Legistar System Configuration Working Session - September 11, 2026
Legistar System Configuration Working Session - September 11, 2026
This was a technical working session between city staff (Jennifer and Sam) focused on optimizing the Legistar meeting management system. The session covered agenda and minutes formatting, audio/video publishing, historical archives, and meeting body setup. No public comments or formal votes occurred; the meeting was purely administrative.
Discussion Items
- Accessible Agenda & Minutes: Sam enabled accessible agenda, minutes, and audio columns. A design ticket was created to add the necessary template code for automatic publishing of accessible versions.
- Audio Publishing: Sam enabled automatic MP3 transcoding in the media manager but noted existing meeting audio links were broken due to a non-retroactive setting. A new “Audio” column was created for manual audio uploads; testing will occur after the next video meeting.
- Attendance & Name Formatting: Jennifer requested moving the district number after the council member’s name. Sam adjusted settings to display “Last Name, Office Title” and reordered the member list (Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, then council members). Attendance now shows correct order.
- DJ Hair Attendance Issue: A duplicate record for DJ Hair was causing his name not to appear. Sam removed the duplicate and activated the correct record, fixing the issue.
- Historical Minutes Archives: Sam demonstrated how to create a dedicated view page in Media Manager for pre-2013 minutes, using a tabbed interface by year. Jennifer plans to upload historical PDFs.
- Agenda Briefings: Jennifer wanted a way to display virtual agenda briefings (third Wednesdays) without a full agenda. Sam created a new meeting body called “City Council Agenda Briefing” and granted security access so staff can create events with location/notes fields containing the meeting link and reference to the related agenda packet.
- Minutes Template Customization: Sam reviewed Jennifer’s markups and confirmed changes including removing the “District 1” language, adjusting header bolding, and hard-coding location information. A design ticket will be submitted to implement these changes.
- Insight Portal Review: Sam showed examples of other cities’ Legistar Insight pages (e.g., Seattle, San Mateo, King County) for inspiration on splash pages, upcoming meetings separation, and embedded widgets (Google Translate, social media links). Jennifer will discuss options with senior leadership.
Key Outcomes
- Tickets Created: An engineering ticket to investigate DJ Hair attendance issue (now resolved); a design ticket for minutes template updates and enhanced ADA styling.
- Meeting Body Created: “City Council Agenda Briefing” added to Legistar; security permissions granted to staff.
- Historical Archives Setup: A pre-2013 archive view page and folder created in Media Manager; Jennifer will upload PDFs and Sam will add an iframe tab to Insight.
- Next Steps: Sam will send Jennifer the iLegislate web link and documentation; will update names in the database (first/last name swapped); will submit design ticket with due date before next training session. Jennifer will test the new audio column after her next video meeting.
- Follow-up: Sam will record the session and upload to media manager; training is scheduled to begin soon, with ongoing email support.
Meeting Transcript
Good morning, Sam. Good morning. How are you doing today? Um, well, how are you? I'm doing well, thank you. Um, Sabina unexpectedly had to be out today, so I'm not sure if Kenneth is joining us, but it might just be you and I again. Okay, want to give them a minute or two? Yeah, absolutely. Sure. Um, it hasn't been too terrible. We had council meetings and all of that. So it's been busy, but not bad. How about yours? Good, nothing too crazy. Been, you know, that it's it's one of those weird weeks where a lot of people are are out. Yeah, I mean. We can start just by kind of catching up on the homework from last week. So share my screen. The couple things that I've done, I've like I said, kind of done some research. A couple things resulted in me making tickets with my team. Um so one follow-up item I've done is I put in a ticket art engineering team to investigate why DJ Hair is not appearing in the attendance in Legistar the way should I also earlier today enabled the accessible agenda, accessible minutes, and audio. Awesome. I wanted to talk to you about those a little bit. One is it while we have these columns, it looks like your uh agenda template doesn't yet have basically there's a line of code they add to the template itself to allow it to publish because I tested it earlier and it did never it published the regular one, but should automatically also publish the accessible one. So that's so currently there is, and that's usually a pretty quick ticket too. But I put a design ticket to do that for that and your minutes template. I did I did some research in the audio for what it looks like Charlotte's one isn't working. I every time I try touch one, does this um so one thing I kind of wanted to test because I enabled the settings on your end, but they aren't retroactive, so these we're still getting that error because you know basically the way it works, if it's working correctly, is what is while your video is uploading at the same time that same process also creates a MP3 version. At least that's you know, knock on wood how it should be working. So I think we would need to see wait till the next time you have a video meeting to test that. So I was thinking we'd probably want to turn off this column, but that but for now, because then we can see if it's working on your media manager site. And then if it is working there, I think that'd be a good idea. But I just wanted to kind of show you that bit where it's kind of automatic, but I did enable the setting in your media manager site, that should make it automatically transcode MP3s as well. Okay. So I just wanted to kind of like again, like so I'll leave the these on because knock on wood, it shouldn't it I put the due date for next meeting, but it should have them before then I can test it and show you what it looks like on your site. Okay. Well, would it be possible to leave it on? Because um, did we have it set up so that we could just upload audio? Yes. Oh, yeah. Okay, because I can do that for a zoning commission. I don't have their audio yet, but they're supposed to send it to me. Sure. So if you just yeah, so all you have to do is go to I know we talked about it a little bit last week. All you have to do is navigate log in, first of all. Navigate to the meeting details, add new file. So I think yeah, so I think for that one, you know me. I think for if that's how you want to go about it, we may want to add one a column called audio where you upload to. So let me do that quick. So let me again here one second my video, otherwise I'm gonna get laggy.
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