An (unofficial) way to stay up to date
Amesbury's local government produces a steady stream of public records—meeting agendas, minutes, transcripts, ordinances, and project updates. The information is all there; it's just hidden in PDFs and doesn't tell a connected story.
As a resident of Amesbury, I found that there was a lot going on, but because of the delay between meetings and published minutes, it was hard to keep up to date on everything that was happening in our local government. Separating the routine work from the important ordinances and projects was also difficult.
This site is a non-commercial experiment in using AI to parse and process every meeting, project, and ordinance into a structured database that is cross-linked and searchable. The AI is directed to be neutral and judgment-free in how it presents summaries and information. No human is involved in the summarization process.
The site is not sponsored or in any way sanctioned by the Amesbury city government—please direct any feedback to feedback@amesbury.city.
If you have ideas for how this site could be made more useful I'd love to hear it.
If you'd like access to the GraphQL endpoint that surfaces this data and is used to drive this site, please just ask for an API key (and keep the number of queries on the poor, tiny server reasonable).
How this site works
This site visits the official Amesbury Agenda center once a day and looks for new and updated agendas. If it finds any it downloads and processes them, extracting and cross-linking city council ordinances and planning board projects so that it's easy to get a project or ordinance-based view of over time. You can see an example of this on the 5 and 13 School Street project page - the project is tracked from initial pre-application in February 2025 all they way through approval in Summer 2026. The documents associated with each project are downloaded, thumbnailed and made easily accessible. AI is used to generate a summary as well as pick gallery and images and a header image from the PDF.
For meetings that are streamed on ACTV, when they are posted to the Amesbury Community Television site, the video is download, the audio extracted, and a AI transcript is generated that extracts items and motions as well as potential points of interest. The video re-encoded at a lower resolution and then hosted here - linked to the agenda timestamps to allow for verification of source material. This allows the actions taken at city meetings to be visible within days instead of months when meeting minutes are posted and approved. When minutes are posted, the official minutes are paired with the transcript to tie official motions to specific timestamps for review.
On Saturday evening any upcoming meetings for the next week along with any meetings with recaps from the previous week and agendas for the upcoming week are compiled and turned into a "This week in Amesbury" post that tries to highlight the most important things that happened in the past week and will happen in the next week in a single post. Here's an example from the week of 7/18. That post is still a work in progress and should hopefully improve in the future.
Double check summaries and details
Please remember that AI makes mistakes, and despite efforts to ground it in the source documents, you should always go to the source materials before reaching a conclusion on anything important to make sure the AI-generated take-away matches reality. Agendas, Minutes, Ordinances, Project Documents and Videos are all linked to make it easy to go the source.
This site is a personal project that is still very much a work in progress, please send me feedback at feedback@amesbury.city if you have suggestions for how to make this more useful or if you come across mistakes or errors.
-Pascal Rettig