Municipal Law Editing and Proofreading Services

One sentence in a zoning ordinance is read by a homeowner who wants a garage, by a developer's attorney looking for room to move, by a code officer who has to apply it forty times a year, and eventually by a judge. All four are entitled to reach the same conclusion from it. That is a harder standard than most legal writing has to meet, and it is the standard a municipal document is held to, because the people governed by the rule are also the people who are presumed to be able to read it.

Ordinances and amending ordinances make up most of the municipal work that reaches us. Staff reports and recommendations to council or commission arrive with them, along with comprehensive plans, zoning text and map amendments, and development agreements. Public notices, hearing materials, procurement and bid documents, minutes, and the plain-language summaries that accompany a proposal come through the same files.

Amending ordinances are the most error-prone documents in local government and the least glamorous to check. An amendment operates on text somewhere else, so it can only be read correctly alongside the thing it amends. A section is renumbered and three cross-references elsewhere in the code still point at the old number. A definition is amended in one article and used unamended in another. A schedule is replaced without the replacing text saying which version it replaces. The federal drafting rules put the underlying point plainly: a reference must be "in terms of the specific titles, chapters, parts, sections, and paragraphs involved", and "ambiguous references such as 'herein', 'above', 'below', and similar expressions may not be used."¹ The same rules require each codified section to carry a complete citation of the authority under which it is issued, which is the habit an amending ordinance borrows when it recites the enabling provision it acts under.² Local codes are not bound by that rule, and they are read by people who behave as though they were. Every cross-reference in an amendment can be followed to its destination and checked, and where one lands somewhere that no longer exists, it comes back marked.

Definitions carry the same risk in a different form. An ordinance defines a term in its definitions article and then, three pages later, uses the ordinary meaning of the same word in an operative clause. Neither use is wrong on its own. Together they leave a code officer to decide which was intended, which is a decision the ordinance was supposed to make. Checking it is mechanical: every defined term against every use, in the amended text and in the sections the amendment leaves untouched.

Staff reports are written for readers who are not specialists and are reading at night. A council member has a packet, a meeting in the morning, and constituents who will ask what was decided. The recommendation should be findable in seconds, stated once, in words the reader can repeat accurately without having the document in front of them. Most staff reports contain that sentence. It is usually on page four, after the background, and phrased as a summary of the analysis rather than as the thing being asked for. Moving it and stating it plainly is the single most useful edit these documents receive.

Public notices and hearing materials answer to a rule that many municipalities meet by accident rather than by design. A local government is a public entity under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the regulation requires it to "take appropriate steps to ensure that communications with applicants, participants, members of the public, and companions with disabilities are as effective as communications with others."³ A separate section requires the entity to make information about those obligations available in a manner sufficient to apprise interested persons of their rights.⁴ Whether a particular notice satisfies either is a legal question for the municipality's attorney. What editing can do is remove the obstacles that are simply obstacles: a notice written in one 90-word sentence, a hearing date buried in the fourth paragraph, a described boundary with no plain restatement of which streets it runs between, and a document laid out so that a screen reader meets the map caption before the date.

Plain language in consultation material is not a courtesy either. If residents cannot tell from a notice what is being proposed, the consultation has happened in form and not in substance, and that becomes an argument later. The remedy is rarely simplification in the sense of leaving things out. It is usually ordering: what is proposed, where, what changes for a person who lives there, what happens next, and by when a person has to respond.

We do not advise on any of it. Whether an ordinance is within the municipality's authority, whether a notice period is adequate, whether an amendment achieves what the council intended, and whether a procedure has been followed are legal questions belonging to the municipality and its attorney, and they reach us decided. We do not change a boundary, a date, a threshold, or a defined term. Where the text and a schedule disagree, or where a cross-reference points at something that is no longer there, both are set out and the drafter settles which is right.

Everything sent to us is confidential, including drafts before they are published, closed-session material, and reports that have not yet gone to council.