Watertown City Council

Loaded: every full City Council meeting with minutes on the city’s meeting portal, from January 9, 2018 through September 8, 2026 (207 meetings: 183 regular, 20 special, and 4 joint meetings with the Planning Board, where only the City Council’s own votes are shown). Watertown is “the City known as the Town of Watertown”; its council was called the Town Council until voters approved charter changes, including the new name, on November 2, 2021. The minutes say City Council from November 23, 2021. Council committee meetings, Committee of the Whole budget hearings and sessions where the council met as the Watertown Redevelopment Authority are not loaded, and committee votes reported in the minutes are not shown as council votes. Minutes files on the portal also contain the agenda, the documents and a roll-call tally sheet for each vote; MassVoter reads the minutes pages and uses a tally sheet only where the minutes do not say how each councilor voted (noted on each vote). The January to September 2023 minutes, and the signed last page of most minutes since late 2023, were posted as scanned images; MassVoter read those pages with text recognition. Not here: minutes the city has not posted for several special and joint meetings (including the special meetings of June 23 and 24, 2020, July 27 and December 1, 2021, January 4, May 2 and May 23, 2023, April 30, 2024, January 21, 2025 and May 12, 2026, the joint meetings with the Planning Board on June 13, June 27 and July 16, 2024, and an executive-session-only meeting on May 25, 2023); MassVoter is asking the Council Clerk for them. Watertown’s minutes record each motion with its mover and seconder and say whether it carried “unanimously in a Voice Vote” or “in a Roll Call Vote”. A unanimous vote shows every councilor present voting yes (or no, when a motion “failed unanimously”). Split votes name the councilors on each side (“passed 7 (…) – 2 (…)”, or in older minutes “All Councilors voted in the affirmative except for Councilor X”); MassVoter shows each councilor’s vote when the names add up to the councilors present, and the count only when they do not. Councilors who arrived late are left out of votes taken before they arrived; when the minutes do not show whether a vote came before or after a late arrival, MassVoter shows the result only. Councilors who recused are left out of that vote. Elections of the Vice President show the result only, with a note. We will ask the Council Clerk to confirm any noted vote.