About

An independent site tracking public data about the City of Burlington. Not run by or affiliated with the city.

Part of Publick

Burlington Publick is one of the Publick sites, which publish the public record of towns and cities every day. The name comes from Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, the first newspaper in the American colonies. It was printed in Boston in 1690 and shut down after one issue for printing without permission.

How it works

• Updated every morning from public sources.
• Every number links to where it came from.
• New agendas and minutes are in an RSS feed.
• Each Sunday, a weekly digest lists the week's meetings and what was decided at those whose minutes were posted.
• Summaries written by AI are labeled on each meeting page.
• Mistakes are corrected openly, with a note on the page.

Sources

• 311 requests: SeeClickFix (opens in new tab), public requests only, under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (opens in new tab) license. How the 311 numbers work.
• Meetings, agendas, and minutes: the city's calendar (opens in new tab) and its meeting portal (opens in new tab) (CivicClerk). Agendas and minutes of the meetings on the portal are saved when posted, from April 2026 on; other meetings link to their agendas where the city posts them.
• School Board meetings, agendas, and minutes: Burlington School District, from its Diligent Community portal (opens in new tab), from January 2026 on.
• Property tax: the Vermont Department of Taxes' Property Valuation and Review Annual Report (opens in new tab): tax rates, taxes raised, and grand lists. The average homestead tax bill is calculated by Publick from the tax rates and the listed values in VCGI's statewide parcel data (opens in new tab), and property tax per resident from the U.S. Census Bureau's population estimates (opens in new tab); the budget page says how.
• Unemployment: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (opens in new tab). City rates aren't seasonally adjusted, so each month is compared with the same month last year.
• Schools: the Vermont Agency of Education (opens in new tab)'s graduation rates, chronic absenteeism, and state test (VTCAP) results, on data.vermont.gov (opens in new tab), and its per pupil spending reports.
• Housing: U.S. Census Bureau Building Permits Survey (opens in new tab) and American Community Survey (opens in new tab) (through Census Reporter (opens in new tab)).
• Elected officials: listed by hand from official city and school websites, last checked October 6, 2026. See Who represents you.
• Ward maps: City of Burlington (opens in new tab), 2024 boundaries.
• Address lookup: U.S. Census Bureau TIGER/Line address ranges (opens in new tab), 2026, each matched by Publick to the boundaries above, for the address box on Who represents you.
• Street maps: OpenStreetMap (opens in new tab), drawn with Leaflet (opens in new tab). Map images load from OpenStreetMap's servers.

Data status

Each source, the latest figures this site has, and when it last checked. Meetings and requests are checked every day. Figures that are published monthly or yearly are checked weekly or monthly, and are marked "Behind" only when newer figures should have been published by now; the maintainer is alerted automatically.

– means none yet: no figures collected, or not checked yet.

AI summaries

Meeting summaries are written by AI (Claude Haiku 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5, by Anthropic). They aren't checked by a person before posting. The city's document is the official record, and every summary links to it.

On the pages in other languages, each summary is translated automatically by AI (Claude Haiku 5.5, by Anthropic) from the English summary, and may have errors. Translations aren't checked by a person either. Two checks stand in: one without AI compares each translation's names, numbers, amounts, times, and decisions with the English, and a second pass by AI reviews its meaning. A translation that fails either is replaced by the English summary. Every translated summary links to the English.

Every summary is then checked against the city's document by a program, without AI: each number, date, and name in it must be in the document, and in minutes, each decision must match the minutes' own words. Against the document's full text, what isn't found isn't shown. A line under each summary says how it was checked:

• Checked against the city's PDF: against the document's own text.
• Partly checked: some pages are scanned images, and only the pages with text could be checked, so nothing is held back.
• Checked against an AI transcription: the PDF is a scanned image, so the summary is compared with AI's reading of it. Both come from AI and can share a mistake, so nothing is held back.
• Not checked: there was no text to check against, or the summary is older than the check that matches decisions to the minutes' own words.

Scanned agendas and minutes, which screen readers can't read, get a readable version of their full text, transcribed by AI and labeled that way. Where a document's own text can be laid out, the full text is the city's own words instead. Every page links the city's PDF.

Reusing what's here

The summaries, headlines, decision lists, and data that Publick compiles are free to reuse, even commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (opens in new tab) (CC BY 4.0). Please credit them like this, with a link to the document the summary came from:

Summary by Publick (publick.org), AI-generated from the city's agenda.

Some of what's here keeps its own terms:

• 311 requests keep SeeClickFix's CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (opens in new tab) license, which doesn't allow commercial use.
• The city's agendas and minutes, and their full text on this site, are public records.
• Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics figures are in the public domain.

The meetings, summaries, and decisions can be downloaded together from the Data page.

The full terms are in the network's license (opens in new tab).

Privacy

We count visits so we know which pages are useful. That's all.

• No ads, and no tracking across other sites.
• One cookie, only if you use the language switch: it remembers the language you chose, and nothing else.
• What you search for, and which street you look up, is never recorded.
• If you use "Find my ward," your location is checked on your device. It isn't sent anywhere or saved.
• If you look up your address on Who represents you, it's looked up on your device. It isn't sent anywhere or saved.
• Nothing that identifies you is kept, not even your IP address.
• The one exception is the weekly digest by email, if you sign up: your email address, the town and language you chose, and the IP address you signed up from go to Buttondown, the service that sends it, which keeps them until you unsubscribe (its privacy policy (opens in new tab)). The emails don't record whether you open them or which links you click, and this site keeps none of it.

Counting is done by GoatCounter (opens in new tab), a privacy-friendly service. It notes the page, the site that linked here, and your screen size, along with the browser type and rough location (such as the country or state) that every website can see. We only look at the totals.

Corrections and contact

Spot a mistake or have a question? Email burlington-vt@publick.org or open an issue on the project's public issue tracker (opens in new tab). Fixes are noted on the page they affect.