Meeting records watch

Open Meetings Law publication rubric (COOG-style), v1

These are research indicators, not legal conclusions. Each one records what the public record shows on the venues we checked, or unknown. A missing document on our side is not proof that the body failed to produce or post it: it may be posted somewhere we haven't checked, posted under a different name, or available on request. Only a court or the Committee on Open Government (COOG) can say whether a body complied with the law.

Statute: New York Public Officers Law, Article 7 (Open Meetings Law, §§100–111). Related: §87(3)(a) (Freedom of Information Law).

Window: meetings on or after 2026-07-09 (three months back from the build date), plus scheduled meetings up to 45 days ahead.

1. Notice (§104)

• Rule. §104(1): for a meeting scheduled at least one week ahead, notice of the time and place goes to the news media and is conspicuously posted at least 72 hours before the meeting. §104(2): for other meetings, notice goes out "to the extent practicable" at a reasonable time beforehand. §104(5): when a body can post notice on its website, it must also do so there.
• Recorded. notice = yes when the meeting appears on the body's own posted calendar or meeting portal, or when an agenda or notice for it is posted. Otherwise unknown. We say unknown rather than no because notice may have gone to newspapers or been posted on a physical board.
• Earliest evidence date. This is the first date this monitor saw the listing. Backfilled meetings were first seen on the build date, so for them the 72-hour test is unknown. From now on, the Worker's cron (every 15 minutes, re-listing each venue about every 6 hours) records listings as they appear, which shows whether a meeting was listed at least 72 hours ahead.

2. Records scheduled to be discussed (§103(e))

• Rule. Records scheduled to be the subject of discussion at an open meeting must be made available, to the extent practicable, before or at the meeting. These include proposed resolutions, laws, rules, regulations, policies and amendments. When the agency maintains a regularly and routinely updated website and uses a high-speed internet connection, those records must be posted online before the meeting, to the extent practicable.
• Recorded.

- agenda_posted and materials_posted (a packet, backup or attachments): yes or no for past meetings, unknown for upcoming ones. agenda_posted is in_packet when no standalone agenda file is listed but a meeting packet is (packets normally open with the agenda; phase 1 does not open packets to confirm).

- posted_before: yes, no, unknown, or no_record, with a labeled date source. In order of strength, the sources are:

1. A portal publication timestamp, for example Legistar's EventAgendaLastPublishedUTC.

2. This monitor capturing the document before the meeting date.

3. HTTP Last-Modified. It is recorded but not trusted: many portals stamp it at request time.

4. PDF CreationDate or ModDate. This is shown as context only, because a document created before a meeting may still have been posted after it.

3. Minutes timeliness (§106(3))

• Rule. Minutes of open meetings must be available within two weeks of the meeting. Minutes of executive sessions in which action was taken by formal vote must be available within one week.
• Recorded.

- minutes_found: yes or no.

- minutes_days: days from the meeting to the earliest evidence of posting, along with what kind of evidence it is. portal_timestamp is exact. upper_bound_first_captured means the minutes were posted no later than the day we first saw them.

- minutes_within_14: yes, no, or unknown.

- minutes_overdue: flagged only when all of the following are true:

- The meeting is known to have occurred, shown by a recording in the video index, a recording link on the portal, or minutes.

- More than 14 days have passed.

- The venue we checked publishes minutes for this body or venue.

- No minutes were found.

4. Minutes contents (§106(1); FOIL §87(3)(a))

• Rule. §106(1): minutes consist of a record or summary of all motions, proposals, resolutions and any other matter formally voted on, and the vote on each. §87(3)(a): agencies must keep a record of the final vote of each member in every proceeding in which the member votes.
• Recorded from the minutes text, using conservative rule-based extraction. Possible values:

- present: motions or resolutions appear along with roll calls, per-member votes, or vote tallies.

- partial: motions appear, but only "carried" or "unanimous" is recorded.

- absent: motions appear with no vote record.

- unknown: there is no text, OCR is pending, or no motions were detected.

• Evidence. Each finding cites a verbatim snippet of at most 25 words, with its page number. Personal names are masked as [name].

5. Executive session (§105(1))

• Rule. A body may enter executive session only on a majority vote of its total membership, taken in an open meeting on a motion identifying the general area or areas of the subject or subjects to be considered, and only for the purposes listed in §105(1)(a)–(h). COOG advisory opinions consistently treat bare labels such as "personnel", "legal" or "contract" as insufficient. Under §105(1)(f), for example, the motion should refer to matters such as "the employment history of a particular person".
• Recorded. For each executive-session motion detected:

- Purpose: specific (the text tracks the statutory language), vague (only a generic label), or not_stated. A bare statutory citation ("pursuant to §105(1)(f)") with no description is counted as vague, because COOG opinions and court decisions treat reciting the section alone as not identifying the subject. Only motions or statements entering executive session are classified; motions to leave it, and agenda boilerplate such as "may entertain a motion", are ignored.

- Vote: vote_recorded (a tally or "unanimous"), carried_without_tally, or no_vote_recorded.

- Whether the majority was of the total membership can't be verified without the body's size, so it is not scored. The snippet is shown so a reader can check.

6. Livestream or recording (informational)

• Cross-referenced against the meeting-video index (capital-region-meeting-asr). Most local bodies aren't required to livestream under the OML, so this indicator is informational only.

Expected-meetings calendar

• For each body, the calendar is the union of three sources:

1. Portal meeting lists (CivicPlus AgendaCenter, IQM2, Legistar, BoardDocs public pages, and plain agenda/minutes pages).

2. Video-index dates.

3. Posted annual schedules (phase 2).

• Every expected meeting needs a notice and an agenda, and minutes are due 14 days after it. A missing document counts as a finding only when the meeting is known to have occurred.

Collection ethics

• robots.txt is honored for non-BoardDocs hosts, including Crawl-delay. For BoardDocs public portals (go.boarddocs.com), collection of publicly posted agendas, minutes and attachments is enabled by operator configuration (BOARDDOCS_FETCH=on). BoardDocs requests use a normal desktop browser user agent, at most one in-flight request to the shared host, at least 3 seconds between requests, a per-site daily cap, and a circuit breaker on repeated failures.
• Requests are polite. For other hosts there is at most one request every 2 seconds, or the host's Crawl-delay if longer. The project user agent is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; meeting-docs/1.0; +…/oml/method).
• No video downloads. The documents pipeline only fetches public documents and listing pages.
• Private residents are not named. Evidence snippets mask personal names.