Your vote
has a receipt.

The Quiet Council holds 7 seats, allocated by zone: 1 Evelyn Rose, 2 Courtyard, 2 Wild Flower Garden, 1 Orchard Garden, 1 Vine Garden. Members are drawn by random lottery from the steward pool — like jury duty — from stewards aged 20 and over, and serve 2-year non-consecutive terms compensated at twice state median income. The Council has no judicial authority and no executive authority. Its sole function is execution, audit, and emergency response: ensuring that what stewards vote on actually happens — that flagged businesses lose their leases, that fee allocation changes are implemented, that December ballot results take effect without delay or interference. It also enforces the CLT ground lease escalator by flagging to the immutable ledger. The community is the authority. The Council makes sure it counts.

Any steward can flag an underperforming Spice Tray operator, employer, or inner-wall business in July. The flag triggers a public performance review and gives the operator five months to address community concerns. If the December ballot removes them, new operators compete for the vacancy starting January 1. No position is grandfathered past a majority who wants change.

The December ballot covers every flagged business and every lease due for renewal, alongside every ordinary measure up that year — one ballot, one window, nothing held over. Stewards vote through URBAL OS on the mechanics described above, and a lease renews on the same 60% directional bar as anything else. Results are final, non-appealable, and on the ledger before midnight. Removed operators vacate January 1 and the vacancy opens to competition immediately, so no space sits dark waiting on a negotiation.

The immutable distributed ledger runs on the town's own private cloud — the portion of the Bunch datacenter reserved for the towns and cities it sits beneath, on the same municipal compute the stewards already own. Every vote, fee allocation, PLC transfer, and construction draw is recorded permanently. Any steward, any external auditor, and any court can read the complete record. Altering it is technically impossible, and that applies to URBAL Platform PBC LLC exactly as it applies to everyone else. Trust doesn't require believing URBAL — it requires reading the ledger.

Every proposal submitted to the December ballot is capped at a single page set in 10 point type. Exceed it and the submission is rejected at input — it is not trimmed, summarised, or returned for editing by anyone else. The cap does two things. It guarantees that every steward can actually read every proposal on the ballot in an evening, which is what makes universal participation realistic rather than notional. And it forces the author to know what they are asking for. A proposal that cannot survive a page was not ready.

A foundational layer of policy is ratified by the first cohort before the town opens, and it sits beneath ordinary governance. Amending it requires a materially higher threshold than the 60% that carries a normal measure — in the range of 70 to 75% — along with a longer deliberation window before the vote. Ordinary decisions should be easy to revisit; the rules that govern how decisions get made should not be. Measures also carry a term: one year where the town is experimenting, two or three where it wants stability.

Open source software, no human write access, and no ability to fork it — ever. The node operators are steward residents, governed by the foundational policy layer covering eligibility, rotation, uptime obligations, compensation, and term limits. This matters more than it sounds: a vote record is only as trustworthy as the people who could quietly rewrite it, so the answer is a system in which no one can. Running it on municipal compute rather than a rented cloud is the same argument one layer down — there is no provider who could be compelled to hand over the keys, because there is no provider.

Construction escrow, URBAL ops, county government share (3% of the raise, the $150M that buys and prepares the land), and county children's 529 plans (2%, the $100M in custodial accounts) hold separate accounts — never commingled, never discretionarily reallocated. Your monthly fee is itemized line by line, and each line can only be spent on the category it names. URBAL has no general fund at all.

If you vote Yes, you also set an intensity number between 60% and 90%, rounded to the nearest 5%. The average of every Yes voter's number becomes the bar that measure must clear when it comes up for renewal. This is the part people misread at first: the intensity does not decide the vote in front of you — it decides how much agreement the measure will need to survive next time. A narrow but passionate majority can therefore set a renewal bar harder to meet than the 60% that passed it in the first place. That is intentional. Conviction should make a decision durable, not permanent, and the people most certain about a measure are the ones asked to say how much consensus it ought to require.

The December lease vote applies to every commercial relationship, not just retail: Spice Tray operators (cafés, bakeries, galleries, performance venues, kiosks, workshops — up to 500 buildings across 24 corridors), Blue Tulip clinics (physician LLCs, dentistry, pharmacy, optometry, mental health, specialist offices), teacher LLCs holding rooftop campus leases, and outer wall employers. Every one re-competes every December on the same ballot as everything else.

Operators with consistently high steward ratings over multiple annual cycles earn Mainstay designation — automatic renewal, no ballot unless formally challenged, and the best placement in their zone. It's earned from aggregate steward ratings, not assigned by URBAL and not purchased. A single poor year can reopen the ballot, and a formally challenged Mainstay operator returns to the same December vote as everyone else. Removed operators vacate January 1 and the waitlist competitor with the next-highest community score takes the space — no gap, no negotiation.