What this is, and what it isn’t

A weekly civic-record project for Fort Mill, the Fort Mill School District, and York County, South Carolina. Independent, ad-free, and built from public documents.

For the personal case for building this, see Why this exists.

Local government produces a lot of decisions, and almost no one has time to read every agenda packet or sit through a four-hour board meeting. Local Record reads each meeting’s official record on your behalf and publishes a structured summary every Monday morning. The summaries are written by a language model under a strict template; the source documents are linked from every page and remain authoritative. We are not journalists, not a government body, and not affiliated with any political organization.

1. i.

   Discover

   Every Monday at 06:00 ET, an automated pipeline checks each jurisdiction’s posting platform for new meetings. Fort Mill uses CivicPlus, York County uses CivicClerk, and the Fort Mill School District uses Diligent Community plus YouTube for recordings. We only ingest meetings that have an official source posted.

2. ii.

   Verify

   We only summarize the record of proceedings, not pre-meeting agendas. For councils and commissions, that means we wait until minutes are posted (typically four to six weeks after the meeting). For the school board, where minutes are not produced in text, we use the auto-captioned video as the substrate. Meetings without a verifiable source stay marked as pending.

3. iii.

   Extract

   The source document or transcript is sent to Claude (Anthropic) with a fixed extraction prompt that pulls attendance, agenda items, motions, vote tallies, public hearings, action items, and upcoming dates into a structured JSON object. The prompt is the same for every meeting; it does not vary by topic, applicant, or political position.

4. iv.

   Flag

   A regular-expression pass identifies agenda items that match any of seven watchlist categories (see below). Each candidate is then re-checked by Claude to filter procedural false positives (e.g. “there were no zoning matters this month”). Confirmed flags appear on the meeting page.

5. v.

   Narrate

   A second pass converts the structured JSON into the Markdown narrative you read on the meeting page, following a four-section template: Summary, Key Decisions & Votes, Watchlist Flags, Action Items & Upcoming Dates. The narrative model is instructed to remain neutral; if you find editorializing, report it as an error and we’ll fix it.

Each flag uses a geometric mark and a category color so it’s identifiable in grayscale and accessible to colorblind readers.

• Subdivision

  New residential development

  Preliminary or final plats, major and minor subdivisions, townhome and single-family projects, residential development. Fires on planning-commission and council agendas.

• Rezoning

  Zoning-map and text amendments

  Map and text amendments, conditional-use approvals, special-use permits, special exceptions. Council and planning bodies.

• Variance

  Zoning-appeals decisions

  Setback variances, special-exception requests at Board of Zoning Appeals, appeals of staff zoning decisions. Quasi-judicial — outcomes are legally appealable.

• School Boundary

  Attendance-zone changes

  Redistricting, attendance-area adjustments, school-boundary reviews. School-board agendas only.

• School Facilities

  Construction, bonds, millage

  New school construction, capital projects, bond referenda and issuances, millage rate changes, facility expansions and renovations.

• School Personnel

  Senior leadership actions

  Superintendent contract actions, interim appointments, principal hires and reassignments at the board-action level. Routine staffing reports are not flagged.

• School Policy

  Policy and curriculum decisions

  Academic calendar, graduation requirements, discipline and grading policy, curriculum adoption, book review and removal, named policy revisions (e.g. Policy GCB).

Every meeting on the site links to its primary source. Treat the source as authoritative; the summary is derived.

• Fort Mill
  CivicPlus AgendaCenter at fortmillsc.gov. PDF agendas and minutes for Town Council, Planning Commission, and Board of Zoning Appeals.
• York County
  CivicClerk portal at yorkcountygov.com for current meetings; IQM2 for meetings before March 2025.
• FMSD agendas
  Diligent Community portal at fortmillschools-org.community.diligentoneplatform.com. Agendas only — minutes are not produced.
• FMSD proceedings
  Board-meeting recordings on the district’s YouTube channel, summarized from auto-generated captions.

• No agendas
  We do not summarize pre-meeting agendas; agendas describe what is planned, not what was decided.
• No predictions
  We do not editorialize, predict outcomes, or characterize members’ motives. The model is instructed to remain neutral.
• No video transcripts (yet)
  When school-board recordings have captions disabled by the uploader, the meeting stays pending. We do not transcribe audio without permission.
• No advertising or tracking
  The site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and serves no ads. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages from a static build.
• No legal opinion
  Summaries are not legal, financial, or planning advice. For anything that turns on a specific provision, read the source.

Speech-recognition and language-model output are imperfect. Proper nouns, dollar figures, and vote tallies are the most error-prone fields. If you spot something wrong, write to corrections@localrecord.org with the meeting URL and the specific phrase. See the corrections policy and log for what to include and how visible updates are handled.

We collect nothing. The site has no analytics, no cookies, and no third-party fonts. Subscribing to the weekly digest requires only an email address, which is used solely to send the digest and is deleted on unsubscribe.