For cities and towns

The bills that reach a city

City staff do not need a general legislative feed. They need to know about a narrow set of things that recur every session and land on specific desks:

• Land use and zoning — preemption of local authority, density and permitting requirements, impact fee rules.
• Municipal finance — sales and property tax changes, revenue caps, budget and reporting obligations.
• Utilities and public works — water rights and conservation, rate-setting constraints, infrastructure standards.
• Public safety — mandates on police policy, training, records and reporting.
• Administration — open meetings, records requests, elections, personnel rules.

Every one of those belongs to a different department, which is why a shared inbox and a spreadsheet stop working the moment more than one person is involved.

Why it usually breaks

Not for lack of care. A city's legislative work is almost always someone's second job — a recorder, a city manager, an assistant to the mayor — running alongside everything else during the eight weeks a session is live. Reading a thousand bill titles to find fifty is a full-time task laid on top of a full-time role, so in practice it gets sampled rather than done, and the bill that mattered is found after the committee hearing.

The second failure is quieter: a bill is read early, judged harmless, and then rewritten in committee into something that is not. Nobody re-reads it, because nobody knew to.

What CivicRelay changes

• Every bill in the session is read, not a keyword-filtered subset — the filtering is the step you cannot audit later.
• Each bill gets a plain-English summary aimed at a department head, not a lawyer, with a citation back to the provision behind every claim.
• Bills route to the department that owns them — Public Works sees the water bill, Finance sees the revenue cap.
• Reviewer responses roll up into a department position, then a city position, so the council hears one voice with the reasoning attached.
• Amendments are diffed against the previous version and rated, so a rewrite on a bill you already cleared comes back to whoever cleared it.
• Bills that pass become implementation items with the deadline attached.

What it looks like in practice

The City of Lehi went from tracking around fifty bills in a session to reviewing more than three hundred, and reported that the part staff valued most was simply being able to understand each bill's impact quickly. Read their account.

Pricing is by organization size and every feature is included in every plan — a small city is not sold a lesser product. See pricing, or book a demo and look at your own session rather than a sample one.