Chico Public is an independent local project — plain-language recaps of every Chico city council meeting, so more of us can follow along with our local politics.
A lot of what shapes daily life in Chico — parks, roads, housing, rents, the police budget — actually gets decided at city council meetings. They're open to everyone. But they start at 6pm on a weeknight and can run for hours, right in the middle of dinner, homework, and bedtime. For a lot of us, especially anyone with kids, being there meeting after meeting just isn't realistic.
We wanted to keep up anyway, and we figured we weren't the only ones. So we built a pipeline that turns each meeting into a plain-language recap: what passed, who voted how, and why it might matter. Not to replace showing up — the opposite. The point is to make staying informed easy enough that you can show up when something matters to you, speak up, and vote with a clearer picture of who's been doing what. Free, nonpartisan, about three minutes a meeting.
In short: we pull the agenda and video from the city's official Granicus archive, transcribe the audio, run logged cleanup and vote-counting passes that don't use AI, and then use AI (Claude) for exactly one thing: drafting the recap text. Details the pipeline can't verify are left out or marked with a dotted underline, every recap links back to the source video, and the video — not our text — is always the authoritative record.
Full transparency Read the whole process — including the exact AI prompts Every step of the pipeline, explained in plain language, with the complete word-for-word instructions the AI is given. Plus, every meeting page has a "How we made this" tab with that meeting's specific receipts. See how it's made →The recaps describe what happened and who voted how. They don't characterize anyone's motives, endorse candidates, or take positions on ballot measures. The instructions given to the AI demand a neutral tone and forbid editorializing — and they're published in full so you can check that claim yourself. If a recap ever reads like it's rooting for a side, that's a bug — tell us.
When we get something wrong, we fix the recap and note the correction on the page — corrections are noted, not buried. Spot an error? Email hello@chicopublic.org or DM @chicopublic and we'll check it against the recording.
Chico Public is built and published by Chico locals as an independent personal project. It has no funding from — or affiliation with — the City of Chico, any campaign, or any political group. Meetings are public records under California law; these recaps are independent summaries built on them.
Every recap goes out by email and to @chicopublic on Instagram — pick whichever you'll actually see.
✓ Check your inbox — click the confirmation link to finish signing up.