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 legacy position survives a majority who wants change.

The December ballot covers every flagged business and every lease due for renewal. Voting runs on the town's own private municipal network — not the public internet. Stewards vote privately through URBAL OS: Yes, No, or Abstain on each question, with Abstain counting as participation but excluded from the directional tally. A lease renews when at least 60% of the directional votes are Yes. Stewards voting Yes also set an intensity between 60% and 90%, and the average of those becomes the bar that operator must clear at their next renewal — so a business that scrapes through on a lukewarm majority faces a harder test next year, not an easier one. Results are final, non-appealable, and on the ledger before midnight.

The immutable distributed ledger is managed by the OCIO bank's independent custodian — not by URBAL Platform LLC. 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. 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.

The ledger is operated by the town itself, on open source software, with 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, including URBAL.

Construction escrow, URBAL ops, county government share (3%), and county children's 529 plans (2%) hold separate accounts — never commingled, never discretionarily reallocated. Your monthly fee is itemized line by line. The general fund is where institutional capture happens. URBAL has no general fund.

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), inner wall 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.