🏛 The Cambridge Record
Become an auditor ▸ the course
Auditor training · a 10-minute read

How to read the record

An 1879 bird’s-eye lithograph of East Cambridge: streets, rooftops, and the harbor drawn in warm sepia.
“View of East Cambridge, Mass.,” O. H. Bailey & J. C. Hazen, 1879 · Boston Public Library · public domain
1

The council runs on paperwork

Every meeting is a stack of numbered items. Six kinds cover nearly everything:

Policy orders are a councillor's formal request, usually aimed at the City Manager, not a law. City Manager's reports are what the administration sends back: reports, appointments, money, answers. Resolutions are congratulations and condolences, still voted on. Applications and petitions are someone asking permission: a sign, a curb cut, a zoning change. Ordinances are actual lawmaking, in multiple readings. And awaiting reports is the ledger of questions the Council asked and hasn't had answered.

Policy order City Manager's report Resolution Application / petition Ordinance Awaiting report
You'll see these colors on every meeting page. Every item page tells the same three-part story: how it started, what happened, what's next.
2

How a roll call reads

Nine seats, and every seat accounted for:

  • AB voted yes
  • CD voted no
  • EF voted “present”, a recorded abstention, often deliberate
  • GH absent, or unaccounted for; we say which, and never guess

On real pages those circles are councillors' photos, names underneath, always in full color; only the ring changes.

Council Rule 6 · 940 CMR 29.10 A voice vote records the outcome, not the votes. Roll calls are required for spending over $50, when a member asks, and, under state law, for every vote at any meeting where a member participates remotely. On a voice vote no individual position enters the record: you can't say who voted against it, and you can't say any particular member voted for it, either. A member can still ask to be recorded in the negative; that lands in the minutes, the fuller record.
Council Rule 19 A charter right pauses, it doesn't kill. Any one councillor can hold any matter to the next meeting, once. It's the one rule that can't be suspended.
3

The five checks

You're comparing our page against the city's. The city is the authority; this site is the one on trial.

  • The headline: same docket number, describing the same thing?
  • The outcome: same official action, tally, and meeting date?
  • The roll call: every name, every column; a face in the wrong column is the highest-value find there is.
  • The documents: do our rendered documents match the city's PDFs?
  • The links: click the 🏛 button; does it land on this item? A page that loads isn't necessarily the right page.
Found something that doesn't match? Flag it. Say what you saw and where; quote the city's page if you can. You don't decide what's wrong; a flag just sends the page for deeper review.
4

Practice, then go

Three practice pages carry one planted mistake each. Practice is worth zero points. Everyone starts the scoreboard at 0. Finding the planted mistakes is what certifies you.

practice A a resolution: something small is off practice B an appointment: read the orders closely practice C a zoning petition: trust nothing, click everything

Check your answers when you've hunted all three.

Found them? Pick any page and audit it for real →