Utility rates and fees

How much of the council's recorded discussion was about utility rates and fees, 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.
50items on this topic
44meetings
0.3%share of discussion (era average)
1contentious items
1divided votes

Items per year

YearItemsShare of the year's items ContentiousMean contentionWords
19691 1% 0.0759
19731 1% 0.0151
19781 1% 0.0532
19801 1%1 0.8066
19811 0% 0.15122
19845 2% 0.12746
19863 2% 0.04117
19891 0% 0.1537
19903 1% 0.10155
20002 1% 0.06110
20015 2% 0.10272
20021 1% 0.1030
20081 0% 0.1036
20131 0% 0.1569
20144 1% 0.09278
20154 1% 0.08227
20169 1% 0.10463
20173 0% 0.0497
20181 0% 0.0753
20201 0% 0.0541
20241 0% 0.12131

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.