenda management, and the unglamorous work of running compliant public meetings in California — written for the people who actually do it.
Sorted newest first. Most pieces are 5–10 minutes.
Water districts, fire districts, and CSDs follow the same Brown Act as cities — but the staff is smaller and the audits are stricter. Here is the checklist that keeps you out of trouble.
Read article →A reporter files a CPRA request for last March’s closed session minutes. What you wrote 14 months ago is about to be public. Here is how to write minutes that hold up.
Read article →AI is going to write your staff reports whether you like it or not. The interesting question is which uses save the city money and which create new liability.
Read article →Three minutes per speaker. No content-based limits. No requiring sign-in. The rules are simple — but the edge cases are where most cities slip up.
Read article →Most Brown Act lawsuits start with a missing or vague closed-session citation. The statute is short, the categories are finite, and there is no good reason to get this wrong.
Read article →The Brown Act Modernization Act took effect January 1, 2026. Here is what actually changed, what is still TBD, and what your city needs to update by your next regular meeting.
Read article →A good consent calendar moves through 12 routine items in 90 seconds. A bad one is where transparency lawsuits are born. Here is the line between the two.
Read article →Legistar was built for big cities and priced for them. If you are a small city paying $25K+/year for software your clerk barely uses, here is what migration actually looks like.
Read article →Cities under 50K spend years trying to make enterprise software fit. The features that matter are smaller, more boring, and rarely on the demo slide.
Read article →Seventy-two continuous hours, posted publicly, identifying every item the body intends to discuss. Sounds simple. The case law is anything but.
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