A plain-English window into your local government.

MN Public Tools is an independent transparency project that organizes the public records and budgets of the City of Nowthen and other Anoka County, Minnesota cities, and makes them searchable in plain English. For the longer story of why it exists and who builds it, read the note on the front page.

Cities like Nowthen publish their agendas, packets, minutes, ordinances, and city code on official sites such as cityofnowthen.gov. The records are public. But they're scattered across hundreds of PDFs, with no real way to search, no way to ask “what was the council talking about three meetings ago,” and no way to follow an issue across the years it took to resolve.

This site is an attempt to fix that: for residents who want a quick answer, for council members who want to find precedent before voting, and for reporters who need background on something a council just discussed.

What's actually on this site

The archive ingests published records from official city sources, optical-character-reads them, and indexes them as they are found. Gaps can remain when a document was never posted, moved, or failed OCR, so the site is organized around both search and source checking:

• Next meeting: the next scheduled meeting, its agenda and packet as they post, and the items headed there.
• Search: ask a plain-English question and get a cited answer, or keyword-search the record.
• Meetings: indexed council, planning & zoning, work-session, and truth-in-taxation meetings, with the agenda, packet, and minutes when available.
• Money: the adopted budget traced to source PDFs: revenue, funds, what it paid for, and city borrowing.
• Your taxes: how the city property-tax rate is set, what the average bill buys, and a Tax Lab to test the levers.
• Roads: a road-history map, project records, dust-control history, and how Nowthen's street spending compares with peer cities.
• Compare cities: Anoka County city profiles and peer comparisons, with the strongest record coverage for Nowthen and nearby rural peers.
• City rules: the full Nowthen city code, by chapter and section.
• Help: a plain-English tour of every section.

A few generated beta pages (vote splits and pending matters) remain beta tools, linked from Help rather than the main navigation while their extracted data is still being cleaned up.

Where the AI parts are

The site uses AI to do two things that humans can't reasonably do across the city's large archive of public documents:

1. Extract structured facts. Reading every packet and pulling out applications, motions, votes, and dollar figures. These extractions are labeled Auto-extracted on the site so you know it's a machine reading and not the official record.
2. Answer questions in plain English. The search page uses the records as context to answer plain-language questions. Factual answers are designed to point back to specific pages in specific PDFs.

Facts approved in admin or read directly from official PDFs get a Verified badge. Everything else is Auto-extracted and may need correction. Spot an error? Use the report button under a search answer or on the corrections page.

Two kinds of dollar figures on this site

The Money and Taxes pages show the adopted budget, parsed from official PDFs. Separately, AI finds other dollar mentions in meeting records for discovery — those are labeled Auto-extracted and never become the official baseline without human review. The Tax Lab is different on purpose: it lets you explore “what would it take” scenarios, and every assumption you can change is labeled as an assumption and presented as a scale comparison, not a forecast.

What this isn't

This is not an official government site. No city, county, or other government endorses, runs, reviews, or funds this project. The PDFs on this site come from those governments' public archives; the organization and interpretation are independent work. When in doubt, the official PDF is the truth; you can open any of them by clicking through.

How to help

• If you find a wrong number or wrong fact, report it — there's a “report an error” button under every answer and on the corrections page. Reports are reviewed, and verified fixes are logged publicly on the corrections list.
• If there's a public document missing from the archive, send us a link and we'll pull it in.
• If you'd like a feature that isn't here yet (a property map, an email digest of upcoming meetings, an RSS feed of decisions) tell us.

For a feature-by-feature tour of how to use the site, see the user manual.