Saturday, October 3, 2026Peoria, Illinois — Whiskey CitySubscribe
WhiskeyCivic

How WhiskeyCivic works

Peoria’s city council meets twice a month. The county board meets monthly. Illinois publishes proposed rules with comment windows measured in days. All of it is public, most of it is technically machine-readable, and almost none of it is anywhere people would look while deciding what to do on a Tuesday evening.

What we do

We read the calendars and feeds that governments publish themselves, and we put the results in one place with the filters that matter:

  • Five levels of government. City of Peoria, Peoria County, Region around Peoria, State of Illinois, Federal government. The four you asked for, plus the towns around Peoria.
  • Five kinds of thing. Meetings, public hearings, comment deadlines, volunteer opportunities and elections — because “things that happen” and “windows that close” are different and you need to know which is which.
  • A deadline first. Comment periods are the thing with a hard end, so they get their own page and the top of the home page.
  • Direct links to the action. Every card links through to the government’s own agenda, docket or signup page. We never stand between you and the place you actually file something.

What we don’t do

  • We don’t summarize. An agenda item titled “Ordinance amending the zoning code” is shown as that. Our opinion of what it means is not what you asked for.
  • We don’t invent times. When a government publishes a date with no time, we show the date and mark it all-day rather than guessing 6pm.
  • We don’t tell you if it’s worth your time. That judgment is the one thing only you can make.

What we’re missing

Some sources have no feed at all, and a few refuse automated requests. We list every one of them on the sources page, with the reason, rather than letting the gaps be invisible.

  • City of Peoria / Pekin agendas (CivicClerk API) — Works from a home connection (verified: HTTP 200 with an identical request) but answers HTTP 403 to every fetch from a Cloudflare Worker, including a retry with full browser headers. It is blocking the network, not the request. This costs us the structured agenda items and the speaker/written-comment cutoffs — so right now no deadline rail. Meeting times still come from the iCal and RSS feeds.
  • Illinois Secretary of State — Every request from Cloudflare's network was refused (HTTP/2 INTERNAL_ERROR behind Akamai). Needs a different fetch path or a published feed.
  • ILGA committee hearings — An undocumented JSON endpoint exists (GetHearingsListByRange) but returned [] on every attempt. Would be the richest state-level comment source if it worked.
  • Peoria County Health Department calendar — A separate CivicPlus site with its own Board of Health, which would be a county-tier body that takes public comment. Its iCal feed serves 2 events with the summary literally "Boa" and nothing else, so there is nothing to read. Board of Health meetings do appear in the main Peoria County calendar, which we already ingest.
  • IDOT District 4 hearings — Real Peoria-area public hearings (US 24/IL 9, IL 116) are announced here as NewsArticle JSON-LD, but there is no calendar and no API — press releases only.
  • Illinois EPA public notices — The notice tables look scrapeable but arrive empty: they are populated by JavaScript, and the API behind them returned HTTP 500 to every parameter combination tried.
  • Peoria Public Schools (District 150) Board of Education — The school board is one of the largest local governments in Peoria, but every page of the district site answers with a bot-challenge page instead of content, and there is no BoardDocs or calendar feed to read instead.
  • Illinois Central College Board of Trustees — The site answers HTTP 403 to its WordPress API and to its RSS feed alike.
  • Village of Peoria Heights — The calendar has a readable feed, but its newest entry is from December 2025 — it is no longer kept up, and listing it would show a village with no meetings.
  • Greater Peoria Sanitary District — Meeting information is a static page with no dated schedule to read.
  • City of Washington — The site's calendar is HTML only, with no iCal or RSS export.
  • Army Corps of Engineers, Rock Island District (Illinois River permits) — The public-notice page answers HTTP 403, and its RSS endpoint returns an empty body. Illinois River permit notices also appear among the Illinois EPA notices above, which are unreachable for their own reasons.

Times, and daylight saving

Everything is shown in Central Time and converted from each source’s own wall-clock times, including across daylight-saving boundaries — a 6pm council meeting stays at 6pm in March and December. If an event’s time looks wrong, check which feed it came from and tell us; that is a bug on our side, not a quirk of the meeting.

Cancelled meetings

When a government removes an event from its feed, we don’t delete it — we hide it after a few refreshes and keep the row. A cancellation is information, and the record of what was cancelled is part of the civic record.

Get in touch

Found a feed we’re missing, or an event we got wrong? hello@whiskeycivic.com. If you maintain a government’s calendar and want it listed, we’d rather have it than not.