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.
| Body | Jurisdiction | Typical notice | Shortest seen | Based on |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Effingham County Board | Effingham County, Illinois | not enough observations | — | — |
| Effingham Water Authority Board of Trustees | Effingham County, Illinois | not enough observations | — | — |
| Effingham City Council | Effingham, Illinois | not enough observations | — | — |
| Moultrie County Townships (collective placeholder) nothing online | Moultrie County, Illinois | not enough observations | — | — |
| Shelby County Airport Committee | Shelby County, Illinois | not enough observations | — | — |
| Shelby County Board | Shelby County, Illinois | not enough observations | — | — |
| Shelby County Budget Audit Legislative Committee | Shelby County, Illinois | not enough observations | — | — |
| Shelby County Farm Committee | Shelby County, Illinois | not enough observations | — | — |
| Shelby County Finance Committee | Shelby County, Illinois | not enough observations | — | — |
| Shelby County Merit Commission | Shelby County, Illinois | not enough observations | — | — |
| Shelby County Public Safety Committee | Shelby County, Illinois | not enough observations | — | — |
| Shelby County Rescue Squad | Shelby County, Illinois | not enough observations | — | — |
| Shelby County Road and Bridge Committee | Shelby County, Illinois | not enough observations | — | — |
| Shelby County Townships (collective placeholder) nothing online | Shelby County, Illinois | not enough observations | — | — |
| Moultrie County Board | Moultrie County, Illinois | not enough observations | — | 2 meetings |
| Sullivan City Council | Sullivan, Illinois | not enough observations | — | 2 meetings |
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 16 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.