Your friends are posting about some local outrage. You're not sure who to trust for the basic facts. I mean, ideally there'd be a newspaper article, but, oh well, they can't necessarily keep up these days.
Fortunately, you know that said outrage is to be discussed at the next city council meeting. And, fortunately, the city has a ton of information online, and you're the internet-researching type. This, fellow civics geek, is the URL you want:
This has records not just for city council, but for every meeting of every City committee you've never heard of. You want to see the minutes for the Dec. 18 2012 meeting of the Parks Advisory Commission? You got it.
You can search by date or by committee, and there's a full text search, though I haven't figured out how deep exactly that goes.
The most interesting part is often under the "Meeting Details" link, which will take you to a page with every agenda item broken out, and clicking on *those* gets you staff reports, public commentary, and more.
The tricky part is often finding the right agenda item, as especially for something like city council there can be a lot, some of them pretty similar-sounding. But, you're the internet-researching type, so follow your nose and you'll find what you're looking for, or at a minimum an idea who you'd need to contact to get the details.