New, improved, easier: Searchable Meeting Minutes starting with 2023 Bellingham City Council & committees/ Noisy Waters Northwest

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August 15, 2024 Dena Jensen

After falling behind last year in keeping up with Searchable Meeting Minutes, I recently put on my thinking cap and managed to figure out how to create new and improved ones that are much easier and faster for me to put together and without the funky formatting of the previous ones I have posted. Searching them is still simple and direct, while I believe the minutes will be much easier to read; easier to tell the difference between which set of minutes is for which date; and easier to browse through if it’s not a specific phrase, word, number, or name that you are looking for.


I am posting a fresh batch of minutes from 2023 today that are listed in this post. Meanwhile these new links, along with all the Searchable Meeting Minutes I have previously posted can be found by clicking the Searchable Minutes link/tab on the menu for the Noisy Waters Northwest website.

Holding down both the Control and F keys on a Windows computer keyboard at the same time, or holding down both the Command and F keys on an Apple computer keyboard at the same time, should give people a search field to enter words, numbers, and phrases to look for. 

Eventually I hope to update the prior years of minutes I had assembled and posted.

On August 15, 2024, I am adding the following links. These are all in the new format and each link will take readers to a PDF which contains the minutes for a year’s worth of meetings for a particular government body:

2023 Bellingham City Council Regular Meeting Minutes

2023 Bellingham City Council Special Meeting Minutes

2023 Bellingham City Council Committee of the Whole Minutes

2023 Bellingham City Council Public Health Safety Justice and Equity Committee Minutes

2023 Bellingham City Council Climate Action Committee Minutes

2023 Bellingham City Council Parks and Recreation Committee Minutes

Previously, two years worth of Whatcom County Council regular meeting minutes (2021 and 2022) and one year of Bellingham City Council regular meeting minutes (2022), along with one year of the City Council’s meeting summaries (2021) had been posted in 2023 here on Noisy Waters Northwest. In addition, there was one year (2022) of meeting minutes posted for Whatcom County Council and Bellingham City Council Committee of the Whole.

My goal is to continue to build on a project of assembling local government meeting minutes into year-long batches that can be searched for material like a topic, presentation, person in attendance, or actions of the members of the body that is meeting.

The City of Bellingham and Whatcom County websites also offer a function that will search the content for all meetings, including documents attached to the meetings. When I tried those options out, I found that there were advantages (like the links to documents and other meeting materials that you might not have thought to look for) and drawbacks (like slower result response times and maybe more info/distractions than you want, or the opposite: missed info that searches on my posts might manage to catch.) So if you can’t find what you’re looking for here, go there, and vice versa.

Here are the links for those options on government websites:

City of Bellingham: https://meetings.cob.org/meetings?fbclid=IwAR1pKVHTcjG9s6U-qaomvivQJxu74i3PVa8fYNbsLMxHlPypWhC82Sz70lA

Whatcom County: https://whatcom.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx?fbclid=IwAR2vtIEDKYL9p9u45RXEMEG8bY6cBcyNfbMeO6MvzQ99JblsKv2Clr_hLNo