Across the full 2025 record of the Saint Paul City Council in the Granicus Legistar API — 1,790 matters introduced by the council body between Jan 1 and Dec 31, 2025 — 603 were 'Legislative Hearing' resolutions: property-tax assessment appeals, nuisance-abatement orders, vacant-building registrations, condemnations. That is 33.7% of the council's 2025 docket, and 9.7 such quasi-judicial resolutions for every one of the 62 ordinances it introduced. Of 320 tax-assessment appeals on that docket, the titles record 177 upheld, 105 cancelled and 38 amended.
We pulled all 27 Metropolitan Council meetings of calendar 2025 through the Granicus Legistar API — 3,440 agenda line-items, 2,653 with a recorded disposition. Exactly 3 carried the action label 'failed', and all three were proposed amendments to the council's own Rules of Procedure (Rule 12, brought and beaten twice; Rule 29). No bill, resolution, appointment, or contract carried that label. What the council slowed, it deferred: 212 times across 137 matters, with three zoning ordinances held six meetings each.
We pulled every matter the City and County of Denver introduced in calendar 2025 through the Granicus Legistar API — 2,020 in all. Of the 1,654 that were bills or resolutions, 1,346 (81.4%) were resolutions and 308 (18.6%) bills, a 4.37-to-1 ratio. Classifying each by title, 1,054 of the 1,654 (63.7%) carried contract, agreement, or amendment language, and 818 of the 1,346 resolution titles carried an explicit dollar figure. General ordinances — actual lawmaking, as distinct from bills that ratify a contract or set the budget — were 154 items, 9.3% of the 1,654, fewer than one in ten.
We pulled every item the Boston City Council disposed of across its 21 recorded-action meetings from January 5 to July 22, 2026, from the free Legistar API. Of the 391 measures it carried to final passage, 296 — 75.7% — passed by suspension of the rules rather than through committee. The council's Rule 33 forbids adopting a measure at the meeting where it is introduced and can be waived only by unanimous consent; the record shows that waiver invoked 213 times. Ordinances, loan orders, and most home-rule petitions still went the long way.
We pulled every measure the Denver City Council introduced in 2025 from the free Legistar API — 2,020 in all — and timed each one from introduction to final passage. The deliberation window a measure gets barely tracks its content; it tracks its legal form. Ordinances, which the council's own rules require to pass on two readings, took a median 34 days and never fewer than 20. Resolutions, which pass on one, were adopted a median of zero days after reaching the floor. The near-unanimous final vote a resident sees looks identical for both — and hides which track the measure was on.
We pulled every recorded roll-call the Seattle City Council took in 2025 from the free Legistar API — all 57 full-council meetings, all 712 votable items, all 5,758 individual yea-or-nay votes cast. Only 35 were 'Opposed.' No vote all year was closer than 6-3, and the 365 appointment confirmations produced a single split. The handful of divided votes a reader hears about are real; they are also 2.7% of the record.
We pulled every meeting the City of San José noticed through the Granicus Legistar API for the 12 months ending July 31, 2026 and marked each cancelled or held. Of 440 meetings of the city's councils, boards, and commissions, 73 — one in six — were cancelled. The elected City Council cancelled 3 of its 58 (5.2%). Every other body combined cancelled 70 of 382 (18.3%), and the cancellations pile up on the volunteer citizen commissions: the Board of Fair Campaign and Political Practices cancelled 10 of 14, the Historic Landmarks Commission 15 of 23.
We pulled every Sacramento City Council agenda from the Granicus Legistar API for the 12 months ending July 31, 2026 and classified each item by its matter type. Of 466 items carrying a consent or discussion matter type, 390 — 83.7% — were placed on the consent calendar and 76 were classified as discussion items. The largest single consent bundle held 42 items. This piece counts agenda placement, not final adoption, which we did not audit. Across those 466 items the structured feed records a numeric vote tally for none — and Legistar's dedicated vote endpoint returns no ballots either.
We pulled the final agenda-publication timestamp (Legistar's `EventAgendaLastPublishedUTC` — the last version's timestamp, not necessarily the first posting) on every listed meeting of 81 public bodies across 5 California cities for the 12 months ending 2026-08-09. Most bodies' final agendas post days ahead. One does not: Oakland's Rules & Legislation Committee — the standing committee that sets the City Council's agenda — published all 32 of its regular-meeting agendas a median of 20.3 hours before they began, every one between 18.0 and 21.6 hours out. This is a last-publication timing pattern, not a first-posting or legal-notice measure.
For the 100 largest school districts by enrollment — 9.4 million students across 28 states, school year 2019–20 (NCES) — we computed each district's local-revenue share and its per-pupil revenue. Local share runs from 9% (Detroit) to 90% (Washington, DC); per-pupil revenue from $9,661 (Jordan, UT) to $34,392 (Boston), a 3.6× spread. The two are nearly uncorrelated (0.23). Houston raises 76% of its money locally — 93rd percentile — and runs on $13,316 a pupil, the 47th.
Across all 32 permit-issuing jurisdictions of the Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler metro, we counted every housing unit authorized January through June 2026 from the Census Building Permits Survey. The metro-wide mix reads 70% detached houses, 27% apartments — but that average describes almost no actual city. Each jurisdiction sits at one pole or the other: Phoenix alone accounts for 59% of every apartment unit permitted in the metro, while Buckeye issued 1,372 permits and zero of them for a building of five units or more.
We pulled the Census Building Permits Survey 2025 annual place file for every Connecticut permit-issuing jurisdiction and tallied each housing-type column. The state authorized 7,273 new residential units; 4,837 sat in buildings of 5 or more units, and Stamford alone accounted for 1,524 of them — 31.5%. Of 172 jurisdictions, 134 authorized zero large-multifamily units, 115 of them while reporting a full 12 months.
Across the full public legislative records of Seattle and Oakland for the 12 months ending June 30, 2026, we counted every listed meeting and every matter introduced: 502 meetings across 24 active bodies in each city, 1,763 matters. Seattle marked 75 of its 327 meetings cancelled. The same free Legistar API returns no Seattle-comparable record for San Francisco after September 2020 or Long Beach after November 2023.