How we do the work.

Watch

Every Council meeting, committee agenda, and posted ordinance is monitored. We track Legistar, the City Clerk's calendar, committee video, and the published fiscal-note appendix. The watch layer runs continuously; the editorial layer runs weekly.

Detect

From the firehose of legislative activity, we surface the items that change something readers can feel. The current detectors are:

• Stalled. A bill that has been in committee for more than 60 days without movement.
• Math-mismatch. A bill whose fiscal note has shifted by more than 25% from introduction to vote.

Two more detectors are planned for phase 2: pile-on (more than three amendments in one committee session) and vote-flip (a member's recorded position changing between committee and full Council).

Package

Each item becomes a record with sponsor, co-sponsors, committee, amendment history, vote tally, fiscal note delta, and primary-source links. No claim ships without a link. If the only available source is opinion, the item does not ship.

Human in the loop

Nothing the Firehose publishes is automated end-to-end. A named editor reviews every dispatch before it leaves draft, and the founder approves each issue as a whole. The point of the agent pipeline is to surface candidates faster, not to remove the human review step.

Publish

One dispatch per week, Friday 6am Pacific. Email goes out at the same moment the public archive page is updated. The version readers received and the version the archive shows are always identical.

Corrections

If we get something wrong, the correction is appended in the dispatch and the archive, with a dated note. We do not silently edit history. If an entire item is retracted, the URL returns a clear retraction notice, not a 404.

What we do not do

• We do not endorse, oppose, or rate candidates in any active race.
• We do not coordinate editorial decisions with any campaign, party, or political committee.
• We do not share reader email with any party, committee, or third-party platform.
• We do not run third-party trackers, ad pixels, or session replay on the reader site.

More detail on the c4/PAC firewall lives on the About page. Privacy details live in the privacy policy.