How to use this site

1. The homepage

The front door. Three cards show the next meeting (or the most recent if there isn't one upcoming), the latest decisions, and the city issues people are watching. Below that, a chip rail of common look-ups and two big cards for Money and Council.

The big search box is for one-shot questions. Type a question in normal English and you'll land on the answer page with citations.

2. Search

The full search experience. Ask a question in plain English; the answer comes back with bracketed citation numbers like [#3] that match thumbnail PDFs on the right rail. Anchor on a name, address, project, ordinance, or topic — the more specific the better.

Tip: press / on the homepage to jump straight to the search box.

3. Meetings

Every Nowthen council, planning & zoning, work-session, and Truth-in-Taxation meeting. The index has filter chips by body type, an “Coming up” section, and a “Recently posted documents” rail. Click any meeting for the briefing view.

Each meeting's page is the briefing — agenda items in plain English, what was decided, dollars discussed (with click-through to every doc that mentions the same number), related city issues, and a clean list of every PDF in the meeting's record.

4. Threads

Recurring civic work — the named projects, capital purchases, and budget items that come back to council across multiple meetings. Each thread page is a single timeline of every meeting where the topic showed up, with the matched motion, agenda item, or dollar figure for each.

The most important visual: every fact carries a green Verified badge (it's from an official record or a human approved it) or a quieter amber Auto-extractedbadge (the AI inferred it from context and may need correction).

5. City rules

The Nowthen city code, indexed chapter by chapter. The system understands citations in several forms — Chapter 11, § 11-4, Section 11-4(A)(2),11-4-5, and even Zoning Ordinance Section 4 all resolve to the same canonical reference.

6. Money

The hub for all the dollar amounts mentioned in city records. Headline sections:

• Biggest dollar figures — top clusters by amount, filtered to remove OCR outliers.
• Repeated or recurring costs — fees and contracts that show up year after year.
• Year-over-year changes — biggest increases (red) and biggest decreases (green).
• Where the money shows up — categories with aggregate dollars per category.
• Tax estimator preview — link to the simulator.
• For reviewers — the technical drill-downs (every figure, every cluster, year-over-year details).

Honesty note: these dollar amounts are AI-extracted from PDFs. The simulator and any “official budget” view only use numbers that have been hand-approved against the source. Until enough approval has happened, the tax estimator shows a yellow banner.

7. People & Council

People is the roster — council members ranked by vote count at the top, recurring applicants and staff below.

Council alignment shows the pairwise voting matrix: how often each pair of council members agrees, and a list of every split vote with links to the source PDF.

Each person's profile page has their aye/nay/abstain tally, every matter they're tied to, every argument they've made on the record, and every speaking turn extracted from minutes.

8. What's pending

Applications and matters that haven't reached a final decision yet — what's currently in motion at City Hall.

9. About

Why this site exists, where the records come from, what the AI does, and the strict separation between auto-extracted dollars and the official budget. Read this first if you're skeptical of an AI-driven civic project (you should be).

Verified vs. Auto-extracted

Two badges. Everywhere.

✓ Verified means the fact came from an official record, was extracted by a deterministic parse (no AI guessing), or was reviewed by a human. Trust it.

Auto-extracted means the AI inferred it from context. It's probably right; it might be wrong. Click through to the source PDF to verify.

Citations & sources

Every fact in this system is bonded to an evidence span — a pointer to the exact PDF page (and excerpt) where it came from. On any matter page, click Sources to see every source row behind the dossier, sorted by date.