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City staff testing new three-step schedule for uploading public comments to Legistar
Summary
Common Council staff presented a revised workflow that adds a Friday pre-meeting upload and a Tuesday in-day upload before a final Wednesday upload, aiming to ensure accuracy and timeliness in placing constituent comments into the public record; staff will continue testing the schedule and asked alders to forward constituent emails to the council office.
Isaac, Common Council staff, presented the office's process for saving and uploading public comments to Legistar and described a new, three-step upload schedule the office is testing.
Isaac said staff first save constituent emails to a file associated with an item, combine multiple comments into a single PDF binder when appropriate, and then upload the saved materials to Legistar. "We want to ensure that every single public comment we receive gets saved and uploaded," Isaac said, describing consistency and accuracy as the chief goals.
The office is testing an additional upload opportunity: an initial Friday upload of comments received before that day, a second upload on the Tuesday of a council meeting to capture later submissions, and a final Wednesday upload to capture any material received during or immediately after the meeting. Isaac said ordinances are handled through the city attorney's office; his team compiles and then forwards ordinance-related comments for attorney-office upload and confirmation.
Committee members asked how staff handle comments that arrive before a Legistar file number is assigned. Isaac said he saves such emails under a broader topical folder and moves them into the numbered file when the Legistar number is issued. On messages that reference multiple files (for example, both an ordinance and a related resolution), Isaac said staff save and upload the comment into each relevant file.
Council members also pressed on automation and redaction. Isaac and Karen (Common Council staff) said automation is limited by the need for human review to identify which agenda item a comment addresses; they were not aware of a turnkey automation solution that could reliably perform that matching. On redaction requests, the staff described a recent case in which they asked the sender to resend the comment with the requested material redacted before uploading.
Isaac shared volume figures to illustrate workload: 1,275 public comments in 2023; 1,569 in 2024; and 735 in 2025, with an average of roughly two to five comments per day but with highly variable, bursty flows. He told the committee the office will continue testing the revised schedule for several meetings of varying comment volume before deciding whether to adopt it permanently.
Next steps: staff will continue the pilot schedule for a few more meetings and report back to the committee with observations and any recommended changes.
