California Special Districts. Two mandates, one website.
Water, fire, transit, park, library, healthcare and utility districts — plus the joint powers authorities they form — run on small teams with no in-house web staff and a statutory obligation to publish. We build and remediate those sites to satisfy SB 929 and the ADA Title II standard together, in one project.
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The situation
Special districts carry both obligations at once, and usually with no web staff
A California special district sits at an unusual intersection. Since January 1, 2020, every independent special district has been required by SB 929 to maintain a website and post a specific set of items on it. Separately, as a public entity, the district is covered by the Justice Department's ADA Title II web rule, which requires web content and mobile apps to conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Special district governments fall in the later compliance cohort: April 26, 2028.
Neither obligation comes with staff. Districts are small by design — a general manager, a board clerk, a handful of operations people — and the website is usually somebody's fourth responsibility. It was often set up quickly in 2019 to clear the SB 929 deadline, by whoever was available, on whatever platform was cheapest. Six years later it is posting agendas, and it is almost certainly not accessible.
That combination is why districts are the most under-served buyer in California local government. The contracts are small, frequent and repeatable, so the large civic-web vendors barely compete for them. Meanwhile the district has a hard accessibility deadline, a statutory publishing obligation it cannot pause, and nobody in the building who can evaluate a remediation quote. We wrote up what a district should actually budget for this for exactly that reader.
Who this is for
Districts and joint powers authorities
Different services, the same shape of problem — statutory publishing duties, a small team, and an accessibility deadline that is not going to move again.
Water, sewer and utility districts
Rate notices, Prop 218 hearings, outage and conservation information, service applications, and consumer confidence reports that have to be findable and readable on a phone.
Fire protection districts
Emergency and evacuation information that has to publish fast and read clearly under stress, alongside routine board business, budgets and hiring.
Transit agencies
Schedules, fares, service alerts, rider notices and Title VI material — the content most likely to be published as an inaccessible PDF, and most consequential when it is.
Park, recreation and library districts
Program registration, facility reservations, hours and closures, and catalog or event systems that are usually third-party embeds with accessibility problems of their own.
Healthcare and hospital districts
Board governance and public meeting material alongside patient-facing information, where plain language and translation matter most.
Joint powers authorities
JPAs formed by member agencies — risk pools, transit and waste authorities, financing authorities — with their own board, their own Brown Act duties, and often no website budget of their own.
SB 929
What an independent special district has to post
SB 929 applies to independent districts, not to dependent districts governed by a city or county board. A district that cannot comply may claim a hardship, but only by resolution, adopted in a public meeting, with evidence, renewed annually.
ADA Title II
Your deadline is April 26, 2028 — and posting compliance is where sites fail
Special district governments are named in the rule as part of the later cohort, so the deadline is April 26, 2028 regardless of the population you serve. 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.
The standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA. For a district site, the failures are predictable and they cluster on exactly the content SB 929 requires you to publish. Agendas and minutes go up as scanned PDFs with no text layer, which are unreadable to a screen reader and unsearchable to everyone. Board packets are image-only. Rate tables are posted as pictures of tables. Meeting videos have automatic captions nobody has corrected. The agenda-posting duty and the accessibility duty land on the same documents, which is why we treat them as one workstream instead of two projects. If your district is part of a joint powers authority, note that the JPA carries its own obligation separately from yours.
There is also a scope trap worth naming early. The rule covers web content and mobile apps that a public entity provides or makes available — which includes the third-party systems you have embedded. Agenda management, permit and payment portals, job boards, reservation systems and video streaming are frequently the least accessible things on a district website, and they are the parts a redesign alone does not fix. We audit those alongside your own pages and tell you which vendors need to be pushed and which need to be replaced.
The work
What we actually do for a district
Procurement
How a district actually buys this
Most districts can award this without a full RFP. We will tell you honestly which path yours is on.
Send the site, or the solicitation
If you have an RFP, send it with any addenda and the scoring rubric. If you do not, send the URL of your current site — that is enough to start.
Fit review, two business days
We read it properly and tell you whether we are bidding. If we are not, we say why.
A findings document your board can read
What is non-compliant, what it affects, what it costs to fix, and what can wait. Written to be attached to a board packet.
Fixed-price proposal
In your required format, against your rubric, with named staff, a real timeline and references from public agencies.
Build, test, hand over
Reviewable stages, keyboard and screen-reader passes before launch, then documentation and training for the staff you actually have.
Questions
Questions from district staff and boards
Is our deadline 2027 or 2028?
We are a dependent district. Does SB 929 apply to us?
Can we just add an accessibility widget?
Do we have to remediate twenty years of archived minutes?
We are a JPA. Whose obligation is this?
What does this cost?
Background
Reading for district staff
The rules, the documents and the procurement path, written for people who have to explain this to a board.
The ADA Title II Web Accessibility Rule: What Government Websites Must Do
Read article →BlogWCAG 2.2 AA Checklist for Government Websites
Read article →BlogPublic Records, Agendas and Minutes: Website Design That Holds Up
Read article →BlogPlain-Language Web Content for Government
Read article →BlogHow to Write a Government Website RFP
Read article →BlogWhat Should a Government or Nonprofit Website Cost?
Read article →BlogWhat a California Special District Should Budget for Its Website
Read article →BlogWho Owns the Website? A JPA Guide to Web Procurement and ADA Compliance
Read article →Project Managers who will work with you on your project!
Wondering what this costs? Every service has published pricing — no discovery call required to see it.
View pricingPutting a district website out to bid?
Send us the solicitation, or just the URL of your current site. We will read it properly and tell you where you stand against both SB 929 and WCAG 2.1 AA.
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