How to Search Council Records

Starting Your Search:

To begin your search, enter a word or words into the search term field and click on the SEARCH button. If you enter more than one word, matches will contain either word. If you want an exact match on the phrase you type, enter it in quotes. For example, the term River Park will find documents referring to the Gordon River, Cambier Park, or River Park. If you enter "River Park" the documents displayed will only refer to River Park.

The region shown in Red is the search term you entered.

The region in Green is the title of the document found. All the documents here are in Adobe Acrobat format, and annotated agendas are labeled as such. The annotated agenda contains the meeting agenda, as well as the votes and decisions made on agenda items, but not the discussion that took place.

The region in Blue is the relevance of this document in meeting your search term criteria. The higher the percentage, the more likely the document is relevant to your search. In general, a relevance of 5% or less means your search term is mentioned only briefly, though in an annotated agenda, that may be what you're looking for.

The region in Yellow is the abstract of the document, basically the first 320 characters or so. For most City Council records, this will be the type of meeting as well as the council members present.

Searches may be narrowed to just the Minutes or Annotated Agendas. Annotated Agendas will show the agenda item, votes cast and decision results, but no discussion. Minutes will include the discussion that took place, and many minutes will also have documents attached or photos of items presented to council. This can make the minutes files very large.

Search results which show a warning message are for documents that are over 500KB in size and which may take some time to download to your system. The time involved to retrieve these documents depends on how large they are, as well as your internet connection speed.