As an unincorporated community, we don’t have our own town council, we’re under the auspices of the county, managed by the San Diego County Board of Supervisors. Recently the Board lowered the speed limit on South Mission — that issue has been under discussion since 2016 and it’s only now in 2024 that it’s going to happen. Not the fastest group of folks. Recently I was trying to figure out when the issue of speed limits on South Mission was discussed at past meetings. It wasn’t easy because you have to load individual PDF files and search through them.
Most weeks, the Board of Supervisors meets twice per week to discuss issues and pass regulations. Minutes of their meetings are public, and are posted on their website, in PDF format, one file per meeting. Posting DOC/DOCX/PDF files may have been a good way to publicize their proceedings in the past. But PDFs were invented in 1993 and it’s really an outdated format.
Here’s what the sandiegocounty.gov website has to say about finding/reading minutes of past meetings:
- Read the minutes: View Minutes/Statements of Proceedings. The minutes are the official record of the Board’s actions.
- Search the online records: Documents that are searchable include Board agenda indexes, Minute Orders, Statements of Proceedings/Minutes, Board Letters (a report to the Board from staff or another elected official seeking Board direction), Board Letter supporting documents, and archived microfilm.
Minutes of meetings are available from 2003 – September 2013 in DOC/DOCX (Microsoft Word) format. From October 2013 through to the present the files are in PDF format. Link
You can search documents (including minutes which are called Statements of Proceedings) here: link But search results come back as simply a list of documents, and then you must click on each document and do a search within the document. And of course, you must have a PDF reader and for pre-2014 documents, you must have a program that can read Microsoft Word documents.
What we need is a Google-style search that will list snippets of documents that refer to the desired subject.
With the interest in AI running hot earlier this year, it seems like there might be a tool that could slurp up documents and allow people to ask questions and find answers. Here’s the problem with AI solutions though: when AI can’t find an answer, it makes things up! If the county built an AI tool for searching, it could not invent something plausible when there is no answer!! But current AI can’t tell the difference between lies and correct answers. AI is probably not a good solution, but there has to be a better way to look up the Board of Supervisors’ deliberations.
