Legal and litigation

How much of the council's recorded discussion was about legal and litigation, and how contentious it was, year by year.

Scores of the written record, normalized by era. Minutes are the clerk's summaries, not transcripts: tone is muted and the style changed with each clerk and era, so every score is compared only with meetings of the same minute-style era (1962-1979 narrative minutes, 1980-2004, 2005-2016, 2017 on) and shown as a percentile of that era. Signals: divided and failed votes, motions that died for lack of a second, tabled or postponed items, amended motions, ordinance readings that stalled, hearings with objections, public appearances, the length of an item's discussion compared with its era, and words such as "objected", "protest", "concern", "thanked" or "commended", each kept with the sentence it came from. Only pages whose reading scores at or above the archive's score target count. The record is scored, not people: no resident is named or scored, and members appear only through their recorded votes. Meetings named as the most contentious or most congenial are published only after a person reviewed them.
98items on this topic
83meetings
0.7%share of discussion (era average)
8contentious items
2divided votes

A recurring struggle: contentious items in 3 decades (1960s: 1, 1980s: 5, 2010s: 2).

Items per year

YearItemsShare of the year's items ContentiousMean contentionWords
19632 3% 0.21109
19652 2% 0.08115
19695 3%1 0.26302
19702 1% 0.24124
19732 2% 0.08169
19751 1% 0.0031
19773 2% 0.17268
19803 3% 0.15275
19814 1%1 0.24266
19824 2%1 0.29473
19831 0% 0.1528
19845 2%2 0.24352
19853 2% 0.16149
19894 2%1 0.22458
19905 2% 0.19705
19982 1% 0.25106
19996 1% 0.12529
20011 0% 0.0368
20021 1% 0.2280
20051 1% 0.1266
20085 2% 0.18127
20105 2% 0.16105
20121 0%1 0.5185
20135 1%1 0.24175
20141 0% 0.0758
20153 1% 0.12136
20164 0% 0.01188
20171 0% 0.1530
20182 0% 0.0016
20192 0% 0.0061
20204 1% 0.10184
20221 0% 0.27142
20245 1% 0.0067
20252 0% 0.0376

Reviewed examples

Examples appear here once meetings on this topic have been reviewed by a person.

JSON

Data last updated October 21, 2026. Built from the archive's documents; see how the data is built.