Most clerks running this November's midterms know election procedure cold. That's not what trips offices up. What tends to cause real disruption isn't unfamiliarity with the process; it's the handful of common problems that show up almost every cycle, somewhere, and catch a specific office off guard because it hadn't rehearsed that particular scenario recently. [...]
East Lyme-web East Lyme, Connecticut wasn't always one town. It was formed in 1839 out of pieces of Lyme and Waterford, joining two places that had very different identities: Flanders, an inland farming and mill community along the old Post Road, and Niantic, a coastal fishing village on Long Island Sound that later [...]
The Municipal Charter as the Ceiling on Authority Every clerk works with a municipal charter, or its general-law equivalent, in some form — it's the document that sets the ceiling on what council, the mayor or manager, and staff can actually do. (The National Civic League's Model City Charter, now in its ninth edition, is [...]
Municipal clerks keep local government moving: turning complex meetings into clear agendas, trusted records, and accessible information. Yet generic workflows and disconnected systems create extra steps, rework, and less time for the work only a clerk can do. ClerkMate is meeting management software created to give you a faster, clearer, more confident way to manage [...]
This month's client spotlight has a bit of a Wisconsin theme running through it. Between our story on the clerk shortage playing out across the state and Jay's attendance at the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association conference in Green Bay, it felt like the right time to highlight one of our Wisconsin clients directly: the City [...]
AI note-taking tools have made it easy to generate a full transcript of a meeting without anyone typing a word. That convenience comes with a records question clerks can't really opt out of: the moment a transcript exists, is it a public record — and if so, for how long does it have to stay [...]
Back in 2021, we wrote about what researchers were calling a "silver tsunami" — a wave of local government retirements picking up speed as the economy improved and the pandemic wore on. In 2022, we followed up with what the data was showing about why people were leaving: burnout, compensation, work-life balance. Both pieces were [...]
Updated August 26, 2026: For a closer look at one specific piece of this — whether AI-generated meeting transcripts count as public records, and what that means for retention — see Are AI Meeting Transcripts Public Records? What Clerks Need to Know, publishing September 2, 2026. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer just a [...]
Punctuation might seem like a small detail next to everything else on a clerk's plate. But it's the body language of the written word. Nowhere does that matter more than in the documents your office produces every week: agendas, minutes, motions, and public notices that residents, council members, and courts may all read closely. The [...]
Extreme heat local government planning isn't usually framed as a clerk's-office issue — and that's not a gap in your preparedness. Emergency management, public health, and public works typically own this topic. But clerks already handle plenty that falls outside those departments' usual playbooks. Meeting continuity, public notice, and the official record all intersect with [...]