How Meetings Are Recorded

A meeting starts on the calendar, ahead of time. The NA Secretary (or whoever the association designates) records the meeting and produces minutes in the city’s standard .docx template afterward. Officers review the draft, agree it accurately captures what happened, and the Secretary marks it approved.

Once approved, minutes are locked. The platform refuses to update them at the database level — this isn’t just a UI choice. The minutes table has a trigger that blocks UPDATE and DELETE on any row where `approved_at IS NOT NULL`. The trigger fires before the application logic ever sees the request. A compromised application could not silently rewrite an approved meeting record.

Approved meeting minutes are the legal record of an NA. They’re what gets cited in zoning disputes, election challenges, and CDBG compliance audits. A platform that lets approved minutes drift is a platform that can be used to rewrite history after the fact — which is the exact thing the Citizen Participation Plan was designed to prevent.

If something genuinely needs to change after approval — typo, missing attendee, address correction — the path is a public correction added as a new follow-up record, not an in-place edit. The original approved version stays exactly as it was approved.

Approved minutes are public by default. Anyone who lands on the platform can read them. That’s how civic transparency works.

Drafts and pending-review minutes are private to the NA’s officers. Residents in the NA can see that a meeting happened (the calendar entry is public) but won’t see the minutes until they’re approved.

The full edit history of any draft is in the audit log: every save, every reviewer comment, every status transition. So even though approved minutes don’t change, you can always reconstruct exactly how they got from first draft to approved.