Your posting checklist says 72 hours. It has been wrong since September.

Somewhere in your city hall there is a checklist, a wall calendar or a well-worn habit that says the agenda goes up 72 hours before the meeting.

It has been wrong since 1 September 2025, and it is wrong in the direction that gets you late.

What changed

HB 1522 replaced the 72-hour posting requirement with a new one: notice must be posted at least three business days before the scheduled date of the meeting.

Three things about how that is counted, because this is where it goes wrong.

• Business days. Weekends do not count. Holidays do not count.
• Before the date, not before the time. The old rule measured to the hour of the meeting. The new one measures to the date.
• The meeting date itself does not count toward the three.

It is not a simplification, and it is usually longer

The instinct on hearing “three business days” is that it is roughly the same as 72 hours, expressed more sensibly. It is not.

Take a Monday morning meeting. Under the old rule, 72 hours back from Monday at 9am is Friday at 9am — posting Friday morning was fine. Under the new rule, you count back three business days from Monday, not counting Monday: Friday, Thursday, Wednesday. The notice has to be up the previous Wednesday.

That is two days earlier for the same meeting, and it moves again whenever a holiday falls in the window. A Tuesday meeting in a week with a Monday holiday needs its notice up the previous Wednesday as well, because the Monday does not count.

This is the sort of arithmetic that is trivial to do once, carefully, and unreliable to do fifty times a year under pressure — which is the whole reason it belongs in software rather than in a habit.

Two exceptions worth knowing. A governmental body with statewide jurisdiction posts at least seven days before the meeting. A regional body whose jurisdiction extends into four or more counties stays at 72 hours. Everybody else — the cities, counties, districts and authorities this is mostly about — is on three business days.

The other half of HB 1522, which nobody mentions

The same bill added a requirement to budget agendas, and it has gone comparatively unremarked because it only bites once a year.

When a governmental body is going to discuss or adopt a budget, the notice must include:

1. A physical copy of the proposed budget — unless it is clearly accessible on the home page of the body’s website; and
2. A taxpayer impact statement, showing the effect on property taxes for a median-valued homestead.

That second item is not a formality. It is a computed figure, derived from the proposed budget and the tax rate implied by it, published as part of the notice — which means it inherits every one of the problems in how a Texas city arrives at its tax rate. It is produced under time pressure, from figures that move, by whoever assembles the packet.

And it is now a notice requirement. Notice requirements are the things that make actions voidable.

The problem that is not about timing at all

Posting on time is necessary and it is not sufficient, and the second requirement causes more trouble than the first.

Section 551.041 requires notice of the subject of each item. The test is whether a member of the public, reading the posted notice, understands what is going to be discussed.

Wording that has been held insufficient:

• “New business”
• “Other business”
• “Personnel”
• “Litigation matters”
• “Presentation by Commissioner” — with nothing indicating the subject

And the standard is not fixed. It scales with how much the subject matters to the community. Phrasing adequate for hiring a schoolteacher has been held inadequate for hiring a senior administrator, on the reasoning that the more consequential the decision, the more specific the public is entitled to have the notice be.

That is an uncomfortable rule to work with, because it means an agenda item that was fine last month can be insufficient this month on the same words, if the subject has become contentious. There is no phrasing you can save and reuse forever.

What a defect costs

Under section 551.141, action taken in violation of the chapter is voidable. Not void automatically — challengeable, and capable of being undone by a court.

The scope is item by item. If one agenda item is too vague on an otherwise properly posted agenda, no action may be taken on that item, and the rest of the agenda stands.

This is the same shape as the notice requirement before a rezoning, covered in what two hundred feet is measured from: a small procedural step, done loosely, that unwinds a decision months later. And it surfaces the same way. Nobody notices a defective agenda at the time — a defective agenda looks exactly like a good one from the inside. It surfaces when somebody with a reason to look goes back through the packet, which is usually after the decision has begun to affect them.

No, you cannot fix it with an emergency posting

The tempting escape when a deadline has been missed is to post the item as an emergency. It does not work, and the statute is specific about why.

An emergency or urgent public necessity exists only where immediate action is required because of an imminent threat to public health and safety, or a reasonably unforeseeable situation. A deadline that was missed because somebody was on leave is neither. It was foreseeable and nothing is imminent.

There are two further limits. The notice has to clearly identify the emergency that justifies it. And deliberation at that meeting is confined to the matter directly related to the identified emergency, plus whatever was already properly posted before the supplemental notice went up. You cannot use an emergency item as a door into the rest of the agenda.

A related provision is more useful and less known. Under section 551.0411, if a body recesses an open meeting to the following regular business day, it does not need to post notice of the continuation, provided the recess is in good faith and not a device to get around the Act. But if, on that following day, the meeting is continued again to some other day, written notice is required for that one.

Why this is a computation problem

Every failure described above is a small arithmetic or drafting task that a competent person does correctly in isolation and unreliably at volume.

The posting date is computed, not chosen. Three business days back from a meeting date, skipping weekends and the holidays your body actually observes. That is a function. Written on a wall calendar in January, it is a set of dates that a rescheduled meeting quietly invalidates.

Rescheduling is where it breaks. Moving a meeting moves its posting deadline, and a meeting moved forward can land inside a window that has already closed. A calendar entry does not know this. A computed deadline does.

The agenda has a second requirement that no date check will catch. Software cannot judge whether wording is specific enough — that needs a person, and often the city attorney. What software can do is make sure the question was asked: flagging items whose wording matches the patterns that have been held insufficient, and refusing to let an item be posted with a placeholder title that somebody meant to come back to.

The record has to survive. When somebody asks two years later whether an item was properly noticed, the useful answer is the posted notice, the timestamp it went up, and the timestamp it came down — kept because the system kept them, not reconstructed from a website nobody archived.

What we would build

Honestly: there is no agendas and minutes demonstration on this site to send you to, which is a gap and worth saying rather than papering over. The nearest thing is the public records office, which is the same department doing the same kind of arithmetic — statutory deadlines computed from the statute and a date rather than typed into a field, tolling that stops and restarts the clock properly, and warnings that name the consequence rather than the date.

An agenda system built the same way is a small piece of work with a specific shape. Meeting dates in, posting deadlines computed out, against a holiday calendar the city can edit because the holidays the city observes are the city’s own choice. Rescheduling that recomputes rather than warns. Item wording checked against the phrases that have failed before. A posting log that is evidence rather than a memory.

None of it is clever. It is the difference between a rule everyone knows and a rule nothing can forget — and since September, the rule everyone knows has been the wrong one.