Adopted tools, not invented ones, and a City Hall residents can actually watch.
Two platforms already exist. North Bay will adopt them, not build them.
Consul and Decidim are open-source civic participation platforms originally developed in Madrid and Barcelona. They support resident proposals, voting, public responses, configurable proposal statuses and implementation tracking. Both are used internationally. North Bay will compare them against any comparable option, publish the hosting, implementation and licensing costs, and select the platform that best fits the City’s needs.
Nextdoor for Public Agencies covers the neighbour-to-neighbour half. Free for the city and free for residents, verified by address, organized by mapped neighbourhood boundaries, already running in thousands of municipalities. The city will use it to post practical needs directly, including on behalf of Hope Awaits Ministries, The Gathering Place, Northern Pines and the other organizations named in section 1, and to hear back from residents willing to help. It doesn’t replace the resident-to-resident conversations already happening there. It adds the city, and the organizations doing the actual work, to a network that already exists.
Open City Hall
Council meeting livestreams should not have comments turned off. Agendas should be summarized in plain language. Meeting videos should be timestamped. Votes should be searchable. Budget lines should be readable by a normal person. City Hall should provide a monthly public answer to the questions residents have raised most often. No more procedural burial or institutional fog.
What this replaces, specifically
The 2026 capital budget assigns $500,000 in 2026 and another $500,000 in 2027 to Digital Modernization and Customer-Service Strategy implementation, a million dollars for a vendor-built roadmap. The issue-submission, voting, status-tracking and public-answer portion of that roadmap is what Consul or Decidim and Nextdoor replace, adopted software instead of a commissioned one. What they do not replace: cybersecurity, payment processing, permit systems, financial records, disaster recovery and the phone and in-person service North Bay is still required to run. That work still needs to be built or contracted. This section only claims the part it actually covers.
Publish the consultant ledger
The city publishes budget totals and annual audited statements, but not one contract-level register showing what it pays outside consultants, for what, and with what result. North Bay will publish that ledger quarterly, every contract over $5,000, including change orders and a link to the deliverable wherever disclosure allows it, with the full citywide consultant total published within six months of year-end using one consistent definition.