Council & meetings
Every regular and special meeting of Council produces an agenda and a set of minutes. Those documents are the public record, and a village website has one job with them: make them reachable.
Agendas, minutes and meeting packages
The Village publishes its meeting record through eSCRIBE, the meeting-management system its staff already use to build agendas and adopt minutes. Agendas, minutes, attachments and meeting videos live there.
This concept does not try to replace that. Rebuilding a meeting list inside the website would mean two records of the same meetings, one of which would fall behind — which is roughly how the Village ended up with a 2015–2020 archive that no longer opens.
What the website should do instead is be an unambiguous front door: one clearly labelled route to the portal, on the page people actually land on, described in words rather than hidden behind an unlabelled embedded frame.
Council meeting portal
Agendas, minutes and meeting packages, maintained by the Village office in eSCRIBE.
On the current site this portal is embedded in a frame with no heading, no label and no plain link, so a screen-reader user arriving on the page is handed an unnamed document with no explanation of what it is.
Meetings, 2015 to 2020
Six years of Council meetings are held on the Village's own site rather than in eSCRIBE. The page that lists them does not currently work.
The page renders server warnings instead of meetings
Opening the Council Meetings 2015–2020 page today produces dozens of raw PHP warnings printed into the body of the page. They push the layout apart, they bury whatever content is meant to be there, and each one prints the absolute path of a file on the Village's server.
Two problems, not one. The visible one is that a member of the public cannot read six years of Council minutes. The quieter one is that a government website is publishing its own server's internal directory structure and the exact plugin and line number that failed — the kind of detail that shortens the work for anyone probing the site.
Warning: Undefined array key "…" in
[server file path — redacted] on line …
Warning: Undefined array key "…" in
[server file path — redacted] on line …
… and dozens more, printed into the page body.Redacted deliberately. The real messages name a directory on the Village's host and the plugin file that produced them; reprinting them here would repeat the leak this concept is asking the Village to close.
The fix, in order
- 01 Turn off error display in production. Warnings belong in a log file that staff and the host can read, never in the page a resident is looking at.
- 02 Fix or retire the page-builder template that is throwing them, so the page has content again.
- 03 Rebuild the archive as plain, indexed pages — a year list and a document list, no page-builder plugin between the public and the minutes.
The archive as this concept builds it
One row per year, each one a link to that year's agendas and minutes, each one carrying its own status so a broken year is visible to staff instead of silently rotting. The statuses below are the truthful ones for today.
| Year | Agendas & minutes | Status today |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Held on the Village's own site | |
| 2019 | Held on the Village's own site | |
| 2018 | Held on the Village's own site | |
| 2017 | Held on the Village's own site | |
| 2016 | Held on the Village's own site | |
| 2015 | Held on the Village's own site |
No year links anywhere in this concept, because this concept has not been given the documents. Once the archive page is repaired, each year becomes a link and its status becomes Available. Nothing here is guessed at.
Mayor and Council
Who sits on Council
The Mayor and Councillors, their portfolios, and the way to contact each of them belong here. Elected officials change; this concept does not name them, because naming the wrong person on a government website is a real harm rather than a design flaw.
In a live build this is a short list with a photograph, a role and one email each, and a single edit date so staff can see when it was last checked.
Meeting schedule and how to take part
The regular meeting schedule, the room, and how a resident asks to appear as a delegation or speak at a public hearing.
This concept prints no meeting dates. The Village's own schedule, published once and fed from eSCRIBE, belongs in this space.
Village staff who can be reached today are listed on the Village office page.