A plain-English window into Nowthen public records.

The City of Nowthen, Minnesota publishes its agendas, packets, minutes, ordinances, and city code on cityofnowthen.gov. The records are public. But they're distributed across hundreds of PDFs, with no real way to search, no way to ask “what was the council talking about three meetings ago,” and no way to follow an issue across the years it took to resolve.

This site is an attempt to fix that — for residents who want a quick answer, for council members who want to find precedent before voting, and for reporters who need background on something the council just discussed.

What's actually on this site

Every public document from the city's archive has been pulled in, optical-character-read, and indexed. The site is organized around the way people actually look for information:

• Meetings — every council, planning & zoning, work-session, and truth-in-taxation meeting, with its agenda, packet, and minutes.
• Threads — recurring civic work (named projects, capital purchases, recurring budget items) tracked across multiple meetings.
• City rules — the full Nowthen city code, by chapter and section.
• Money — every dollar amount the records mention, grouped into the same line item where they repeat across documents, with year-over-year changes computed.
• Council — member profiles, voting records, and how often any two members agree.
• What's pending — applications and matters that haven't reached a final decision yet.

Where the AI parts are

The site uses AI to do two things that humans can't reasonably do across 270+ documents:

1. Extract structured facts. Reading every packet and pulling out applications, motions, votes, and dollar figures. These extractions are labeled Auto-extracted on the site so you know it's a machine reading and not the official record.
2. Answer questions in plain English. The search page uses the records as context to answer plain-language questions. Every claim it makes is cited back to a specific page in a specific PDF.

Facts that come straight from an official record — or that have been reviewed by a human — get a Verified badge. Everything else is Auto-extracted and may need correction. Spot an error? Email or open an issue and we'll fix it.

Money on this site is not the official budget

The Money pages show every dollar amount the AI found in city documents. Some of those are right and some are wrong. The site keeps a strict separation: AI-extracted figures are for discovery and audit only. The tax estimator and any “official budget” views only use numbers that have been hand-approved against the source. Until enough approval has happened, the tax estimator shows a yellow warning banner and refuses to compute against unreviewed numbers.

What this isn't

This is not an official City of Nowthen site. The city does not endorse, run, or fund this project. The PDFs on this site come from the city's public archive; the organization and interpretation are independent work. When in doubt, the official PDF is the truth — you can open any of them by clicking through.

How to help

• If you find a wrong number or wrong fact, let us know and we'll fix it and add it to a list of corrections.
• If there's a public document missing from the archive, send us a link and we'll pull it in.
• If you'd like a feature that isn't here yet — a property map, an email digest of upcoming meetings, an RSS feed of decisions — tell us.

For a feature-by-feature tour of how to use the site, see the user manual.