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 or records, and recent meeting activity. Below that is what's new in the archive.

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 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 “Recent meetings” rail listing the latest meetings newest-first. Click any meeting for the briefing view.

Each meeting's page is the briefing: agenda items in plain English, what was decided, motion and vote details, any spending the minutes show the council actually approved, related city issues, and a clean list of every PDF in the meeting's record.

4. Roads

A map of every road in Nowthen, drawn from Anoka County's official centerline data. Click a road to see the engineer's pavement ratings, the recommended repair and its printed cost, and a jump to everything the archive says about it. Below the map: the project history, what every city in the county actually spends on streets, and a plain-English piece (backed by MnDOT's own cost figures) on how much a city has to spend just to keep its roads from falling apart. A companion road-funding article connects those maintenance needs to the city's tax base.

5. Compare cities

Every city in Anoka County side by side: population, income, housing, density, the city tax rate, and who provides police, water, sewer, and fire, ordered by how similar each city is to Nowthen. Open any city for its own dashboard, or use the comparison tool to ask how the neighbors handle something.

6. 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. Use the rule finder at the top of the page for contractor-style lookups like fences, setbacks, driveways, signs, home occupations, and permits.

7. Money

The city-budget page traces money through the record:

• Where the money came from: revenue sources in the adopted budget.
• The funds it sat in: city funds and restrictions.
• What it paid for: departments and funds you can expand inline to see each budget line and the PDF page it was parsed from.
• Borrowing: bond issues, terms, repayment, and source documents.
• Your property tax: where the city share of a tax bill goes and what changes the math.

Honesty note: the verified adopted budget (the totals and line items on the Money and Taxes pages, read straight from the official budget PDFs) is reviewed against the source before it's marked verified. Some meeting mentions, transcript-derived outcomes, and other extracted dollar references do appear publicly as discovery links, and they are labeled Auto-extracted or awaiting review when they are. No AI-derived figure is ever promoted into the official adopted budget without an admin checking it against the source.

8. Beta tools (not in main navigation)

These two pages are generated from extracted meeting data and are still being refined, so they aren't in the top navigation yet. They're useful, but treat them as works in progress and check the linked sources.

When votes split

Council voting leads with concrete split votes: what the motion was, whether it passed, and where the record says so. It covers everyone who appears in the vote data, current and former council members, and sometimes Planning Commission members. The pairwise agreement matrix is tucked behind a details control because most votes are unanimous.

What's pending

Applications and city business that may not have reached a final decision yet. Many entries are items the system flagged from old meeting notes that may not still be open — check the source before treating anything here as pending, so it's labeled beta; for tabled or continued items headed to an upcoming meeting, the Next meeting page is more reliable.

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).

10. What these labels mean

The most important two are Verified ✓ and Auto-extracted: verified facts came from an official record, were read directly from the source (no AI guessing), or passed a human review. Trust them; auto-extracted facts were inferred by AI, so click through to the source to confirm. The rest tell you how finished or how confident a particular fact is. They mean the same thing wherever you see them on the site.

11. Citations & sources

Every fact links to the exact PDF page or transcript segment where it appears. On search, the source rail shows cited PDFs as page thumbnails so you can inspect the original record.