About the data

The County is the source of record

The Clerk of the Board of Supervisors publishes agendas, minutes and votes through a system called Legistar, at sonoma-county.legistar.com. This site reads that public record through the day and shows it arranged by meeting and by Supervisor. It adds no votes of its own, and every item links to the County’s page for it. If this site and the County’s record differ, the County’s record is right.

This site last checked the County’s record on September 21, 2026 at 10:07 PM Pacific.

Votes arrive after the minutes

A vote appears in the record when the Clerk publishes a meeting’s minutes, usually days to weeks after the meeting. Until the County marks minutes final they can be corrected, and this site marks those meetings as draft. Right now 9 meetings with votes have minutes that are not final.

March 2020 to October 2021, and early 2019

The record begins with the meeting of November 15, 2018. The County keeps votes in a vote table, one row for each Supervisor on each item, and that is what this site reads first. But from the meeting of March 17, 2020 until November 2, 2021, while the Board met largely by video, the table is almost empty: three items in nineteen months. The same is true of the first weeks of 2019. The Board voted throughout. The Clerk recorded those votes another way.

Votes read from the Clerk’s minutes text

In those months the Clerk typed each vote into the minutes text of the item, like this:

Where the vote table is empty, this site reads the vote from that text, and marks every such item “Read from the Clerk’s minutes text”. The downloads mark them too, in the column vote_source. The reading is strict, and it never guesses. A vote is read only when:

• the text has exactly one “Board Action” and one set of vote lines, so there is one motion and no doubt which vote belongs to it;
• every name is a Supervisor who sat on the Board that day;
• nobody is named twice.

Anything else is quoted on its meeting’s page under “In the Clerk’s words” and is not counted anywhere: items with several motions, such as a budget hearing; a vote line with no stated Board Action to attach it to; votes that include someone who is not a Supervisor, such as a city’s mayor sitting as a director of a sanitation district; and the Clerk’s slips, such as a Supervisor listed under both Ayes and Noes.

To test the reading, FivePaths ran it over the items where the County recorded a vote both ways, in the vote table and in the text. Read under these rules, the text matched the table on all 13 such items, 65 votes of 65. Under looser rules it did not: a single vote line in the text sometimes belongs to a side motion, while the table holds the main one. That is why the rules are strict. It remains FivePaths’s reading of the Clerk’s text, not the County’s vote table, and the County’s minutes are the authority.

What FivePaths adds

Contested

An item where the Board split: some Supervisors voted Aye and some Nay. A unanimous vote is not contested, whichever way it went, and an abstention, a recusal or an absence does not make it so. The County does not use this label.

Consent calendar

The Board approves its consent calendar in one motion, and the County records that vote on every item. This site treats consent items, appointments and gold resolutions as the consent calendar, going by the County’s type for each item, and folds them away on meeting pages so they do not bury the rest.

Search

The search on the Votes page reads each file’s title and the County’s staff report, the plain text the County publishes through Legistar. It finds words, not topics: a report that speaks of “federal immigration enforcement” and never says “ICE” is not found by searching for ICE. Attachments, such as resolutions and contracts, are not searched. The passage shown under a result is the County’s text.

Department or agency

County staff type on each file the department that brought it. FivePaths merges spellings of the same name (“County Counsel”, “county counsel”, “CC”) and nothing more: a department the County renamed stays under the name on the file.

District of an item

County staff also type the supervisorial district or districts a file concerns, in more than two hundred spellings. FivePaths reads them into District 1 to 5 or countywide, and leaves out the one file in eleven where the text names none. It records what staff saw the file as concerning, not everything that affects a district.

Districts and terms

Entered by FivePaths. The County’s Legistar record does not carry districts, and leaves out the terms of Supervisors Gorin and Zane.

Agreement between Supervisors

FivePaths’s arithmetic: of the items on which two Supervisors both voted Aye or Nay, the share on which they voted the same way.

Movers and seconders

The County’s record names them only from about 2023, so those counts start there.

Downloads

One row per Supervisor per item, with the link to the County’s record. Free to use; please credit the County of Sonoma as the source.

• All votes, CSV
• All votes, JSON

Who publishes this

This site is published by FivePaths, independently of the County of Sonoma. It takes no position on any vote.