Council Brief
Orange County, California — every agenda, before the vote

Nobody watches city hall anymore.
We do.

Your city council decides millions of dollars of contracts, rezonings, and rules every other Tuesday night — in public meetings almost no one attends and no newspaper covers. Council Brief reads every agenda in Orange County and reports what's about to be decided, before the vote — with every claim linked to the official record.

$57M+
in decisions on this week's agendas
34/34
Orange County cities — full county coverage
72 hrs
California law requires agendas be public before every vote
🗳️ November 3, 2026 · General Election 104 Orange County officials are on the ballot Nearly half of every city council — plus the Board of Supervisors. See who's up in your city, and how they've voted →
—days to go
 This week's briefs

What was decided — and what's next

Huntington Beach, San Clemente, Orange, Newport Beach, and the OC Sanitation District's outcomes are confirmed from the official vote records; Mission Viejo, Buena Park, and Brea's come from posted summaries and draft minutes, marked as such until adopted. Most other cities' minutes are still working their way through the clerk's office — we check every day and post results the moment they're official. Every brief links to the primary record.

Decided this week ✅

Newly published this week

Coming up

The permanent record

Every member. Every vote. Every city.

A summary tells you what happened Tuesday. Council Brief keeps the permanent voting record — how each councilmember actually voted, item by item, going back years, every line linked to the official minutes. No other newsroom in Orange County has this.

104,000+
individual council votes on the record
2,066
recorded dissents — who broke from the pack
191
current officials, all 34 cities + the county board

Rosters, tenure, next-election dates, and full sourced voting records for every Orange County city council and the Board of Supervisors — plus the regional boards (OCTA, OC Sanitation) many of them also sit on. And now: who funds them — and what they own. Every member page carries their itemized campaign contributions (donor, amount, employer, industry) from FPPC Form 460, and their personal economic interests — real property, investments, income sources — from their Form 700 disclosures, right next to how they voted. Neutral by design: we keep the record, we don't grade it.

$8.9M+
in itemized campaign contributions, traced to each official
118
officials with a campaign-funding record
93
with economic-interest (Form 700) disclosures
Browse every council member's voting record → Who it's for

Foresight, not news

🏗️ Contractors & vendors

Contract awards, sealed-bid waivers, capital improvement plans, and pre-RFP signals — surfaced while there's still time to act. Cities telegraph their spending months ahead; almost nobody is listening.

🏘️ Developers, investors & land-use attorneys

Rezonings, entitlements, development agreements, long-term leases, and ordinance changes across all 34 cities — the items that move property values, delivered when they hit the agenda, not after the vote.

🏠 Residents (free, forever)

A plain-English weekly brief on what your city council actually did and is about to do. Local news is disappearing; the public record isn't. We read it so you don't have to.

Now covering all 34 Orange County cities — plus the OC Board of Supervisors, OCTA, and OC Sanitation District — and expanding weekly. After each meeting we publish what was actually decided. Resident briefs are free forever; professional alerts start at $59/month.
Professional alerts for contractors & developers → The OC Development Pipeline tracker → Council members & voting records — every city → Open books

We cover public records. Ours are public too.

Council Brief publishes its complete ledger from its $1,000 founding — every cost, every decision, and, as revenue arrives, figures verified at the payment processor rather than claimed. A publication that reports on government transparency should practice it.

See the ledger & decision log →

Get the weekly brief for your city — free

One email a week: what your Orange County city is about to decide, before the vote. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.

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