How this works
Council meetings hold a lot of what matters in a city — and most of it disappears into hours of video nobody has time to watch. This site is an attempt to fix that: a searchable record of Utica Common Council meetings, where every remark is transcribed and linked back to the exact second it was said. Look up a phrase, a name, or a decision, and go straight to the moment it happened.
How the record is built
- Start with the source. Every meeting begins from the City's own YouTube recording — nothing here is second-hand.
- Transcribe the room. The audio runs through speech-to-text that also tells the voices in the room apart, turning a long video into readable text.
- Put names to voices. Then a human goes through and labels who's speaking — council members, city officials, residents at the podium — checking against the agenda and minutes to get it right.
- Make it scannable. A short “In Brief” recap and a list of chapters get added so you can size up a two-hour meeting in a minute.
A note on accuracy
A lot of this is done by machine, and machines mishear. Expect the occasional wrong word, a name pinned to the wrong voice, or punctuation that wandered off. The “In Brief” recaps and chapters are AI-generated too — handy for getting your bearings, but not something to quote.
So treat this as a finding aid, not the final word. The minutes kept by the Utica City Clerk are the official record of Council proceedings, and the video is the primary source. When a detail matters, watch the moment — every remark links straight to it — and check it against the Clerk's minutes.
Ways to dig in
- Search any phrase to see every time it came up across meetings, and jump straight to that point in the video.
- Speaker profiles show what someone talked about, how often, and which meetings they turned up in.
- Follow a topic to keep tabs on it — new mentions in later meetings collect on your Following page. (That list lives only in your browser; nothing is sent back to us.)
Found something off?
If you spot a wrong name or a garbled line, say so — every correction makes the archive a little more trustworthy for the next person. Drop a note.