{"id":1156,"date":"2026-07-28T05:29:35","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T13:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/salemdata.net\/johnpress\/?p=1156"},"modified":"2026-07-28T05:29:35","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T13:29:35","slug":"digesting-the-salem-city-council-hearing-record-for-july-27-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/salemdata.net\/johnpress\/?p=1156","title":{"rendered":"Digesting the Salem City Council Hearing Record for July 27, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Public testimony is often technically available but practically inaccessible. I downloaded the hearing record, removed duplicates, redacted contact information, summarized each submission, classified the testimony, and linked every entry back to its source page.<\/p>\n

The Salem City Council convened on July 27, 2026, at 6:00 p.m.\u00a0 The Agenda and supplemental packets can be obtained at here<\/a>. Here is a screenshot of the page you will encounter, it is designed to look like a calendar and has entries in blue bars on a given date:<\/p>\n

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The “helpful” interface requires you to hover and click a given blue bar on a given day.\u00a0 Here’s what you will see (as of Tuesday, 7\/28\/26 at 4:50 AM PDT):<\/p>\n

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I numbered the choices, whose names have had the<\/strong>\u00a0middle truncated and replaced with an ellipsis<\/strong> so that the entries are not unique, e.g. “07-27-26 Cou…pdf”, and I downloaded all five entries into a directory ~\/work\/Salem\/20260727.\u00a0 If you hover over the blue characters of any entry, you get a mouse pop-up that distnguishes the entry:<\/p>\n

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I do not know whether this interface satisfies applicable accessibility requirements, but its dependence on hovering, truncated filenames, and precise mouse movement raises obvious usability and accessibility concerns. A plain-text list with complete filenames would be substantially easier to navigate.<\/p>\n

Here is a listing of the files downloaded with their size and page number (along with the shell script that extracted the page count):<\/p>\n

jlpoole@jp<\/b><\/span> ~\/work\/Salem\/20260727 $<\/b><\/span> date; printf '%-60s %12s %8s\\n' 'FILE' 'SIZE' 'PAGES'\r\nfind . -maxdepth 1 -type f -iname '*.pdf' -print0 |\r\nwhile IFS= read -r -d '' file; do\r\n    size=$(du -h --apparent-size \"$file\" | awk '{print $1}')\r\n    pages=$(pdfinfo \"$file\" 2>\/dev\/null | awk '\/^Pages:\/ { print $2 }')\r\n\r\n    printf '%-60s %12s %8s\\n' \\\r\n        \"${file#.\/}\" \\\r\n        \"$size\" \\\r\n        \"${pages:-ERROR}\"\r\ndone\r\nTue Jul 28 04:57:54 PDT 2026\r\nFILE                                                                 SIZE    PAGES\r\n07-27-26 Council Written Testimony #2.pdf                             36M      361\r\n07-27-26 Council Additions 1.pdf                                     836K       22\r\nAgenda - FullPackage City Council _Jul27_2026.pdf                     89M      386\r\n07-27-26 Council Written Testimony 1.pdf                              61M      319\r\nAgenda - Agenda City Council _Jul27_2026.pdf                         503K        8\r\njlpoole@jp<\/b><\/span> ~\/work\/Salem\/20260727 $<\/b><\/span> \r\n<\/pre>\n
I then submitted this prompt to OpenAI’s Codex:<\/p>\n
~\/work\/Salem\/20260727 contains 5 PDFs relating to the City of Salem hearing on same date. Would you please digest the PDFs providing a table of people who appeared with a colum [sic<\/em>] of their name & address, if provided, their email, and then a concise summary in 1-3 sentences of the substance of their submission? The table would be relevant to “Additions” which is a powerpoint presentation and “Agenda – Agenda” which is solely the Agenda. The goal here is to provide an executive summary, along with count of testimony submissions, so one can get an overview without having to read 600+ sheets.<\/p>\n
The response was:<\/p>\n
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5:11 AM<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Worked for 4m 12s<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Done. I created the digest here:<\/p>\n
[salem_2026-07-27_testimony_digest.md](\/home\/jlpoole\/work\/Salem\/20260727\/salem_2026-07-27_testimony_digest.md)<\/p>\n
Key counts from the digest:<\/p>\n