Fayetteville NC Legistar Minutes Configuration Working Session - September 4, 2026

On September 4, 2026, a Granicus consultant and Fayetteville city staff met virtually for about two hours to review how the city produces meeting minutes, test importing minutes from the June 22, 2026 meeting into Legistar, and identify configuration changes to reduce manual work. No agenda or minutes for this working session were provided; no formal city council votes or decisions occurred.

Current Minutes Process

• City staff currently uses Media Manager / Live Manager to timestamp meeting activity, then exports minutes and has someone manually upload a custom document rather than importing the meeting data back into Legistar.
• The city does not record motions or votes inside Live Manager; votes and motions are not currently pulled automatically into Legistar.
• Staff expressed strong interest in not recreating minutes manually every month.

Legistar / Live Manager Demonstration

• The consultant demonstrated how minutes in Legistar begin as a one-for-one copy of the agenda and can import data from Media Manager, including timestamps and actions taken during the meeting.
• Live Manager is browser-based, can be used on any device, and includes annotation tools such as highlighting, drawing lines, and adding notes and images.
• The consultant walked through sample consent items, a roll call vote, a unanimous vote, a motion without a second, and calling a speaker; test data was paired with the original June 22 video using a temporary video swap.
• A limitation was noted: no mass voting for consent agendas; a common workaround is to add a note with the intended motion text.

Configuration Review and Staff Requests

• Workflow actions / motion text: Staff asked to remove unused actions such as received and filed and bring back for further consideration and formal vote, and to clean up punctuation and grammar in automatically generated motion text.
• File types: The consultant identified that legislative hearing is not used by city council but is used by the zoning commission; zoning and planning meeting bodies were given permission to vote on that file type in workflow control, since they previously could not take any action on it.
• Attendance and voting types: Staff decided to add a virtual attendance type, use an others present attendance group, and add Douglas Hewitt as a non-voting member so he appears in attendance but not in votes.
• Roll call and office titles: The city has nine districts; staff requested office titles such as Council Member District One through District Nine so each council member's district number can appear after their name.
• Meeting statuses: Staff noted the preliminary status was never used and should be removed.
• Standard paragraphs: The existing standard paragraph referencing former City Manager Ted Voorhees was outdated and was not actively used.
• Names: Council Member DJ Hare appeared in Live Manager attendance but was missing from Legistar's roll call; the consultant agreed to investigate, possibly with engineering.
• Mac users: Legistar is Windows-only; Mac users at the city currently connect through a separate server or VPN, and running Windows via a partition was mentioned as a possible alternative.

Minutes Formatting and Design Requests

• Staff and consultant compared the current Legistar output with the city's existing minutes template and agreed to send a marked-up sample to the design team.
• Formatting changes requested:
  • Action notes: change from italics to left-aligned text with a single indent.
  • Comments: display as bold, half-inch indented text to hold ordinance and resolution language.
  • Roll call: place attendance before Call to Order using a blank header.
  • Signature block: add a non-forced header line at the bottom after adjournment.
  • Fix spacing and formatting of names and titles, including the mayor's name and title.
• Staff remained open to trying Legistar's header layout but wanted spacing and formatting adjustments.

Insight Page, Accessibility, and Next Steps

• The consultant noted that finalizing minutes in Legistar will make legislation, votes, and actions searchable on the public Insight page.
• Staff supported adding accessible HTML publishing for ADA compliance; it would require no extra staff work once enabled. Staff responded 100 percent in favor of enabling accessible HTML.
• Staff requested an audio column for committees that are not broadcast, including planning, zoning, and audit; the consultant will enable settings similar to Charlotte, NC and add accessible agenda and minutes columns before the next meeting.
• The consultant showed Insight skins, including enhanced ADA styling, and examples from other jurisdictions such as King County, Oakland, and Charlotte for future design choices.

Key Outcomes

• Consultant will send the current workflow actions list and the sample minutes export to staff for markup.
• A design team ticket will be created for minutes formatting updates: action notes, comments, motion and vote text, headers, attendance placement, and signature block.
• Staff will send additional markup notes before the next meeting; updates will be reviewed at the start of the next call.
• Before the next session, the consultant will add accessible agenda and minutes columns and enable audio download so these features can be demonstrated.
• The next meeting will be a hands-on working session on the Insight public page, including skins, accessible HTML, audio, and additional jurisdiction examples.