High Alerts
Rare by design — urgent by definition
A High Alert means a decision is big, fast-moving and hard to reverse: surveillance rollouts, insurance and condo changes, property-tax shifts, voting deadlines, emergency rules or serious environmental threats. Most weeks there are none. When one appears, it means you should look.
Sample contentHow something becomes a High Alert: it must (1) affect a county-wide or multi-county population, (2) have a near-term, hard deadline, and (3) be expensive or impossible to undo. Two editors and a source check are required before the siren goes up. Read the full criteria