Six Years of City Hall in One Afternoon

Most city council meetings are technically public. Recorded, archived, legally accessible. But practically speaking, they're buried.

Hours of video. No search. No index. No memory.

A vote from 2021 that directly shapes a 2025 zoning fight? Good luck finding it without watching everything twice.

The Project

This project set out to fix that for one small Kentucky city.

Park Hills, a hillside community of a few thousand residents, has been recording its council meetings for years. Over 107 sessions spanning October 2019 through March 2026, those recordings sat in an archive. Individually watchable, collectively impenetrable.

The workflow was straightforward:

1. Download the meeting videos

2. Run them through Whisper for transcription

3. Combine all 107 transcripts into a single document (~147,000 lines)

4. Hand that document to Claude for structured analysis

The output was not just a summary.

It became a layered institutional report including:

• Recurring themes across six years and how they evolved

• Detailed participation profiles for each council member

• Institutional gaps created by departing members

• Documentation of interpersonal dynamics invisible within any single meeting

• Longitudinal insight into governance patterns and procedural behavior

Why It Matters

The patterns that shape a community's future:

• who controls zoning

• who gets heard

• who gets interrupted

• who consistently drives outcomes

...rarely reveal themselves in a single meeting. They emerge over time.

AI made that longitudinal view achievable in hours rather than months.

Practical Takeaways

1. Whisper Handles Long-Form Audio Well

Whisper performed surprisingly well on public meeting audio.

For archives this size, batch processing becomes essential.

2. Combined Transcripts Create Better Analysis

A single unified transcript dramatically outperformed per-session analysis. Cross-session pattern recognition is where the real value exists.

3. Prompt Specificity Determines Investigative Depth

This prompt:

“Analyze themes.”

Produces generalities.

This prompt:

“Document every instance where a council member’s procedural motion was ruled out of order and by whom.”

Produces evidence.

4. Deliverables Matter as Much as the Analysis

The final format determines whether the work actually travels to the people who need it.

Useful outputs include:

• PDF reports

• Structured CSV exports

• Word documents

• Searchable databases

• Public dashboards

The Bigger Point

The raw material for this kind of accountability work already exists in almost every municipality in the country. The barrier now is not access. It is knowing what to do with it.