Personnel, pay and appointments

How much of the council's recorded discussion was about personnel, pay and appointments, 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.
895items on this topic
563meetings
4.0%share of discussion (era average)
39contentious items
37divided votes

A recurring struggle: contentious items in 5 decades (1970s: 4, 1980s: 8, 1990s: 1, 2010s: 21, 2020s: 5).

Items per year

YearItemsShare of the year's items ContentiousMean contentionWords
19621 3% 0.0652
19632 3% 0.12121
19643 3% 0.03148
19651 1% 0.20106
19662 3% 0.0579
19674 7% 0.08255
19685 4% 0.07331
19694 2% 0.04172
19708 4%1 0.13501
19713 4% 0.09132
19727 6% 0.03300
19734 5%1 0.16185
197410 10%1 0.11414
197515 10% 0.09720
197611 7% 0.03344
19777 5%1 0.11184
197818 10% 0.04605
19799 17% 0.03319
19806 6%1 0.27479
198113 4%2 0.201,043
19828 4% 0.04302
19839 3%4 0.42465
19848 3% 0.10642
198510 7% 0.02465
198610 6% 0.01312
198714 9% 0.05843
198812 4%1 0.111,376
19896 3% 0.05287
199017 7% 0.071,090
19972 20%1 0.4578
19986 2% 0.10340
199911 3% 0.04614
200011 5% 0.07597
20013 1% 0.13220
20024 2% 0.10284
20052 3% 0.0093
20074 6% 0.06246
200831 11% 0.01635
20091 2% 0.0535
201014 6% 0.0047
20114 3% 0.0019
201236 13% 0.072,014
201323 4%12 0.401,069
20146 1% 0.06330
201536 8% 0.082,468
201661 7%9 0.113,260
201738 5% 0.02848
201836 5% 0.02531
201945 6% 0.021,013
202043 8%1 0.03763
202140 6% 0.00362
202246 8% 0.01667
202340 7% 0.01585
202441 7%2 0.03687
202547 7% 0.02926
202637 7%2 0.06962

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.