A guide for residents

How to find your town’s public notices

Board meetings, public hearings, road closures, bids, elections and legal notices are usually published somewhere nobody looks. Here is where to look for them, and an easier way to keep up with your own town.

Where public notices are usually published

A municipality’s notices are usually published in one or more of these places:

  • A newspaper of record
  • A bulletin board in a hallway
  • A PDF on the town’s website

Each of them works if you know where to look and remember to keep looking. People miss hearings about their own street.

If you are not sure where your town publishes its notices, or a notice you expected is missing, contact the clerk’s office directly.

What kinds of notices a town posts

A town posts more than meeting dates. Towncrier files every notice under one of ten fixed categories, so you can mute the ones you do not care about and keep the ones you do. There is deliberately no emergency category.

  • Meetings
  • Public hearings
  • Legal notices
  • Roads
  • Services
  • Bids & RFPs
  • Elections
  • Events
  • Announcements
  • Jobs

An easier way: follow your town on Towncrier

Follow your town and Towncrier tells you when it posts something. In the app, it takes three steps.

  1. Open Find a town

    Search for your town. Try your town’s name, your ZIP code, or your county.

  2. Tap Follow

    The button changes to “Following”, and your town’s notices show up in Your feed.

  3. Choose what reaches you

    In Settings, tap Turn on notifications, then switch off any category you do not care about. Muting a category stops notices in it reaching you.

Notices are never sent overnight. Something published late in the evening reaches you the following morning, deliberately.

Towncrier is not an emergency notification system. Do not rely on it for life safety.

No account to make

Towncrier never asks for your name, your email address or your phone number, and there is nowhere to type them. You do not sign up, and there is nothing to sign in to.

Published by your town

Every notice on Towncrier is written and published by the municipality named on it. We do not write notices, edit them, or decide what a town publishes. Towncrier is an additional place to read what a town has published.

On the web, too

Towncrier is on the web as well as in the app.

If your town is not on Towncrier

Towncrier adds one municipality at a time, and only after verifying it is a real government body. A town that has not been verified, or has chosen not to appear in our directory, will not show up. We do not list towns that have not signed up.

If you would like your town on Towncrier, ask your clerk to get in touch — or send them the page for municipalities.

In the meantime, check the places above, or ask the clerk’s office where your town publishes its notices.

For residents

Get the app

Follow your town and Towncrier tells you when it posts something.

Read on the web: find your town