About
An independent site tracking public data about the City of Salem. Not run by or affiliated with the city.
Part of Publick
Salem Publick is one of the Publick sites, which publish the public record of towns and cities every day. The name comes from Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, the first newspaper in the American colonies. It was printed in Boston in 1690 and shut down after one issue for printing without permission.
How it works
- Updated every morning from public sources.
- Every number links to where it came from.
- New agendas and minutes are in an RSS feed.
- Each Sunday, a weekly digest lists the week's meetings and what was decided at those whose minutes were posted.
- Summaries written by AI are labeled on each meeting page.
- Mistakes are corrected openly, with a note on the page.
Sources
- 311 requests: SeeClickFix (opens in new tab), public requests only, under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (opens in new tab) license. How the 311 numbers work.
- Meetings, agendas, and minutes: the city's calendar (opens in new tab), for every meeting it lists, and its Agenda Center (opens in new tab), for agendas and minutes. A meeting listed in both is shown once. Copies of agendas are saved when posted. Minutes are collected from January 2026 on.
- Tax bill and city budget: Mass. Division of Local Services (opens in new tab) Municipal Databank, from the city's filings with the state.
- Unemployment: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (opens in new tab). City rates aren't seasonally adjusted, so each month is compared with the same month last year.
- Schools: Mass. Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (opens in new tab) open data.
- Housing: U.S. Census Bureau Building Permits Survey (opens in new tab) and American Community Survey (opens in new tab) (through Census Reporter (opens in new tab)), the state's Subsidized Housing Inventory (opens in new tab), and Division of Local Services parcel counts.
- Elected officials: listed by hand from official city and school websites, last checked October 18, 2026. See Who represents you.
- Ward maps: MassGIS (opens in new tab), 2022 boundaries.
- Address lookup: U.S. Census Bureau TIGER/Line address ranges (opens in new tab), 2026, each matched by Publick to the boundaries above, for the address box on Who represents you.
- Street maps: OpenStreetMap (opens in new tab), drawn with Leaflet (opens in new tab). Map images load from OpenStreetMap's servers.
Data status
Each source, the latest figures this site has, and when it last checked. Meetings and requests are checked every day. Figures that are published monthly or yearly are checked weekly or monthly, and are marked "Behind" only when newer figures should have been published by now; the maintainer is alerted automatically.
| Source | Latest | Last checked | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meetings (Agenda Center) | – | Up to date | |
| 311 requests | – | Up to date | |
| 311 scorecard | – | Up to date | |
| Average tax bill (Mass. DLS) | Fiscal year 2026 | Up to date. Next: Fiscal year 2027 usually by February 1, 2027. | |
| City budget (Mass. DLS) | Fiscal year 2025 spending | Up to date. Next: Fiscal year 2026 spending usually by June 1, 2027. | |
| School figures (DESE) | Class of 2025 graduation rate; Spring 2026 MCAS results; 2025–26 attendance | Up to date. Next: Class of 2026 graduation rate usually by May 1, 2027; Spring 2027 MCAS results usually by October 1, 2027; 2026–27 attendance usually by October 1, 2027. | |
| Unemployment rate (BLS) | August 2026 rate | Up to date. Next: September 2026 rate usually by November 10, 2026. | |
| Housing figures | 2025 building permits; August 2026 building permits; ACS 2024 5-year estimates; Fiscal year 2026 parcel counts | Up to date. Next: 2026 building permits usually by June 1, 2027; September 2026 building permits usually by November 1, 2026; ACS 2025 5-year estimates usually by December 15, 2026; Fiscal year 2027 parcel counts usually by March 1, 2027. | |
| Elected officials | – | Up to date. Next: a check after the election of November 2, 2027. | |
| Meeting summaries | – | – | Up to date |
– means none yet: no figures collected, or not checked yet.
AI summaries
Meeting summaries are written by AI (Claude Haiku 5.5, by Anthropic). They aren't checked by a person before posting. The city's document is the official record, and every summary links to it.
On the pages in other languages, each summary is translated automatically by AI (Claude Haiku 5.5, by Anthropic) from the English summary, and may have errors. Translations aren't checked by a person either. Two checks stand in: one without AI compares each translation's names, numbers, amounts, times, and decisions with the English, and a second pass by AI reviews its meaning. A translation that fails either is replaced by the English summary. Every translated summary links to the English.
Every summary is then checked against the city's document by a program, without AI: each number, date, and name in it must be in the document, and in minutes, each decision must match the minutes' own words. Against the document's full text, what isn't found isn't shown. A line under each summary says how it was checked:
- Checked against the city's PDF: against the document's own text.
- Partly checked: some pages are scanned images, and only the pages with text could be checked, so nothing is held back.
- Checked against an AI transcription: the PDF is a scanned image, so the summary is compared with AI's reading of it. Both come from AI and can share a mistake, so nothing is held back.
- Not checked: there was no text to check against, or the summary is older than the check that matches decisions to the minutes' own words.
Scanned agendas and minutes, which screen readers can't read, get a readable version of their full text, transcribed by AI and labeled that way. Where a document's own text can be laid out, the full text is the city's own words instead. Every page links the city's PDF.
Reusing what's here
The summaries, headlines, decision lists, and data that Publick compiles are free to reuse, even commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (opens in new tab) (CC BY 4.0). Please credit them like this, with a link to the document the summary came from:
Summary by Publick (publick.org), AI-generated from the city's agenda.
Some of what's here keeps its own terms:
- 311 requests keep SeeClickFix's CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (opens in new tab) license, which doesn't allow commercial use.
- The city's agendas and minutes, and their full text on this site, are public records.
- Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics figures are in the public domain.
The meetings, summaries, and decisions can be downloaded together from the Data page.
The full terms are in the network's license (opens in new tab).
Privacy
We count visits so we know which pages are useful. That's all.
- No ads, and no tracking across other sites.
- One cookie, only if you use the language switch: it remembers the language you chose, and nothing else.
- What you search for, and which street you look up, is never recorded.
- If you use "Find my ward," your location is checked on your device. It isn't sent anywhere or saved.
- If you look up your address on Who represents you, it's looked up on your device. It isn't sent anywhere or saved.
- Nothing that identifies you is kept, not even your IP address.
Counting is done by GoatCounter (opens in new tab), a privacy-friendly service. It notes the page, the site that linked here, and your screen size, along with the browser type and rough location (such as the country or state) that every website can see. We only look at the totals.
Corrections and contact
Spot a mistake or have a question? Email salem-ma@publick.org or open an issue on the project's public issue tracker (opens in new tab). Fixes are noted on the page they affect.