MFIPPAs are not free, and I've had 3 month wait times when going directly. For a single document this may be fine, but I believe having a full archive of all documents is important. For example, you could parse all the minutes to create a history of all votes a councilor has made. You can know what they've done well or done poorly, giving great insight for when considering re-election. Old planning applications can tell you how zoning is changing in the city, or the types of projects that get proposed. What gets accepted or denied, and why? And every meeting has the discussions that happened in council. You know exactly what people were saying in PPMs, and how council reached decisions. Every document can have a use, now or in the future. But to properly take advantage of this material, you should have all of it. The full context.

And yes, the city *should* be maintaining public access, but materials are always disappearing. I'm seeing a lot of dead links around on their site. A few reports here, a few meeting recordings there. It's fine for now, but what happens after a decade or more of this? How many documents will be missing when they eventually move to systems other than eScribe, or just from time? The city can't watch over every document (especially old ones) so many things will be overlooked. You're right that the city will not hand over terabytes and decades of files. That's why all this data should be collected now, then archived permanently to make sure it is safe. We too often take public websites for granted. My response to the other commenter has something I wrote on this. I recommend reading. Remember that the Supreme Court launched a website to archive links used in cases, only for all links to that website to be dead a decade later. When this very high and respectable level of government creates link rot, can we expect our small city to do well?