An entrepreneurial Essex couple have created an artificial intelligence chatbot that uses local selectboard minutes to answer questions about town governance. Local Minutes, the tool developed by software engineer Duane Millar Barlow and his wife, Allison, can answer questions about a town’s policy history and what happened in a selectboard meeting in mere seconds.
That’s promising news, since many municipal websites aren’t easy to navigate.
Local Minutes was in beta testing for months and launched publicly two weeks ago. It’s free and accessible at localminutes.org.
Duane came up with the idea for Local Minutes as a novice member of Essex’s Conservation and Trails Committee. Tasked with writing the committee’s meeting minutes, he discovered how valuable those notes can be for informing discussions.
The problem was, combing through past meeting minutes for relevant information was a slog. Duane found that researching decisions other towns made was even more challenging.
Duane’s solution: training an AI chatbot to pull information from public documents. Because the data is drawn from a limited pool of information, the tool is almost entirely accurate, according to Duane.
So far, Local Minutes can answer questions about the 50 most populous municipalities in Vermont, representing 70 percent of the state’s population. Duane and Allison hope to cover the entire state eventually, financed by donations from regular users while keeping the website free.
Duane now uses the tool in his conservation committee meetings and says it “feels like having a superpower.” A member will mention a development project, and Duane can generate a “summary of all of the challenges that committee faced with the project over the past 10 years,” he said.
The original print version of this article was headlined “AI for the People”
This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2025.
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