What's being proposed, what's being built, what it costs, and who decided it — assembled from the Town of Milton's own public records.
Operator: Mike Shoss
Corrections: themiltonrecord@gmail.com
Corrections are acted on within 48 hours. Every member of Council is welcome to have their page reviewed and errors fixed — the aim is an accurate record, not a scorecard.
Post-meeting minutes published by the Town through eSCRIBE. A deterministic parser reads each set of minutes for resolutions, who moved and seconded them, the outcome, declared conflicts of interest, and who was recorded present. No language model reads or counts anything on these pages.
Partial record. Covers 113 of 119 meetings (2022-10-27 to 2026-07-30). Counts below are of what has been parsed, not of the whole term — the remaining 6 meetings have no published minutes yet or failed to parse.
On a partial sample of 21 meetings, one councillor appeared to have moved zero motions. Across the full term he had moved 24. Publishing the first number would have been false, about a named person, during an election. That is why no page publishes without its coverage stated.
Every certified candidate gets the same page whether or not anything is known about them. Filing details come from the Clerk's certified list. Where a campaign website was filed, that site is read in full and quotations from it are checked against the page they are attributed to before they appear here — a quotation that cannot be found in the captured text is dropped rather than published.
Social accounts are listed only when the candidate links to them from their own website or filed them with the Clerk. Nothing is found by searching for a name, because an account that turns out to belong to someone else, published beside a real candidate's name, is a harm no amount of later correction undoes.
The side-by-side comparison sets three things next to each other on each theme: what the candidate answered, what their own website says, and — for sitting members — the motions they moved and the votes recorded in their name. Two limits are enforced in the code rather than promised in this paragraph:
Local coverage that names a member or a candidate is listed on their page: headline, outlet, date and a link. The source is InsideHalton / the Milton Champion, read with the publisher’s permission, across six Milton-scoped queries: council, councillors, the mayor, development, budget and transit. Articles are also added by hand when the operator finds one the feeds do not carry.
Sources are named because choosing them is an editorial act. Every fetch is checked against the site’s robots.txt first; where a publisher disallows automated reading and no permission exists, nothing is fetched and the piece can only be added by a person reading it and entering it, which is not crawling. Where permission does exist, it is recorded with the article rather than assumed.
A piece counts as naming someone only on their full name, or their title and surname together. A bare surname is never matched — Best, Ali, Gray, Marshall and Khan are ordinary words, and attributing a story to the wrong named person is the worst mistake this section could make.
News never becomes a position. A reporter writing that a councillor “backs expansion” has compressed what was said into their own words. Recording that as the member’s stance would mean this site telling you a named person holds a view they may never have stated — and the side-by-side comparison could then flag a contradiction against a position they never took. That comparison is only fair because both sides of it are things the person themselves wrote or submitted, so third-party reporting is kept out of it entirely. The database has nowhere to record it.
Where an article quotes someone directly, those are their own words and are shown as such: printed verbatim, checked against the article they are attributed to, and dropped if the quotation cannot be found there or does not end where a sentence ends. No language model reads any news article.
Who said it is decided by grammar, not by proximity. Only the standard attribution shapes count — “…,” said Councillor X; “…,” Councillor X said; “…,” he said, where the speaker is whoever was named last before the quotation; and Councillor X said, “…”. Where two people are named and neither shape settles it, the quotation is dropped. An earlier version scored by distance instead, and gave a councillor’s words to the mayor because his name sat nearer the quotation marks; putting one member’s words in another’s mouth is the worst thing this section could do, so it now declines far more often than it guesses.
Analytics. This site loads Google Analytics, which records the pages visited, a rough location and device type, and sets a cookie to tell repeat visits apart. It is not used for advertising and nothing is sold or shared. A tracker blocker stops it and nothing else changes.
An independent project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the Town of Milton, and not a substitute for the official record. It does not rate, rank or recommend candidates, and it takes no position on any of them. For the official 2026 election information, including the certified candidate list, see the Town's election page.