Why MMWatch exists
Local government is the level where an ordinary person still has real leverage. A city council has nine members. Showing up and speaking for three minutes is a meaningful fraction of the public input a body receives on any given question.
The problem is not that these meetings are secret. It is that they are technically public and practically invisible.
How a decision actually slips past
Consider the pattern that repeats across both cities:
- A notice runs once in the newspaper.
- The agenda posts a few days ahead — often a scanned PDF that no search engine can read, and sometimes only the one-page agenda, not the packet the council will actually be looking at.
- The enclosures that contain the substance are not posted at all.
- The meeting happens at 4:15 on a Monday afternoon.
- Coverage, if any, appears after the vote.
Nobody has to be acting in bad faith for a decision to go unexamined. The process simply moves faster than any ordinary person can follow while holding down a job.
What this site does about it
MMWatch reads the public notices and agenda portals for the City of Marinette, Marinette County, the City of Menominee and Menominee County every day, pulls out when and where each body is meeting and what it intends to discuss, and publishes that as:
- a website you can check in ten seconds,
- a calendar feed you subscribe to once and then simply have,
- an email newsletter, and
- open data that anyone can reuse or check.
What it deliberately does not do
It does not decide what is newsworthy. Listings are compiled mechanically, and every one links to the notice it came from, so you can read the original rather than trust a summary. Nothing here is paraphrased by a language model.
It also does not claim to be complete. If a body publishes no notice, we cannot list it — absence from this site is not evidence that nothing is scheduled. Some agendas are scanned images that we read with OCR, which is imperfect. And meetings get moved and cancelled after publication.
So: use this to find out what is coming up, then confirm with the clerk before you rearrange your evening. If you find something here that is wrong, tell us. An error in a transparency project is worse than an error anywhere else.