About

What this is right now

A directory of Eastern Washington governments: who they are, when they meet, where to watch, and how to comment. 31 bodies, covering seven county commissions, twelve city councils, six school boards, two public utility district commissions, three sovereign tribal governments, and the state legislature read for what it does east of the mountains.

It is incomplete and every page says where. No count of the region's total governing bodies has been run, so no page here claims a percentage.

There is no journalism here yet. No articles, no reporters, no coverage of what happens at these meetings. That comes later.

What it is meant to become

The same site, filled in. Every public meeting in the region transcribed and made searchable, so that "what did the commission actually say about the Odessa groundwater project" is a question with an answer.

Minutes tell you what was decided. Video tells you what was said but cannot be searched. Nothing in between exists, for this region or most others. That gap is the whole point.

The URLs are built to hold it. A meeting page today lists a body and a schedule; the same address later holds a transcript.

Three cities, not one region

Eastern Washington is a real thing at the "not Seattle" level and thinner below that. Spokane, the Tri-Cities and Yakima are three separate communities that do not think of themselves as one, and the research bears it out: they meet on different nights, run different portals, and give speakers different amounts of time.

So these pages are written to be entered sideways. A reader in Pasco should be able to find Pasco without reading about Spokane, and the tables are ordered so that they can. Where a difference between the three is real, it is called out rather than smoothed over.

Tribal governments are governments

The Yakama Nation, the Spokane Tribe of Indians and the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation are filed here alongside counties and cities, because that is what they are: sovereign governments with their own constitutions, councils and jurisdiction. They are not community organisations and they are not stakeholders.

Two consequences run through these pages. Washington's Public Records Act does not reach them, so a state-style records request is the wrong instrument. And the Yakama Nation's General Council and Tribal Council are different bodies with different chairmen, which is the error readers of this market notice fastest.

What we will not do

Publish a fact we have not checked. Every page marks what is unconfirmed rather than filling it in with something plausible. That is why the public comment page has real rules for twenty-three bodies and "not established" for eight, instead of eight guesses that look the same as the real ones.

Three examples of the line we are holding:

• Walla Walla County's meeting cadence is blank. Its 2025 agendas are all dated on Mondays. That is what happened, not what is required, and a pattern read off four PDFs is not a rule. It stays blank until we find the resolution that sets it.
• Richland's mayor is blank. A September 2025 agenda names a "Mayor Richardson" presiding. A general election intervened in November 2025 and richlandwa.gov returned 403 to us on the date checked. Naming a mayor who may have left office is worse than naming none.
• The Legislature's 105-day odd-year session length was blank, and now is not. We confirmed the 2026 session ran January 12 to March 12, which is 60 days, and that the rule lives in Article II, Section 12 of the state Constitution. We could not retrieve that section's text on 15 August, so we did not publish the other number. We retrieved it on 16 August from the Constitution PDF published by leg.wa.gov, and it is now quoted in full on when they meet. The wording turned out to matter: the Constitution sets a ceiling of "not more than one hundred five consecutive days", not a fixed length, so the number everyone quotes is a maximum. That is the argument for holding the line rather than publishing the remembered figure: the remembered figure was subtly wrong.

Never infer one body's rules from another's. Spokane County's Planning Commission publishes a three-minute comment limit. The Spokane County Board of Commissioners is a different body and its limit is recorded as not established, three inches away on the same page.

Pad a page to look complete. If a market yields twenty-three confirmed comment rules, it gets twenty-three. The Quincy City Council's agenda carries an item that reads, in full, "PUBLIC COMMENT", and its municipal code chapter on council meetings says only when they start. So Quincy's comment rules are recorded as not established, rather than borrowed from a neighbouring city that looks similar.

What surprised us

Recorded here because it is the kind of thing that is useful to whoever picks this up next.

• Spokane City Council moved its meeting night in July 2026, from Monday evenings to Wednesdays. Every guide written before mid-2026 now sends people on the wrong day.
• Spokane's public comment limit is tiered by agenda category, 3 minutes for express testimony and 2 for everything else. Every other body here has one number.
• Pullman, a city, runs BoardDocs, which is otherwise a school-district product.
• Benton County meets in two towns, Prosser most Tuesdays and Kennewick on the second.
• Benton County and the Colville Business Council both stream on IBM Video, a vendor that appears nowhere else in this market.
• The Colville Business Council publishes more than most counties here: quarterly regular sessions, a monthly district-meeting circuit, a committee calendar, a live stream, and a resolution index running from 2000 to 2026.
• Two city websites, wallawallawa.gov and richlandwa.gov, block automated access while their agenda systems do not. Several blank fields on these pages trace to that.
• Ephrata's published municipal code has been three years out of date on its own meeting time. The code says the Council meets at seven p.m.; the Council voted on 1 March 2023 to move it to six, and the code publisher's page still shows the old text under a banner claiming currency through February 2026. The reason the Council gave is the good part: to "close the gap between traditional business hours and meeting times."
• Grant County's website and Grant County's agenda disagree about when its Open Forum for Public Input happens. The web page says Tuesday at 11:00 a.m.; the agenda says 10:30 a.m. and puts it on Monday. Both are the county's own documents.
• Grant County's fifteen-minute Open Forum is the smallest comment period in this guide, five speakers at three minutes each, in a county that sits twice a week.
• Wenatchee School District caps the number of speakers rather than the minutes, at twenty and then twenty-five, and provides Spanish interpretation at every meeting by policy without charging it against anyone's three minutes.
• Moses Lake wrote its agenda-posting deadline into municipal code, the only body here that has. Agenda materials go online the Friday before.
• Three bodies publish audio and no video: Walla Walla County, the Quincy City Council and the Grant County PUD. Chelan County publishes neither, streaming live by Zoom and archiving nothing.
• The municipal code hosts are now the hard part. Moses Lake's code sits behind a Cloudflare bot check; Ephrata's and Chelan County's have migrated from CodePublishing to eCode360, so bookmarked code URLs return a redirect notice that looks like a page.
• chelanpud.org refuses HTTP/2 and answers over HTTP/1.1, which is the reverse of the usual pattern and will make a modern client report a live site as dead.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, the government's own page is authoritative and we want to know. Every page carries a "verified" date so you can see how stale it might be.

Who this is for

People who live in Spokane, the Tri-Cities, Yakima, Wenatchee, Moses Lake, Ephrata, Quincy, Walla Walla, Pullman and the twenty counties around them, and who want to know what their governments are doing. Not lobbyists, not consultants, not people who already have somebody reading the agendas for them.

Verified 2026-08-15, with nine Grant and Chelan county bodies added and every count on these pages reconciled on 2026-08-16. The government's own page is authoritative.