Watch Northwest Arkansas government meetings

Where to watch city councils, quorum courts, school boards and regional authorities across Benton, Washington, Madison and Carroll counties, live and archived.

We track 20 bodies so far. Four counties, more than two dozen incorporated cities and towns, and a long list of school and special districts, so this list is a long way from complete. It grows as each body is verified. Nothing here is listed until its channel has been checked.

The Arkansas rule worth knowing first

A recording exists whether or not anyone streamed it. Arkansas Code 25-19-106(d)(1) requires that "all officially scheduled, special, and called open public meetings shall be recorded in a manner that allows for the capture of sound", as sound-only, as video with sound, or as a broadcast capable of being recorded. Subsection (d)(2) requires it to be kept at least one year, and (d)(3) requires it to be kept in a format that can be reproduced on a request under the FOIA.

Executive sessions and volunteer fire departments are excluded. Cities of the second class and incorporated towns had an exemption, and it expired on July 1, 2020.

So for every "Not established" in the tables below, there is still a legal path to the audio: ask the body for the recording. See minutes and records.

Counties

Washington County states plainly on its Quorum Court page that "Meetings are live-streamed on the County's YouTube Channel", and its agenda archive marks a "Media" link against each meeting entry pointing at the same channel.

Benton County is the weaker of the two. We found a Zoom registration link published on quorum court agendas rather than a durable channel, and bentoncountyar.gov returns HTTP 403 to automated checks, so this is one to verify against the current agenda.

Cities

Fayetteville is the deepest city video operation in the market by a wide margin. It runs a Granicus video-on-demand archive, a YouTube channel, a Cablecast internet channel and two cable carriage slots, and it separates regular council meetings from work sessions, special meetings and budget work sessions.

It also states its archive boundary, which almost no body does: all meetings from 2022 are available through video on demand, and anything earlier requires contacting Media Services at [email protected].

Rogers is the one city here with nothing you can bookmark. Its video is a Dropbox link to the most recent meeting, overwritten each cycle, and its remote access is a Zoom meeting ID minted fresh for each sitting. Its August 2026 council meeting used one ID and the committee meetings the same evening used two others. There is no archive to browse and no address that stays put.

Bentonville draws the line explicitly, and it is a line every remote viewer in this market should understand: "Watching online allows viewers to observe the meeting but does not include the ability to provide public comment." Streaming is not participation. In Bentonville you must register separately, and if you are joining virtually that registration closes at noon.

School districts

All five school districts stream, and all five stream on YouTube. That is the cleanest single-vendor result of any category in ten markets, and it matters because YouTube is the one platform on this page with a durable, public, linkable archive by default. Three districts run a dedicated board-meeting channel or playlist rather than mixing board meetings into a general district channel, which makes them the easiest bodies in the region to follow over time.

Bentonville Schools has the deepest video archive in the market, deeper than any city or county. Its separate recordings index reaches back roughly a decade, which is four years further than Fayetteville's city video and considerably further than anything else here.

Siloam Springs School District is the only body in this market that publishes a turnaround commitment: recordings within 48 hours of the meeting.

Springdale, the largest district in Arkansas, notes that meetings occasionally get rescheduled and that changes are announced on the website, on social media and through the district's mobile app rather than only on the calendar.

Regional and special-purpose bodies

This is the market's real coverage gap and it is not the small towns. The bodies with no published video are the regional authorities: the airport authority that meets at 9:30 a.m., the metropolitan planning organization that allocates federal transportation money, the bus agency, and the water district that supplies drinking water to more than 400,000 people across the four largest cities.

All of them are legally required to record their meetings and to keep the recording for a year. None of them, as far as we can find, publishes it.

Ozark Regional Transit states the position exactly, and it is worth quoting because it is the whole product thesis in one line of boilerplate. Its minutes say the audio and video of the meeting is available upon request. The recording exists. It is a public record. You have to know to ask, and you have to ask within a year.

Hybrid is not the same as archived. Both NWARPC and Ozark Regional Transit run their meetings through a conferencing product. That lets you attend from your desk if you know the meeting is happening and can be at your desk at 10:30 in the morning. It does not leave anything behind.

Not yet checked

Every other city and town in the four counties, the Carroll and Madison county quorum courts, most school districts, every city planning commission and board of adjustment, and the library, fire, water and improvement districts. If you want a specific body added, that is the list we work from.

A note for anyone building on this

Roughly a third of the government hosts in this market return HTTP 403 to plain fetchers while loading normally in a browser, including bentoncountyar.gov, washingtoncountyar.gov and the S3 bucket behind Fayetteville Public Schools' own downloadable forms. An automated link checker pointed at this page will report failures that are not failures. Any refresh pipeline here needs browser rendering.

Verified 2026-08-15. Each link above was checked against the body's own site or portal on that date. Platforms change and channels move. The body's own page is authoritative.