If there’s one thing journalists get inordinately excited about, it’s easily navigable digital records systems for municipal meetings.

Although many municipal bodies (but certainly not all) are slowly evolving over time — many finally at least try to record their meetings on video and make agendas available digitally online — far too often there is still a crucial lack of contextual information available to the public on the issues being discussed within municipal meetings, conducted by officials elected to represent them.

But Bristol deserves a short victory lap in this regard, thanks in large part to their Town Clerk, Melissa Cordeiro.

Not only have they been streaming municipal meetings (with solid quality video and audio) since the very onset of the pandemic, they now have what could very well be one of the most powerful and user-friendly municipal meeting databases in the state.

“I always thought it was extremely important to make public documents available to the public,” Cordeiro said in a recent interview. “It was baffling that it wasn’t, especially in today's day and age when we have the capability of putting it online for people to view it. Not utilizing that just didn’t make sense to me.”

She spent the better part of a year researching systems that could provide a better digital experience for record keeping and public access, landing eventually on Municode.

The Municode system utilized by Bristol allows for the upload of entire meeting packets for each of its major boards and subcommittees — and not just the agenda. Anyone can access every contextual document and correspondence that board members get to help them make their decisions. The public also gets access to the minutes from each meeting, which for now only go back 10 years, but Cordeiro says she hopes to go back to the 1950s and, eventually, further back to when they kept handwritten records.

The system also provides a link between captured video and agenda items, so if you click on an agenda item it will snap to that specific portion of the video.

If you’re looking for a particular topic but aren’t sure when it happened or what board it happened at, you can do a more rudimentary search at the top right of the page. Simply typing in something like “Walley Beach” will net you tons of results whenever that topic came up in an agenda item or within the minutes of a meeting, whether it was in a public comment or in a statement by an elected official.

“Transparency is a fundamental component of a democratic government, and this gives citizens and residents the ability to know and search and see what their government is doing,” Cordeiro said. “You keep people accountable and it's convenient. It's transparent. It builds trust in our local government, and I just think it's really important that public documents are made available to the public when it's convenient for them, not convenient for us.”

The database also serves as a digital archive for the town. This is actually how the system is funded as well, through a fund set aside from fees assessed on accessing land evidence documents. The money can only be used for preservation technology efforts like this, and means the system requires no additional tax burden on the resident.

“But the other thing, too, that becomes fairly useful is that for the council members or other board members, it becomes a digital packet for them,” Cordeiro added. “So it's less waste on paper too. Because some of these are like 500 pages long.”

Anyone from Bristol can access the database at the Town of Bristol website by going to https://bristol-ri.municodemeetings.com/.

From there, you will be able to search for meetings from the Town Council, the Planning Board, the Zoning Board of Review, and the Historic District Commission, along with their subcommittees.