How the record changed shape
Each bar is one section of the City Clerk's annual index, over the years it carries entries. The sections are how the clerk filed the council's work, so they show when the work changed.
Council rules, state law and the clerk's filing practice all changed across this period. The charter did not: Plan E was adopted by referendum in 1940, the first council and city manager took office in January 1942, and it was not amended until 2021, then amended by substitution in 2025.
years the section carries entries a single year — a one-off or occasional section 1970 and 1977 — the city's scans of these two volumes are incomplete, so every bar is bridged across them rather than showing a hole the council never had
What the chart shows
Five sections run the whole period: Appointments, Finance, Highways, Ordinances and Sundries.
Public Celebrations & Military Affairs ends after 1963. It is the section that named squares, tot-lots and playgrounds after the city's war dead — 127 actions, each sponsored by a named councillor. Claims ends in 1969, Public Safety in 1979, Public Service in 1980. Miscellaneous Documents starts in 1971 and stays small.
Resolutions and City Manager Requests both start in 1993 and at once account for most of the book: 14,052 and 5,245 actions in eleven years. They are the ancestors of two item types the site files today, Resolutions and the City Manager's Agenda.
Read the years themselves in the docket. A section with no entries in a year has no bar there. The exceptions are 1970 and 1977, where the city's scans are incomplete — those two years are marked, and bars are drawn through them rather than showing a gap the council did not have.