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About

Why this website exists

By Dan Swenson, written in my personal capacity

This is a hobby. Nobody pays me to do it.

I'm Dan Swenson. I'm a personal injury and workers' compensation attorney, and I serve on the Nowthen City Council through the end of 2026. I was not reelected on November 3. This website is my own project. It is not a City of Nowthen project, and no city, county, or other government pays for it, maintains it, or reviews what I publish.

It started with an ordinary problem. I was trying to do my own council work and got tired of hunting through old PDFs. Nowthen's agendas, packets, minutes, budgets, audits, ordinances, and other records are public, but public does not always mean usable. I started using AI to search and organize those records so I could answer basic questions without opening fifty files and trying to remember where I had seen something six months earlier. Once the records were organized, I realized residents could use the same thing, so I put it online.

Then I kept following questions. I added the other Anoka County cities because our council regularly looks at how neighboring cities handle a service or a cost, and a comparison is more useful when every city is measured the same way. I added the state budget because I wanted to understand where the state's money actually goes.

Luverne came next. I heard about its charter amendment on the city utilities and got curious. Both sides could make claims that sounded reasonable, and a resident would have to spend hours reading audits, utility reports, rate sheets, meeting records, charter language, and state law to figure out what was true. Most people do not have time for that, so I put the records together in one place.

The Minnesota fraud section grew out of the same impulse. I had lost track of what had actually happened. There were multiple programs, investigations, court cases, audits, and political arguments, and the dollar figures did not all measure the same thing. I stopped being comfortable relying on anyone else's summary. I was not trying to decide which political side to blame. I wanted to know what happened, when it happened, what the public record establishes, and what it does not.

That is how this site grows. I run into a question I do not understand, and I work through the record until I can explain it to myself.

How the site works

I do not like reading an article that makes a factual claim and leaves me wondering whether it is true. My answer is not to ask you to trust me more. It is to make my work easier to check.

Material claims on this site link back to their sources. Numbers are labeled by what they measure. A budget amount is not necessarily money spent. A government payment is not necessarily a fraud loss. An allegation in a charging document is not a conviction. Restitution ordered by a court is not money recovered. When I calculate a number myself, I say so.

I do have opinions. Some pages contain my analysis, and some explain votes I have cast as a council member. Those pages are labeled as analysis. I build those opinions from the same public records and show the numbers and reasoning, so you can decide whether my conclusion follows from the evidence.

Full method and editorial standards →

How AI is used

AI is a big part of how I can do this as a hobby. I use it to pull information out of records, organize and compare data, write code, test calculations, and help draft parts of this website. I do not rely on AI at all for writing my analysis pieces, nor do I rely on it for extended writing on any other page. I use other tools and models to check and challenge that work.

AI can be wrong, and so can I. I have not personally verified every word and every number on this site despite doing my very best to check and ensure it is accurate. Records can be missed, data can be read incorrectly, and two sources can describe the same thing differently. That is why the source trail matters.

Corrections

If something is wrong, tell me specifically what it is. Give me the page, the number or statement, and the source that shows the right answer. I will fix it and log the correction publicly. I would rather publish a correction than defend a bad number. Report an error or read the corrections log.

This site helps me understand complicated subjects, and I enjoy building it. If other people find it useful too, that is a bonus.

Other projects by Dan

Free Minnesota consumer tools I also build, separate from this research site.