For two years, the Dallas City Council kept itself in chambers for — hours — averaging — every time the gavel came down. It voted on — agenda items in that span and rejected none of them.

§ 1 · How long is long?

Every voting meeting, plotted by when and how long.

Dallas's council meets every other Wednesday for its main voting session. The meetings start at 9 a.m. and, on a typical week, gavel out sometime after supper. Each dot below is one of those meetings, placed on the date it happened and the total hours the council was in chambers that day. The longest single session ran —. The median is —. Special-called voting sessions are shown with an open ring; their agendas are shorter.

Zoomed-in view of where those hours go, per item: on average, the more NO votes a single item drew, the longer the council spent debating it. A four-plus-NO item got about ten times the floor time of a unanimous one. There are, however, thirty-seven times more unanimous items than contested ones — which is how the totals still tilt toward quiet votes.

§ 2 · The shape of it

One dot per item that was discussed.

Items that the council votes on without individual discussion — about four-fifths of the docket — are passed on the consent agenda and excluded here. What remains is every item pulled off consent for individual deliberation. The horizontal axis measures how long that deliberation lasted. The vertical axis counts NO votes: zero at top is a unanimous yes, one below is a 14–1–style pass, and the rare dots further down represent real opposition.

The pattern is the entire argument.

§ 3 · Where the hours went

Two clocks, same chamber.

The top bar is every minute the council was gaveled in — — in all — broken into the sort of activity filling it. The bottom bar is just the — they spent debating items pulled off consent for individual discussion, segmented by how those items ultimately voted.

Swagit's archive captures wall-clock time from gavel-in to gavel-out. Short recesses — lunch, the bathroom break, the five minutes a member leaves the dais — aren't given their own chapter; they stay absorbed into whichever chapter was active when the council paused. The one exception is closed session: the council gavels out of public session, deliberates privately off-camera, and returns. The 2.3 hours labeled "procedural & ceremonial" counts the brief chapter marker Swagit places for the gavel-out, not the closed-door time itself.

§ 5 · Meeting by meeting

Every voting meeting on the calendar, drawn to full length.

Each row is one meeting, scaled end-to-end to the time the council was actually in chambers. Colored segments on the left of each row are individual items pulled off consent for discussion — white for unanimous, blue for 14–1, orange for contested. The gray tail on the right is everything else that filled the meeting: the consent-agenda roll-call, the open-mic public speaking period, invocation and pledge, and recesses. Meetings held after the OpenData vote cutoff are shown as all-gray rows — the total duration is known from the Swagit video; the per-item breakdown just isn't published yet.

§ 6 · Who casts the dissent

Of the few NO votes that happened, three members cast most of them.

— individual NO votes were recorded across the window, on — items that drew any opposition at all. The left column ranks members by raw count. The right column shows the same NO votes as a share of each member's total yes-or-no votes, so members who joined mid-term aren't penalized for a shorter tenure.