What is in a city council agenda feed: 28 of 60 rows are procedure

We looked at 60 agenda rows for meetings between 2026-09-28 and 2026-10-08 in 2 cities. A row is called procedural when its title matches a short phrase list (call to order, approval of the agenda or minutes, adjournment, roll call, public comment, announcements and similar; the list is in the script). By that rule 28 rows (47%) are procedural.

City	Rows	Meetings	Procedural	Linked to a matter file	With action	With vote result
Seattle, WA	41	4	24	8	3	0
Denver, CO	19	1	4	8	8	7

Substance

16 rows link to a legislative matter file. Of those, 11 have an action recorded and 7 have a vote result. Matter types present: Information Item (Inf) (7), Appointment (Appt) (1), Approved Minutes (1), Proclamation (4), Resolution (3).

The practical point for anyone watching zoning, contracts or appointments: filter on matter-linked rows, not on all rows, or most of what you read will be housekeeping.

Limits

Two cities, one with a single meeting in the sample. Seattle and Denver publish differently, so the per-city split reflects the portals as much as the councils.
Whether an action or vote is filled depends on whether the meeting has happened and the clerk has entered it, so recent agendas look emptier.
The procedural phrase list is ours and will miss some lines and catch some others.

Data and method

Input: 60 rows from a test run of the city-council-agendas actor, stored as council_items.json with attachment links and note text removed (the public sample CSV has 12 rows). The figures on this page are computed by a3_council.py (run it from the articles/_data folder). Related: the actor page and its sample CSV. Published 2026-10-13. We build and maintain these actors.