About ourloris
An independent demonstration of what an open, plain-language City of Loris website could look like, built so you can actually use it.
What this is
ourloris.com is a prototype: one resident's re-envisioning of the City of Loris's web presence. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the City of Loris or its government, and it isn't the city's official website.
What comes from the city, and what doesn't
Start with the council meeting records, because those are the genuine article. Every agenda item, figure, and vote shown under Meetings is quoted verbatim from the city's own primary records: the agenda packets, the approved minutes, and the city's meeting video. Nothing is summarized, paraphrased, or interpreted.
Everything built around those records, the layout, the services pages, the budget explainers, shows how that public information could be presented. Whenever something isn't the city's, the site says so, and it links you straight to the source.
The service details, who to call, where to pay, how to apply, come straight from the City of Loris's own website, and every outbound link points to the exact same place the city's page does. This site never sends you anywhere the city itself wouldn't.
The city's official site runs on vetted municipal-website software, and its caution about untested tools is sound governance. Automated machine translation, for example, can publish inaccurate text that no one has reviewed, so a government channel is right to hold off. That same care is part of why public records often reach residents as scanned PDFs and limited exports. The experimental layer here, plain-language rewrites, OCR of scanned documents, and AI-assisted summaries, is the kind of thing that belongs on an independent, clearly unofficial site like this one rather than on the city's own. How this site is written, and the line we never cross →
Why it exists
Most of what a city government does is, technically, public. But public and easy to find are not the same thing. The records exist, scattered across PDFs, tucked into agenda packets, or sitting inside hours of meeting video few people have the time to watch. This site starts from a simple idea: put that public information in one place, in plain language, so a resident can see what the council did and what's coming up without having to go digging for it.
So this site tries to build a small piece of that: a place where the records are one click away, where the decisions made at a meeting get explained without the jargon, and where people can see how to weigh in before a vote instead of after.
It's built and maintained by Joshua Franklin, a Loris resident. It began as a personal project, one resident who wanted the city's information to be easier to reach, and it grew into something that felt worth sharing. A hopeful picture of how closely a small city and its people can stay connected.
The real City of Loris
For anything official, like city announcements, paying a bill, or getting in touch, go to the city directly. These are the City of Loris's own channels: