How scores work
Every story here is built from the official record: the meeting video, the published agenda, and the city's recorded-vote file. An automated pipeline reads all of it, writes the story, and scores it. A score is editorial judgment made legible: you always see the reasoning, never just a number.
Two questions, scored separately
How big a deal is this at city hall? Routine paperwork, a contained decision, a big deal, or structural — something that closes doors on future councils. Dollar figures alone do not raise this; what raises it is whether the money is a departure from what was agreed, and whether the decision is hard to undo.
Does it land on your life? Scored for right now, not someday. Invisible, touches a narrow group, felt this week by a real group of people, or citywide. A study about a subject everyone cares about still changes nobody's week — it scores on what is true today, and the story says what it becomes if it advances.
The tiers
A story reaches the top only if one of the two questions maxes out, or a group feels it now and there is still time to act. A pile of medium scores cannot add up to the top: the top tier stays scarce so it means something.
The catches
Some items get flagged because the paper record alone would mislead you: a motion that reads as gutting a policy when the mover was saving it, or a "further study" that quietly buries a decision past the end of the term. Those flags come with verbatim evidence from the meeting, and they exist because the transcript beats the agenda.
Honesty rules
- Every claim traces to the record. Voice votes are reported as voice votes; tallies are never invented.
- Closed-door items are scored on what is public, and the story says plainly that the decision happened behind closed doors.
- Meeting captions garble names. A name that cannot be matched to the official roster is marked "name as heard, unverified" and never presented as fact.
- During election campaigns, coverage describes; it does not endorse.