Meeting Records Are the Most Requested. Are Yours Findable?
Public records requests are at record levels — and they’re not slowing down.
Federal FOIA requests topped 1.5 million in fiscal year 2024, a 25 percent increase in a single year. Backlogs grew 33 percent. The average response time for a simple request stretched from 39 days to 44 days. State and local governments are absorbing the same pressure: in New York, Freedom of Information Law requests more than doubled between 2018 and 2024, with 62 percent of open requests already past their due date by year’s end.
For municipal and county clerk’s offices, a significant share of that volume has a common source: meeting records. Agendas, board packets, minutes, resolutions, supporting documents — the full record of what boards and committees do is among the most frequently requested categories of public information. And in many offices, it’s also among the hardest for residents to find on their own.
Publishing isn’t the same as findable
The Government Accountability Office has identified this gap directly. In its 2021 audit of federal agency FOIA compliance, GAO found that making proactively disclosed records accessible “is a challenge for agencies” — and that without addressing accessibility, agencies miss the opportunity to “potentially decrease the number of incoming FOIA requests” even when they’re actively publishing.
The DOJ’s own guidance has made the same point for years: posting records online proactively “reduces the need for individual information requests and may help reduce agency backlogs.” But that reduction only materializes when residents can actually navigate to what’s been published.
Meeting records present a specific version of this problem. An agenda posted as a scanned PDF is technically public. Minutes buried in a department folder three clicks from the homepage are technically available. A board packet from 18 months ago with no consistent naming convention is technically on file. None of those records is findable by a resident who doesn’t already know your internal filing logic — and when residents can’t find them, the request follows.
What findability actually requires for meeting records
For board and committee meeting records to be genuinely accessible to the public, a few conditions have to be in place:
Centralization by board. When a resident is researching what the planning board decided about a specific parcel, or tracking a budget committee’s work across multiple meetings, they need to find all of it in one place — not spread across department folders, website pages, or filing systems that don’t talk to each other. Centralizing records by board gives residents a navigable structure that mirrors the way decisions actually get made.
Public-facing access to board membership and status. Residents frequently need to know who sits on a board, whether there are vacancies, and what reports a board has produced. When that information isn’t publicly accessible and searchable, it generates inquiries and requests that don’t have to happen.
A consistent, accessible home for meeting materials. Agendas, packets, minutes, and supporting documents that live in a single, organized, public-facing location don’t require a resident to know which department to call or which system to search. They just require a working link.
Thirty-plus years of getting this right
ClerkBase has been making meeting materials findable online for more than 30 years. It’s not an add-on capability — it’s the core of what we’ve built. OnBoardGOV extends that into a public-facing portal where board membership, vacancies, and reports are searchable and accessible, and where meeting materials can be centralized by board for offices using the Meeting Center module.
That’s a specific scope, and we’ll be direct about it: OnBoardGOV is a board and committee management platform, not a general document management system. What it does, it does well — and what it does is directly relevant to one of the highest-volume categories of public records requests your office handles.
See what OnBoardGOV makes findable →
What’s coming
The findability problem for meeting records extends beyond portals and access — it lives in the documents themselves. Searchable agendas and minutes, structured for public navigation, are the next frontier. We’ll have more to say about that soon.
In the meantime, if your board and committee meeting records aren’t easy for residents to find, we’d like to show you what it looks like when they are.
Ready to see OnBoardGOV in action? Request a demo.