Engaging Madison City Government

There are several ways to make your voice heard for the City of Madison Wisconsin. The City Council (whose members are called alders) is made up of representatives from districts. You can see a map of the districts and find the name of your own  alder on https://www.cityofmadison.com/council  which also gives the email address you can use to send a message to all the alders at once ( allalders@cityofmadison.com  or council@cityofmadison.com). This same page also gives a phone number and a fax number as well as a “contact council” form. To be an effective advocate over time, it is valuable to get to know your alder and what is important to them in general, outside a specific campaign.

The list of all city committees and commissions is at https://www.cityofmadison.com/city-hall/committees  This page also includes a link to “watch meetings online” which lists all the upcoming meetings available online. After a meeting is over, you can also access a recording of that meeting from the same site.  You can also navigate to the page for a particular committee. So, for example, if you are interested in meetings of the Police Civilian Oversight Board (PCOB) you can navigate to its page ( https://www.cityofmadison.com/city-hall/committees/police-civilian-oversight-board/ ) and see a list of future and past meetings as well as the email for the committee and information about it.

There will often be “action alerts” asking you to show you support around some specific issue. The list of upcoming meetings of the Common Council is posted at https://www.cityofmadison.com/council . For each meeting date, you can click on it to get to a page that shows a link to its its agenda (as a PDF document that can be viewed online) and whether the meeting is in person (and if so where) or online or both. Agendas for future meetings are sometimes not available until close to the meeting date. Once the agenda is posted, each item on the agenda will have a number and will have a link to the supporting materials about that agenda item.

If the meeting in person, the address will be shown. City Council meetings are in person at the City County Building 210 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, room 201. They are also available virtually. If you want to attend virtually you must register for each individual meeting to get a link to that meeting via email. The links are sent quickly so it is possible to do this at the last minute.  Some committee meetings are only in person, some only virtual, and some hybrid. City Council meetings can also be viewed on television and listened to by phone: the information is on the meeting page.

If you want to speak at any meeting (either in person or virtually) you must register in advance and will receive information about how to attend as a participant. It is also possible to register your opinion on an agenda item without asking to speak. You will need to know the number of the agenda item to do this.

You can send also written comments about an item on the agenda using the email address given on the meeting agenda page. It is possible to send an email to every member of the City Council using the allalders email address.

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