Review workflow and positions

Why a spreadsheet stops working

A single person tracking bills can hold the state of things in their head. The moment a second person is involved, the questions change: who was asked, did they answer, is that their view or the department's, and what does the organization actually say if someone calls? A spreadsheet has one cell for all of that, so in practice it holds whichever answer was written last.

The chain, kept distinct at every level

CivicRelay keeps these four as four separate things, because collapsing them is what makes a position impossible to defend later:

• A reviewer response is one person's answer about one bill — their read, their concerns, their recommended position.
• A department position is what that department says, which may or may not match any single reviewer.
• An organization position is official, approved by someone with the authority to approve it.
• A published position is what you say outside the building.

Each level is set by different people with different authority. A department head speaks for their department; an executive can overturn that, but the override is recorded with a reason and the department can see it. Nothing is overwritten silently.

Getting an answer at all

• Bills route to departments with the reason attached, so the ask never arrives unexplained.
• Reviewers see a plain-English summary and the citations before they see a request for their opinion.
• Review deadlines and reminders are handled by the system rather than by someone remembering to chase.
• Someone outside the organization — an attorney, a consultant — can answer through a single-use link without needing an account.
• A coordinator can see, at a glance, which bills are waiting on whom.

Disagreement is a feature

When departments take conflicting positions on the same bill, the conflict is detected and surfaced rather than resolved by whoever wrote last. That is deliberate. An organization position that quietly papers over Legal's objection is worse than no position, because it will be stated publicly by someone who does not know the objection existed.

Conflicts get an explicit resolution step, and the reasoning stays attached to the bill afterwards — so in nine months, when someone asks why the city supported this, the answer is on the record instead of in somebody's memory.

After the vote

Bills that pass become implementation items: what has to be done, by when, and which department owns it. The session does not end when the legislature adjourns — it ends when the things it obliges you to do are done.

See also bill version tracking for what happens when a bill changes after a department has already answered.