CivicWatch

How much notice local bodies give

Before a public meeting, a body is expected to publish what it will discuss. This page shows how far ahead we have actually seen each body’s agenda appear — so you can judge when to start paying attention.

These are observation times, not posting times. We record when we first saw an agenda, which is the earliest we can confirm it was available. A body may well have published it sooner and we simply had not looked yet. A short figure here is a reason to check for yourself, not a finding against anyone.

Illinois law asks for 48 hours’ notice before a regular meeting (5 ILCS 120/2.02). Emergency meetings are excluded throughout, because the law asks only for notice as soon as practicable.

BodyJurisdictionTypical noticeShortest seenBased on
Moultrie County Townships (collective placeholder) nothing onlineMoultrie County, Illinoisnot enough observations
Shelby County Townships (collective placeholder) nothing onlineShelby County, Illinoisnot enough observations
City CouncilSullivan, Illinoisnot enough observations

What this page does not do

It does not accuse anyone of breaking the law. We do run the statutory deadline checks, and they are deliberately built so that a finding is only possible when we hold a capture of the body’s own page, taken inside the notice window, showing the document absent. Everything short of that is recorded as undetermined.

Even then, findings are reviewed by a person before publication. When we first ran those checks against the real archive they produced hundreds of results, and all of them were wrong — several because our own software had misfiled documents that were on the page the whole time. An automated accusation against an elected official is not something to get wrong twice.

0 of 3 bodies have enough observations to describe. The rest are ones we have not watched long enough — which is a statement about our coverage, not about them.