About

We track 23 bodies so far, out of an estimated 300 to 500 or more across the region. This page explains what that number means and what we refuse to do to make it look bigger.

What this is right now

A directory of San Joaquin Valley governments: who they are, when they meet, where to watch, and how to comment. 23 bodies out of an estimated 300 to 500 or more, across eight counties and 62 incorporated cities. It is incomplete and every page says where.

There is no journalism here yet. No articles, no reporters, no coverage of what happens at these meetings. That comes later.

What it is meant to become

The same site, filled in. Every public meeting in the region transcribed and made searchable, so that "what did the board actually say about the groundwater plan" is a question with an answer.

Minutes tell you what was decided. Kings County is honest enough to call its document an Action Summary, which is exactly what minutes are everywhere. Video tells you what was said but cannot be searched. Nothing in between exists, for this region or most others. That gap is the whole point.

The URLs are built to hold it. A meeting page today lists a body and a schedule; the same address later holds a transcript.

What we will not do

Publish a fact we have not checked. Every page here marks what is unconfirmed rather than filling it in with something plausible.

The clearest example is Bakersfield. It is one of California's ten largest cities, and its public comment rules are not in its municipal code and not on its agenda; the code says only that they "shall be set by council policy," and that policy sits in a document we could not verify a number from. Sixteen of the 22 other bodies we checked allow three minutes. It would have been easy, and it would have looked right, to write three minutes for Bakersfield too.

We did not, because four bodies in this market allow two minutes, one allows five, and one sets the limit fresh at the start of every meeting. Guessing the common value would have been wrong more than a fifth of the time, and the person it would be wrong for is someone who prepared a three-minute statement and got cut off at two.

Infer one body's rules from another's. Fresno County and Stanislaus County are both county boards of supervisors, both in the San Joaquin Valley, and one gives a speaker two minutes while the other gives five. Modesto's city council and Modesto City Schools sit in the same city with different rules, different portals, and different deadlines.

State a schedule from a calendar. A meeting cadence comes from an ordinance, charter, bylaw, or the body's own written statement of its rule, never from a list of dates it happened to meet on. Fresno County's own page says "scheduled Tuesdays" and third-party sites confidently say "first and third Tuesdays." The county's Legistar calendar showed August 2026 meetings on the second and fourth Tuesdays. The confident answer was the wrong one.

Three bodies in Fresno, the county, the city, and the school district, all publish schedules we could not reduce to a rule. Their meeting day is blank here rather than inferred, because a wrong meeting day sends a resident to a government building on the wrong morning.

Resolve a conflict silently. Where two official pages from the same government disagree, we print both and say so. Stockton's city council meets at an address two of its own pages describe differently. Modesto publishes one page saying public comment is in person only and another giving Zoom instructions. Tulare County's agenda requires a speaker form and its own posted Rules of Procedure say sign-in is voluntary. Kings County's two pages give agenda posting times two hours apart.

Those are four conflicts across 23 bodies. Picking a side would make the page look cleaner and would make it wrong roughly half the time.

Pad a page to look complete. If a market yields 23 entries, it gets 23.

Names get stale faster than anything else

Officeholders are the weakest category on any civic page, because a stale name reads exactly like a current one.

On the verification date, search-engine and aggregator summaries returned Steve Brandau for Fresno County District 2 and Sal Quintero for District 3. The county's own roster says Garry Bredefeld and Luis Chavez. A stale City of Visalia page still names a former mayor at a live URL.

Every name in this guide was read off the government's own site, not off an aggregator. Even so, a general election falls on November 3, 2026, and Modesto, Visalia, Merced, and Turlock all hold municipal elections that day. Several names here will be wrong by January 2027, and the fix is to re-verify after certification rather than to trust the "verified" stamp indefinitely.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, the government's own page is authoritative and we want to know. Every page carries a "verified" date so you can see how stale it might be.

Who this is for

People who live in the eight counties of the San Joaquin Valley and want to know what their governments are doing. Farmworkers, parents, growers, teachers, and residents of the 443 unincorporated communities out here whose local government is a county board meeting at 9:00 on a Tuesday morning.

Not developers, not lobbyists, not the people who already have a consultant reading the agendas for them. Those people are already in the room. That is rather the point.

Verified 2026-08-15. The government's own page is authoritative.