California Cities & Counties. Your deadline is April 26, 2027.

A California municipal website carries obligations that most civic templates were never designed around: 72-hour agenda posting, records that have to stay resolvable, language access for the community you actually have, and an accessibility standard with a hard date attached. We build and remediate for all of it.

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The deadline

Most California cities and counties are in the earlier cohort

Under the ADA Title II web rule, public entities with a total population of 50,000 or more must have their web content and mobile apps conforming to WCAG 2.1 Level AA by April 26, 2027. Every California county and a large share of its cities are over that threshold, and any AI tooling you deploy is web content on the same clock, which puts them in the earlier of the two cohorts. Smaller cities have until April 26, 2028.

Those dates are the extended ones. The Justice Department published an interim final rule on April 20, 2026 that moved both compliance dates back by a year; a great deal of published guidance still quotes the original April 2026 and April 2027 dates. If a vendor is quoting you a 2026 deadline, they are working from stale information.

Whichever cohort you are in, the constraint is not the design work. It is procurement plus a build plus the third-party vendors embedded in your site, run in sequence, by a team that also has a day job. Counting backwards from 2027 through a solicitation, an award and a phased build does not leave the amount of room it looks like it does. The full picture for both cohorts is on the Title II deadline page, and the special districts in your jurisdiction are on a later date than you are.

What a California municipal site carries

Obligations that shape the build

These are not add-ons to a template. They determine the information architecture, the publishing model and the migration plan.

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Brown Act agenda posting

Agendas for regular meetings posted at least 72 hours ahead, in a location the public can reach, and reachable from the site rather than buried. The posting workflow has to be fast and hard to get wrong at 4:55pm on a Friday.

Public Records Act material

Records, notices and disclosures that have to stay findable and keep resolving. A redesign that changes every URL is both a public-records problem and the fastest way to lose the search visibility the site had.

Language access

Translation for the languages your community actually speaks, with honest handling of the difference between machine and human translation on the pages where accuracy is legally significant.

WCAG 2.1 AA

Across pages, documents, video and every third-party system you embed — agenda management, permitting, utility payments, job boards and reservations included.

Emergency information

Alert and evacuation content that can be published in minutes, reads clearly under stress, and survives a traffic spike.

Distributed publishing

Many departments, many publishers, one standard — editing models that stay consistent without routing every change through one overloaded person.

The build

What we hold ourselves to

✓

Every archived agenda, minute and notice keeps its URL through the migration

✓

Meeting materials structured and searchable, not dumped into an ever-growing PDF list

✓

WCAG 2.1 AA verified with keyboard and screen-reader passes before launch — no overlay widgets

✓

Plain-language service pages a resident can scan on a phone in thirty seconds

✓

Embedded third-party systems audited, with conformance reports requested from those vendors in writing

✓

Agenda posting that a clerk can complete quickly without breaking accessibility

✓

Alert publishing that works on the worst day, not just the demo

✓

A written handover, so the site does not decay when the staff who commissioned it move on

Procurement

From solicitation to award

A predictable path that fits how public agencies actually have to buy.

Submit the solicitation

Upload the RFP, RFQ or scope of work, with addenda and evaluation criteria if you have them.

Fit review, two business days

We read it properly and tell you whether we are bidding. If we are not, we say why.

Clarification call

Scope, accessibility obligations, existing systems, and what went wrong with the last vendor. Skipped if your process does not permit contact.

Written proposal

In your required format and against your scoring rubric, with fixed pricing, a real timeline, named staff and public-agency references.

Award, kickoff and handover

Discovery, build in reviewable stages, accessibility tested before launch, documentation and training at the end.

Questions

Questions from city and county teams

Is our deadline 2027 or 2028?

If your total population is 50,000 or more, April 26, 2027. Under 50,000, April 26, 2028. Both were extended by a year in the Justice Department's April 2026 interim final rule, so any plan built on an April 2026 date is working from the superseded schedule.

Can our agenda management vendor make us compliant?

Not on their own, and this is worth establishing early. Your agenda platform is your obligation because you make it available to the public, but you generally cannot remediate it yourself. Ask the vendor for a current conformance report in writing. The answer, or the absence of one, tells you a lot about your timeline.

We are mid-redesign with another vendor. Can you just audit?

Yes. The audit is priced and delivered independently of any build work, so you can hand the findings to your existing vendor and hold them to it. That is a legitimate outcome and we will not pitch you during it.

What happens to our URLs?

They are mapped before launch and preserved. We treat the archive as a requirement rather than a nice-to-have, because a broken notice archive is both a records problem and a search problem.

Do you work with our existing CMS?

Usually, yes. Remediation and template work do not always require replacing the platform, and we will tell you plainly when the platform genuinely is the obstacle rather than using it as an upsell.