Ordinances

An ordinance is a piece of legislation enacted by a municipal government. The term is sometimes used interchangeably with local law, code, or regulation. Ordinances are legislative by nature and the creation of one is equivalent to a municipal statute (Garner 2014, 1273). They are introduced within a city council, debated on the floor, occasionally referred to committee for more discussion, and then ultimately voted upon (League of Minnesota Cities 2023).

Intended to address something not currently legislated through federal or state laws, such as the imposition of fines or the local regulation of people and property, ordinances have the strongest legal standing of the policies included in our archive (Garner 2014; League of Minnesota Cities 2023). An ordinance can only be repealed with another ordinance, and violation of an ordinance can be enforced in municipal court. Ordinances can be voided if they conflict with U.S. federal law, state law, or the U.S. constitution (League of Minnesota Cities 2023).

You can peruse the collection of Ordinances by scrolling through the policies below or using the filters to sort them by issue date, author, title, or subject. Please note that some of the filters, such as department and graduation year, are not applicable to this project. Also, the title filter only captures the first few letters of a title and the policy titles all begin with the designation of the type of policy so searching within this filter will not be as illustrative as the other filters. Once you click on a filter, you can search within that filter by entering in a place name or a few letters of an author, for instance, and then clicking the browse button.

There are 36 ordinances in our archive. Please note that in the case of San Francisco, the ordinances were put forth by the city and county of San Francisco. We include these policies in our tally for cities that passed policies.

References: Garner, B. (Ed.) (2014). Black’s law dictionary, tenth edition. Thomson Reuters.

League of Minnesota Cities. (2023). Handbook for Minnesota cities. https://www.lmc.org/wp-content/uploads/documents/Meetings-Motions-Resolutions-and-Ordinances.pdf.

This page was last updated in July 2024.