Jersey City Minutes

Methods

Jersey City Minutes is a record of what the Jersey City Municipal Council, Planning Board and Zoning Board of Adjustment decide: each project and ordinance from first filing to final vote, each member's roll-call votes and attendance, each meeting as a structured record, and a weekly page of what moved. It is not a news site and not a summary service: the record, not the recap. It reports agenda items, hearings, votes and outcomes, not what anyone meant or should have done.

Author

Adam Hanford prepares and is responsible for every page. Corrections: corrections@jerseycityminutes.com. Every change after publication is listed in the corrections log. Sponsors and subscribers get no say in what the record contains and no earlier sight of it than anyone else.

How a record is made

  1. The city's public video of the meeting (Jersey City TV on YouTube) is fetched and transcribed locally with faster-whisper large-v3-turbo, with the members' names supplied as hotwords so they are spelled right.
  2. A small model (claude-haiku-5-5) normalises member names in the transcript against a dictionary built from the city's minutes and agendas; it changes nothing else.
  3. An AI model (claude-opus-5-5) drafts the meeting record from the transcript: items, timestamps, actions and each member's roll-call answer, with the clerk's agenda numbering taken from the published minutes.
  4. A second pass by the same model, with fresh instructions, checks the draft against the transcript and the written minutes, fixes what it can with evidence, and logs every change.
  5. Adam Hanford reviews the record and the unresolved list before anything is published. Nothing is published that he has not looked at.

The vote rule

A roll-call vote is shown by member only when two records agree: the roll call as heard on the video, and the city's written minutes (which name every nay, abstention, recusal and absence). If they differ in any member's answer or in the tally, the vote is held back and listed as awaiting confirmation until it is resolved by listening to the video again. Where the audio did not catch a member's one-word answer, that answer is taken from the written records only when two of them agree, the minutes and the vote table printed in the item's own ordinance or resolution; such answers are marked † on the page. Where the audio did not catch an answer and the count the clerk or the board secretary announced after the roll call leaves only one possible answer, that answer is taken from the count, still subject to the minutes agreeing; such answers are marked ‡. A motion decided by voice ("all in favor") is shown as a voice vote with no roll call: no member's answer and no tally are recorded for it. The Planning Board and Zoning Board have published no written minutes since 2023, so their votes are shown "as heard, unconfirmed" until a memorialized resolution confirms the outcome. A board roll call that memorializes resolutions is shown as heard on the video, because the resolution it adopts prints the earlier hearing's vote, not this one. Where a resolution's vote table leaves out a member the video shows absent, the page says so.

Sources

Writing rules

No characterisation of motives. No adjectives for projects or people. Speakers are quoted only when the transcript is unambiguous and the chair or clerk identified them. Members of the public are named only as the minutes name them. Every fact cites the meeting date and a timestamp into the video. The full rules are in the project's EDITORIAL.md.

Pipeline last changed 2026-10-23.