About
An independent site tracking public data about the Town of South Kingstown. Not run by or affiliated with the town.
Part of Publick
South Kingstown Publick is one of the Publick sites, which publish the public record of towns and cities every day. The name comes from Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, the first newspaper in the American colonies. It was printed in Boston in 1690 and shut down after one issue for printing without permission.
How it works
- Updated every morning from public sources.
- Every number links to where it came from.
- New agendas and minutes are in an RSS feed.
- Each Sunday, a weekly digest lists the week's meetings and what was decided at those whose minutes were posted.
- Summaries written by AI are labeled on each meeting page.
- Mistakes are corrected openly, with a note on the page.
Sources
- 311 requests: SeeClickFix (opens in new tab), public requests only, under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (opens in new tab) license. How the 311 numbers work.
- Meetings, agendas, and minutes: the town's calendar (opens in new tab) and its meeting portal (opens in new tab) (CivicClerk). Agendas and minutes of the meetings on the portal are saved when posted, from January 2026 on; other meetings link to their agendas where the town posts them.
- School Committee meetings, agendas, and minutes: the Rhode Island Secretary of State's Open Meetings portal (opens in new tab), where every public body in the state files its notices and minutes, from January 2026 on.
- Property tax: the Rhode Island Division of Municipal Finance (opens in new tab)'s tables of tax rates, net assessed values, and tax levies by class of property. Property tax per resident, and the state's median rate, are calculated by Publick, with the U.S. Census Bureau's population estimates (opens in new tab); the budget page says how. Rhode Island publishes no average tax bill.
- Unemployment: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (opens in new tab). Town rates aren't seasonally adjusted, so each month is compared with the same month last year.
- Schools: the Rhode Island Department of Education's report card data files (opens in new tab) (graduation rates, chronic absenteeism, and spending per pupil) and its assessment data portal (opens in new tab) (RICAS test results).
- Housing: U.S. Census Bureau Building Permits Survey (opens in new tab) and American Community Survey (opens in new tab) (through Census Reporter (opens in new tab)).
- Elected officials: listed by hand from official town and school websites, last checked October 4, 2026. See Who represents you.
- Voting precinct maps: RIGIS (opens in new tab), 2022 boundaries.
- Street maps: OpenStreetMap (opens in new tab), drawn with Leaflet (opens in new tab). Map images load from OpenStreetMap's servers.
Data status
Each source, the latest figures this site has, and when it last checked. Meetings and requests are checked every day. Figures that are published monthly or yearly are checked weekly or monthly, and are marked "Behind" only when newer figures should have been published by now; the maintainer is alerted automatically.
| Source | Latest | Last checked | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meetings (CivicClerk) | – | Up to date | |
| School Committee meetings (Open Meetings portal) | – | Up to date | |
| 311 requests | – | Up to date | |
| 311 scorecard | – | Up to date | |
| Tax rates and levy | Fiscal year 2026 tax rates; Fiscal year 2026 tax levy | Up to date. Next: Fiscal year 2027 tax rates usually by December 1, 2026; Fiscal year 2027 tax levy usually by January 1, 2027. | |
| School figures | Class of 2025 graduation rate; Spring 2026 state test results; 2025–26 attendance; 2024–25 spending per pupil | Up to date. Next: Class of 2026 graduation rate usually by December 1, 2027; Spring 2027 state test results usually by October 1, 2027; 2026–27 attendance usually by December 1, 2027; 2025–26 spending per pupil usually by December 1, 2027. | |
| Unemployment rate (BLS) | August 2026 rate | Up to date. Next: September 2026 rate usually by November 10, 2026. | |
| Housing figures | 2025 building permits; August 2026 building permits; ACS 2024 5-year estimates | Up to date. Next: 2026 building permits usually by June 1, 2027; September 2026 building permits usually by November 1, 2026; ACS 2025 5-year estimates usually by December 15, 2026. | |
| Elected officials | – | Up to date. Next: a check after the election of November 3, 2026. | |
| Meeting summaries | – | – | Up to date |
– means none yet: no figures collected, or not checked yet.
AI summaries
Meeting summaries are written by AI (Claude Haiku 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5, by Anthropic). They aren't checked by a person before posting. The town's document is the official record, and every summary links to it.
On the pages in other languages, each summary is translated automatically by AI (Claude Haiku 5.5, by Anthropic) from the English summary, and may have errors. Translations aren't checked by a person either. Two checks stand in: one without AI compares each translation's names, numbers, amounts, times, and decisions with the English, and a second pass by AI reviews its meaning. A translation that fails either is replaced by the English summary. Every translated summary links to the English.
Every summary is then checked against the town's document by a program, without AI: each number, date, and name in it must be in the document, and in minutes, each decision must match the minutes' own words. Against the document's full text, what isn't found isn't shown. A line under each summary says how it was checked:
- Checked against the town's PDF: against the document's own text.
- Partly checked: some pages are scanned images, and only the pages with text could be checked, so nothing is held back.
- Checked against an AI transcription: the PDF is a scanned image, so the summary is compared with AI's reading of it. Both come from AI and can share a mistake, so nothing is held back.
- Not checked: there was no text to check against, or the summary is older than the check that matches decisions to the minutes' own words.
Scanned agendas and minutes, which screen readers can't read, get a readable version of their full text, transcribed by AI and labeled that way. Where a document's own text can be laid out, the full text is the town's own words instead. Every page links the town's PDF.
Reusing what's here
The summaries, headlines, decision lists, and data that Publick compiles are free to reuse, even commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (opens in new tab) (CC BY 4.0). Please credit them like this, with a link to the document the summary came from:
Summary by Publick (publick.org), AI-generated from the town's agenda.
Some of what's here keeps its own terms:
- 311 requests keep SeeClickFix's CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (opens in new tab) license, which doesn't allow commercial use.
- The town's agendas and minutes, and their full text on this site, are public records.
- Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics figures are in the public domain.
The meetings, summaries, and decisions can be downloaded together from the Data page.
The full terms are in the network's license (opens in new tab).
Privacy
We count visits so we know which pages are useful. That's all.
- No ads, and no tracking across other sites.
- One cookie, only if you use the language switch: it remembers the language you chose, and nothing else.
- What you search for, and which street you look up, is never recorded.
- Nothing that identifies you is kept, not even your IP address.
- The one exception is the weekly digest by email, if you sign up: your email address, the town and language you chose, and the IP address you signed up from go to Buttondown, the service that sends it, which keeps them until you unsubscribe (its privacy policy (opens in new tab)). The emails don't record whether you open them or which links you click, and this site keeps none of it.
Counting is done by GoatCounter (opens in new tab), a privacy-friendly service. It notes the page, the site that linked here, and your screen size, along with the browser type and rough location (such as the country or state) that every website can see. We only look at the totals.
Corrections and contact
Spot a mistake or have a question? Email south-kingstown-ri@publick.org or open an issue on the project's public issue tracker (opens in new tab). Fixes are noted on the page they affect.