A 2024 Boil-Water Notice Is Still Live on Santa Rosa's Homepage
The City of Santa Rosa's official homepage, srcity.org, runs a scrolling "City of Santa Rosa News" feed near the top of the page. Scroll far enough through it today and you'll find a cancellation notice for a boil-water advisory tied to a water main break. The break happened on August 9, 2024. The cancellation was issued August 11, 2024. Both dates are still sitting in the live feed, unremoved, alongside news from this month.
What we found
The item, titled as a cancellation of a boil-water notice for a water main break on Carissa Avenue off Summerfield Road, appears mixed into the same scrolling feed as 2026 news items — budget updates, city council appointments, this year's Fourth of July safety message. There's no visible cutoff date, no archive boundary, nothing distinguishing a two-year-old emergency notice from this week's press release. A resident scrolling the feed today has no way to know, from the page itself, that the item is stale unless they read the date in the body text.
Source
srcity.org homepage, "City of Santa Rosa News" feed, item titled "CANCELLATION: Boil Water Notice for Water Main Break on Carissa Ave. Off Summerfield Rd." Verified live July 22, 2026. Re-check it yourself — the URL and feed are public.
Why this isn't a nitpick
A boil-water notice is safety-critical content by design — it exists to tell residents their tap water might not be safe. That category of content carries a specific reputational risk when it goes stale: it's the kind of item a resident might stumble into via search or a shared link, with no easy way to tell at a glance that it no longer applies. The fix isn't complicated either — most CMS platforms support expiration dates or feed pruning by default. Whatever's happening here looks more like a missing cleanup step than a technical limitation.
Not an isolated case
This is one finding from a broader, ongoing review of NorCal city government websites — independent, unsolicited, and unpaid, the same standard we apply to the private businesses in our "Eight Audits, Eight Bugs" series. Santa Rosa's site runs on CivicPlus, one of the more common municipal CMS platforms in the region — and it's not the only city we've found with stale content sitting on a live homepage. More on that as the series continues.
What we didn't do
No login was used, no admin access attempted, no scraping beyond a single public page load. Everything here is visible to any resident who visits the site right now.
This is the first entry in a recurring series. We're publishing one municipal audit finding roughly every 8 days, working through city websites across Northern California.
Have a city website you'd like checked? Let us know — this is unpaid, independent work in the public interest.
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