The New City Clerk's First 90 Days: A 30, 60, 90 Day Plan

The first week in the clerk's office rarely feels like a beginning. There is usually a meeting already on the calendar, a records request already in progress, and a stack of things your predecessor meant to finish. Whether you were hired from outside or promoted from deputy, the job starts in motion, and the easy path is to spend three months answering whatever lands on the desk.

That approach keeps the office running, but it does not show you where the risk sits. In my experience overseeing meeting operations, most problems in a clerk's office do not start inside the office. They start at the seams: between the clerk and the city attorney on notice language, between a department and the clerk on packet deadlines, between IT and the clerk on who controls the archive. A new clerk who learns those seams early can head off the problems that otherwise surface in front of the council and the public.

This plan splits the first 90 days into three stretches. The first 30 days are for learning the calendar and the people. Days 31 to 60 are for building a legal deadline register and inventorying records and systems. Days 61 to 90 are for fixing one pain point, chosen on purpose, so you finish the quarter with a visible improvement and a clear picture of what comes next. Adjust the pace to your city. A clerk in a small town who also handles elections, business licenses and the front counter will move differently than a clerk with a staff of eight.

Week one: find the clocks that are already running

Before you plan anything, find out what is already in motion with a deadline attached. These items will not wait for you to settle in.

• The next regular meeting, any special meetings already called, and the posting deadline for each agenda.
• Public hearings that have been scheduled or promised, and whether required published, mailed or posted notice has gone out.
• Open public records requests: when each arrived and what response deadline applies under your state's law.
• Election activity, if your office administers municipal elections, including candidate filing periods and ballot measure deadlines.
• Ordinances adopted recently that still need publication, codification or a second reading.
• Your own onboarding requirements, such as an oath of office, an official bond, or a notary commission, if your city or state requires them for the clerk.

Ask your predecessor, your deputy, or the city manager's office to walk through this list with you in your first two or three days. If nobody can answer one of these questions, that is your first finding. It means the office has been relying on one person's memory, and that memory may have just walked out the door.

Write each item down with a date and an owner. A shared calendar works. A single printed sheet works too, as long as it exists somewhere other than your head and your deputy knows where it is.

Two warnings for this first week. First, do not assume the templates you inherited reflect current law. Notice language, posting locations and records response letters drift out of date, and the person who wrote them may have known which parts to quietly ignore. Second, if anything on the list looks late or uncertain, tell the city attorney and the city manager the same day. A missed notice found in week one is a fixable problem. The same missed notice found at the hearing is a delayed item at best and a legal challenge at worst.

Days 1 to 30: learn the calendar the city actually runs on

The adopted meeting schedule is a starting point, not the full calendar. The real calendar includes every recurring event that creates work for your office, and many of those events are owned by someone else.

Build a twelve-month view

Start with regular council meetings, then layer in everything that feeds them or competes with them:

• Boards and commissions your office supports, and which ones you fully staff versus only post notices for.
• The budget calendar: when the proposed budget goes to council, when workshops happen, when budget hearings must be held, and when adoption is required under your charter or state law.
• Annual filings that pass through your office, such as financial disclosure statements from elected officials and designated staff.
• Board and commission appointment cycles, term expirations, and when vacancies must be advertised.
• Elections, if your office has a role, and any periods that affect meeting scheduling.
• Recurring contracts, franchise agreements and annual renewals that come to council on a predictable schedule.
• Holidays, school breaks and local events that compete for the chamber or for members' availability.

Put all of it on one view that covers a full year. When you do, you will often find busy seasons stacked on top of each other in ways nobody planned, such as appointments, budget hearings and disclosure filings all landing in the same few weeks. You cannot fix that in month one, but you can see it coming and staff for it.

Sit through one full cycle before changing it

Treat your first meeting cycle as observation. Watch how items actually arrive, not how the written procedure says they arrive. Notice which departments submit complete reports, which ones send late items, how the manager's office reviews the draft agenda, where the packet gets stuck, and what happens in the last few days before posting.

Keep a running notes file with three columns: what happened, who was involved, and whether it looked like normal process or like a workaround. Workarounds are the most valuable thing you can find. They usually mark a seam where two teams never agreed on who owns a step, so someone quietly covers it. When that person goes on vacation or retires, the step disappears, and nobody notices until something breaks.

Learn the council's habits

Every council has its own rhythm. Some members read the packet early and send questions ahead of time. Others ask everything from the dais. Some want printed packets, and some rely on the clerk for procedural guidance during the meeting while others turn to the city attorney. Ask the mayor or chair, and the manager, how the council prefers to receive information and what has gone wrong in past meetings.

You are not changing anything yet. You are learning what normal looks like here so you can recognize when something is off.

Days 1 to 30: meet the people who touch the record

Clerk work depends on people who do not report to you. An hour with each of them in your first month is worth more than any procedure manual you inherit, partly because the manual probably does not describe the handoffs.

Who to meet and what to listen for

Ask the same four questions

Using the same questions in every conversation makes the answers easier to compare.

1. What does the clerk's office do that helps you most?
2. What has the clerk's office done that caused you a problem?
3. What do you need from us that you are not getting?
4. Is there anything you handle that might actually belong to us, or anything we handle that might belong to you?

The fourth question finds seams. You may hear that a department is never sure whether signed contracts go to the clerk or to finance, or that both planning and the clerk post hearing notices and nobody knows which posting is the official one. Write each answer down without judging it. These become your list of candidate fixes for days 61 to 90.

Also use this month to connect with your profession. Join your state municipal clerks association if you are not already a member, and look at the training and certification paths offered through the International Institute of Municipal Clerks. Ask the association whether it can connect you with an experienced clerk in a city your size. A mentor who has handled the same state law questions is hard to replace.

Build a legal deadline register

Start this document in your first month and finish it by day 60. It is the most important thing you will build in your first 90 days, because it turns the office's compliance obligations into something anyone on staff can check, not just the person who has been doing the job longest.

Requirements differ widely by state and by charter. A meeting posting period, records response time, or hearing notice rule in one state can look very different in the next, and home rule cities may have charter provisions or local ordinances that add to state law. Do not rely on a general article, including this one, for the specific rules. Confirm every entry with your city attorney and, where helpful, your state municipal clerks association.

Categories to research

• Open meeting notice: posting periods for regular, special and emergency meetings, required posting locations, and online posting rules.
• Public hearing notice: published, mailed and posted notice, which can differ by hearing type, such as land use, budget or fee changes.
• Public records: response deadlines, extension rules, fee rules, and any required written responses to requesters.
• Minutes: when drafts must be available, when they must be approved, and any posting requirement.
• Ordinances and resolutions: required readings, publication, effective dates and codification.
• Records retention: which state or local retention schedule applies and the approval process for destruction.
• Elections and filings: candidate filing, campaign finance reports, financial disclosure forms and oaths, if your office handles them.
• Boards and commissions: vacancy notice and appointment requirements.

What each entry should capture

For every requirement, record:

• The requirement in plain language.
• The legal source as identified by your city attorney, whether charter, ordinance, state law or adopted policy.
• The trigger, meaning the event that starts the clock.
• The deadline and how it is counted: calendar or business days, and whether holidays count.
• The owner in your office and a named backup.
• Any other office involved, such as the attorney reviewing notices or IT posting online.
• Where the template or form lives.

The "other office involved" column is where the register earns its keep. A notice deadline the clerk owns but that depends on a newspaper's publication schedule, or on the attorney's review, is only as reliable as the handoff. Write down how much lead time each partner needs, then build your internal deadline backward from that, not from the legal deadline itself.

When the register is complete, ask the city attorney to review it, flag anything missing, and tell you how they want to be notified when a deadline is at risk. Review it every year, and again whenever your state changes its open meeting or public records law.

Days 31 to 60: inventory records and systems

With the calendar and the people mapped, turn to what the office holds and the tools it uses. The goal is not to reorganize anything yet. The goal is to know what exists, where it lives, and who can get to it.

Records

Start with permanent records, because they carry the highest stakes:

• Adopted ordinances and resolutions, and whether there is a complete, indexed set.
• Approved minutes, as far back as the office holds them.
• The municipal code and how amendments get codified.
• Contracts, deeds, easements and agreements your office is responsible for keeping.
• Oaths, bonds and appointment records.
• Election records, if applicable.

For each category, note the format (paper, scanned, or created digitally), the location, whether an index exists, and whether there are gaps. Walk the physical spaces yourself: the vault, the basement, offsite storage, and any department that keeps clerk records of its own. You may find a department holding original signed contracts that belong in your custody, or a run of older minutes that exists only on paper.

Then check retention. Confirm which schedule applies, whether destruction has happened on schedule, and whether past destruction was documented. If records have piled up well past their retention period, or if records appear to have been destroyed without approval, take it to the attorney before you act. Destruction cannot be undone, and some records may be under a litigation hold you have not heard about yet. ARMA International publishes general records management guidance that can help you frame these conversations, but your state's retention schedule and your attorney's advice govern.

Systems and access

List every system your office depends on:

• Agenda and minutes software.
• Document management, or the shared drive where records are kept.
• The city website and any public records or transparency portal.
• Meeting recording and streaming tools.
• Email, including retention settings for council and staff accounts.
• Records request tracking, if any exists.
• The codification service or online code host.
• Election or campaign filing systems, if applicable.

For each one, record the administrator, who has access, the vendor contact, when the contract renews, and how data is backed up. Look closely for accounts tied to your predecessor's name or personal email, shared logins, and admin rights held by someone who has left. These are easy to overlook when everything is working and painful to sort out when you need to recover something quickly.

Do this inventory with IT, not around them. For each system, ask who owns it technically and who owns it as a records matter. Those are often different people. The gap between them is where an archive gets lost in a migration, or a retention setting gets changed without anyone in the clerk's office knowing.

Processes

Finally, document the handful of processes that happen every cycle: agenda building, packet assembly, posting, minutes, records requests and ordinance publication. One page each is enough. List the steps, the owner and every handoff to another team. These pages are what your deputy needs if you are out sick on posting day, and they are what you will use to choose your first fix.

Days 61 to 90: fix one pain point

By day 60 you will have a list of problems, and it may be long. The discipline of the last 30 days is to pick one and fix it well, instead of starting ten fixes and finishing none. One finished improvement builds credibility with departments and the manager. Ten half-finished ones build skepticism.

How to choose

Score each candidate against a few questions:

• Does it carry legal risk, such as a notice step that depends on one person remembering?
• Does it affect other teams, not just the clerk's office?
• Can it be fixed in about 30 days with resources you already have?
• Will the people affected notice the improvement?
• Do you have authority to make the change, or will you need the manager's backing?

The best first fix usually sits at a seam and becomes simple once ownership is defined. Problems that tend to fit:

• No written internal deadline for departments, so items arrive the day of posting.
• Signed contracts that end up in three different places depending on who handled them.
• Hearing notices posted by two offices with no agreement on which one is official.
• Records requests sitting in a shared inbox with no tracking of due dates.
• Draft minutes that wait for weeks because nobody owns the review step.

Avoid making a software replacement or a full records reorganization your first project. Both may be worth doing, but they take longer than 30 days, and starting them before you understand the office invites rework. Put them on the list for your day 90 memo instead.

How to make the fix stick

1. Write down the current process exactly as it happens, including the workarounds.
2. Agree on the new process with every team involved, in a short meeting rather than an email chain.
3. Put the decision in writing: a one-page procedure, a memo from the manager, or an update to an administrative policy, depending on how your city formalizes these things.
4. Tell everyone affected, including the date the change takes effect.
5. Check how it is working after one or two meeting cycles and adjust.

Get the manager's sign-off on anything that changes another department's obligations. A clerk can ask departments to meet a deadline. A memo from the manager makes it an expectation. That difference matters most at the seams, where nobody technically reports to you.

If you were promoted from inside the office

A deputy who moves up starts with real advantages: you already know the systems, the people and the calendar. The risks are just different.

• You may know the workarounds so well that you no longer see them. Do the full inventory anyway, and ask someone from outside the office to observe a meeting cycle and tell you what looks odd.
• Former peers now report to you. Have a direct conversation early about what changes and what stays the same.
• The tasks you used to do still need an owner. If you built the packet every cycle, decide who does it now, train them, and step back.
• People who relied on you informally will keep calling you for things that now belong to someone else. Redirect them politely and consistently until the new pattern sets.

A clerk hired from outside has the opposite problem: fresh eyes and no history. Lean on your deputy and longtime staff, and give them credit for what they know. They hold much of the office's institutional memory, often in no written form at all, and the inventory work in days 31 to 60 goes much faster with their help.

The 90-day plan at a glance

The day 90 memo

Close the quarter with a short memo to the city manager. Two or three pages is plenty. Cover what you learned from the calendar and the inventories, attach the deadline register, describe the fix you made and how it is working, and list the top risks you found, such as a records gap, an unowned system, or a notice process that depends on a single person.

End with proposed priorities for the next six months. If any of them need staff time, training or budget, say so plainly, and note when the next budget cycle opens so the manager can plan for it. This memo also gives the manager a record of what you inherited, which is useful for everyone if an old problem surfaces later.

Next steps

You do not need to finish everything in this article by day 90. You need to know where the deadlines are, who owns each handoff, and what the office holds. Start with these:

• This week, list every deadline already running and confirm an owner for each.
• Schedule your conversations with the manager, attorney, finance, IT, communications and department heads for the next few weeks.
• Contact your state municipal clerks association and the International Institute of Municipal Clerks about training, certification and a possible mentor.
• Open a blank document for your legal deadline register and add the first entries as you find them.
• Block time on your calendar for the records walk-through and the systems inventory with IT.
• Keep a running list of seams and workarounds so you are ready to choose your first fix at day 60.

If your inventory shows that past decisions and council commitments are hard to find in the archive, that is worth solving deliberately. Govera is one option to evaluate: it searches the full archive, tracks commitments made in minutes with citations to the source meeting, and has staff review every output. Compare it with other approaches on your own records before deciding.