How we evaluate a board's
business-friendliness

What sources we use

The Board Review is built entirely from the public record — the same documents any resident could request or already finds posted on the township's own website. Two sources feed it:

• Official meeting minutes and agendas — automatically retrieved from the township's public meetings page. We prioritize the most recent year of records, and prioritize minutes and agendas over large "packet" attachments, which mostly duplicate the minutes with lower-value supporting material (maps, ordinance text, financial exhibits).
• Uploaded supplementary materials — a sponsor may optionally upload additional documents (e.g. correspondence) that shed light on a board's conduct. These are held to a stricter evidentiary standard than official minutes — see "Direct quotes only," below.

What we score

The Board Review uses the Business Friendly IPA (Importance-Performance Analysis) framework — the same lens the core BFI survey uses to score a whole community (General Government Support, Support for Existing Businesses, Support for New & Growing Businesses), broken into six more granular dimensions so a single official's record can be scored, not just a community-wide average. Every named participant who holds a public official or staff role — elected officials, appointed staff, managers, directors — is scored 1–5 on each:

Votes are the decisive evidence

What an official says, and the questions they raise, provide useful context — but their votes are weighted as the decisive evidence, because a vote is the one action with real, binding consequences. When a participant's public statements and their actual votes point in different directions, the vote is what determines the score, and the review says so explicitly rather than papering over the tension.

A participant who consistently voted the right way on business-relevant items scores well even if they rarely spoke up. A participant who said the right things in public comment but voted against business-friendly measures does not.

IPA Quadrant, orientation, and engagement strategy

Beyond the six dimension scores, every official is placed into one of five IPA quadrants based on their average score (performance) and how much real influence they have on business-relevant matters (importance) — from "Keep Up the Good Work — Champion" down to "Concentrate Here" (an influential role underperforming its potential) and "Low Priority". Each participant also gets a short, specific orientation tag summarizing their pattern in the record (e.g. "Active Facilitator," "Infrastructure-Focused Financial Steward") and a concrete BFI Engagement Strategy — practical, individualized guidance on how a sponsor should actually work with that specific official.

The overall rating

Each participant's overall 1–5 rating is the average of their six dimension scores, so it's always traceable back to specific, individually-justified evidence rather than a single holistic judgment call:

Board Scorecard and Key Findings

Every review includes a side-by-side scorecard of all members across the six dimensions, and a Key Findings summary that calls out the standouts by category — Top BFI Champion, Infrastructure Leader, Lowest BFI Engagement, and any Key Opportunity or Key Risk the record surfaces — so leadership can scan the headline conclusions before reading every individual profile.

Tracking change over time

Every review opens with a full board roster: name, role, years on board (from the record, when it's explicitly stated — never estimated), and a side-by-side of the previous and current overall BFI rating for each participant, with the change highlighted in green (improving) or red (declining). A township that reviews annually gets a real accountability record, not just a snapshot.

Board and Planning Commission — reviewed individually and as a whole

The base Board Review covers the Board of Trustees. Planning Commission coverage is available as an add-on — its members are scored, profiled, and rostered in their own dedicated section, fully separate from the Board, with their own scorecard and key findings.

But the review doesn't stop at "separate." A Planning Commission is typically appointed by, and acts at the direction and guidance of, the Board of Trustees. So alongside each body's individual section, the review's whole-township "Overall Assessment" explicitly addresses how the two bodies relate — if the Commission's record shows a business-unfriendly pattern, that gets named as a Board-level oversight consideration, not filed away as a separate outcome the Board bears no responsibility for. The point of this review is accountability, and an appointed body isn't a place for that accountability to disappear.

Safeguards built into every review

Because this evaluates real, named public officials, the review is built around explicit rules designed to keep it fair, narrow, and defensible:

• 🏛️Official capacity only. We only evaluate individuals acting in their official public role, as documented in public meeting records — never private conduct, personal life, or character.
• 🙅No private citizens. Anyone who doesn't hold a public office or staff role is omitted from the review entirely, even if they're named in the minutes.
• 📋Documented conduct, not character judgments. Findings are framed as "voted against," "proposed," "did not participate" — never as characterizations like "obstructed" or "opposed businesses."
• 🔍Patterns, not incidents. A single vote or a single absence is never enough to support a "concern" — only a clear pattern across the record.
• 💬Direct quotes only. When supplementary materials beyond the official minutes are used (e.g. an uploaded email), a statement is only attributed to an official if it's a direct quote in their own words. A claim from someone else about what an official said, thought, or intended is hearsay, not evidence — and is excluded. Official meeting minutes are held to the normal standard: documented motions, votes, and paraphrased statements of record are valid evidence as usual.
• ⚖️Grounded in the record. No speculation beyond what the public record actually shows.
• 🔒Full transparency on coverage. If a review only had time or access to cover a subset of available records, the report says so explicitly rather than silently presenting a partial record as complete.

Why this exists

Township boards already know how businesses rate them — the Business Friendly Index survey tells them that. What's harder to see is which individual decisions and votes are driving that score. The Board Review closes that gap: it turns a stack of meeting minutes any resident could read into a clear, fair, board-level accountability record, and gives a community's leadership a concrete, individualized starting point for outreach and engagement.