Municipal Governments Editing and Proofreading Services

Municipal government is the order of government people actually encounter, and almost all of it happens in public. A staff report is published days before council debates it, read by residents who will speak to it, by the applicant whose project depends on it, by a journalist looking for the line, and by councillors who received forty other pages the same week. Nowhere else does technical advice get written for an audience this mixed, this engaged, and this able to turn a poorly chosen sentence into a two-hour delegation.

We edit what municipalities and their departments produce — staff reports and recommendations to council, council and committee agendas and minutes, bylaws and their explanatory material, official community plans and zoning amendments, development permit and rezoning reports, public hearing notices and materials, budget documents and financial plans, asset management plans, service level and performance reporting, procurement documents and award reports, public consultation material and engagement summaries, utility and tax notices to residents, emergency and service disruption communications, and correspondence with residents and businesses. Our editors check that a report gives council a decision it can make and gives the public an explanation it can follow.

The staff report is the document that runs a municipality, and the recommendation is where its discipline shows. A report that analyses thoroughly and recommends that council "receive this report for information" when a decision is plainly needed has left councillors to invent the motion in the meeting, which is how bad amendments happen. We rewrite these so the recommendation is drafted as the resolution council would pass, so the financial implications state the amount, the source and the effect on the tax requisition rather than "there are no financial implications at this time" where there plainly are, so what the public said during consultation is reported including the views staff disagree with, and so the options council actually has — including refusing — are set out with their consequences. Where the professional advice is unwelcome, we keep it plain: councils are entitled to decide against staff advice, and the report's job is to make sure they do so knowing what they are deciding.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including closed-meeting material, draft reports and matters under negotiation. We are editors rather than planners, engineers or legal advisers, and we offer no view on any recommendation, application or bylaw. What we can do is make reports decision-ready for council and comprehensible to the residents reading them online the night before.