Tri-Lakes Town Square needs volunteers to cover government meetings in Saranac Lake, Lake Placid, and Tupper Lake. No experience or money required.
Tri-Lakes Town Square has never had a newsroom. What it has is a document scraper, a set of automated feeds, and neighbors who send in what they notice. That has been enough to index 13,173 government documents across eleven agencies in Franklin and Essex counties, and enough to keep every word on this site free — no paywall, no ads, no subscription, no login required to read.
It is not enough to cover a meeting.
Village Boards, town councils, county committees, and school boards across Saranac Lake, Lake Placid, and Tupper Lake meet most weeks of the year. Budgets get adopted in those rooms. Assessments get set. Contracts get awarded, tax caps get pierced, and positions get cut. A scraper can tell you a document was filed three weeks later. It cannot tell you what was said before the vote, who showed up to object, or what the room felt like.
So we are asking for help. Four specific ways, and you can pick any of them.
Sit in on a town, village, county, or school board meeting and send us your notes. That is the whole job. You do not need to write a story, quote anyone accurately in real time, or stay to the end. Rough notes from a meeting nobody else attended are worth more than polished prose about one that was already covered.
If you already go to your school board meetings, you are most of the way there.
Meetings, storms, road closures, construction, events, the thing on Main Street that wasn't there last week. Photographs from the Tri-Lakes, taken by people who live in the Tri-Lakes. Your phone is fine.
Tell us what you are hearing. A rumor about a closure, a letter that showed up in your mailbox, an assessment that doubled, a line item that looks wrong. You do not have to write it up, prove it, or put your name on it. Passing along a thread for someone else to pull is a real contribution.
Turn notes, documents, and tips into something people can actually read. If you have ever written a decent email, you can do this. We edit before anything publishes, and nothing goes out with your name on it unless you want it to.
Money. This site costs about ten dollars a year to run and we intend to keep it that way.
We are also not asking for a schedule. There are no shifts, no quotas, and no minimum commitment. One meeting a year is a genuine contribution. If you sign up and never have the time, nothing bad happens and nobody follows up twice.
Volunteering is unpaid. Your contact information is never published, never sold, and never added to a mailing list — it goes to the editors so we have a way to reach you, and that is all.
There is a Volunteer button on the front page, in the footer, and in the sidebar. It takes about a minute and does not require an account.
An editor will email you within a few days with what is coming up and where you would fit.
We currently track eleven bodies: three villages, three towns, three school districts, and two county legislatures. Between them they meet well over two hundred times a year, and most of those rooms have nobody in them who isn't paid to be there. That is the gap. If you can help close even a little of it, we would like to hear from you.