Nashville Council Digest

The brief

Council agendas run to 100–170 items in legal language. The goal was a page a resident can read in a few minutes and filter to their district, without asking them to trust a model's reading of the law. Live at nathanaelhub.github.io/nashville-council-digest.

The build

• Records from the city's Legistar API: 21 full-council meetings, January 20 to October 20, 2026, 1,125 distinct bills and resolutions. Outcomes come from the recorded action, not Legistar's "passed" flag, which reads "Fail" for a resolution the council adopted.
• Districts from Metro's parcel map: zoning bills cite official parcels and other items give addresses; that places 180 of 194 site-specific zoning bills.
• A fact check in code: every dollar amount, number, district, file number and name in a summary must appear in the text Claude was shown. A summary that fails shows the official title instead.
• A second Claude reading for meaning: it can only hold a summary back, never put one up.
• Zoning codes explained in quotes from Metro Planning reports, with a test that every quote is in its source.

What I learned

I measured both checks on 281 planted errors. The code check caught made-up facts but none of the 62 swapped names or 44 reversed verbs; the Claude reading caught 56 of 59 real swaps and all the reversals. Run on all 1,124 summaries that passed the code check, the second reading flagged 14: 6 real errors (one made a festival firearms ban sound waivable), 4 false alarms. The official record had errors of its own, four of them, including an analysis naming the wrong nonprofit for a grant.

Stack

Python, Claude (Sonnet through the Claude CLI), Legistar web API, Metro Nashville ArcGIS, pytest, Playwright, GitHub Pages.