The COVID-19 pandemic quickly moved many public meetings online, where they could be accessible by a meeting platform like Zoom, or available via YouTube. But governments continue to have long-standing needs around online permitting, payment, digitized forms — and meeting notes.
HeyGov, an online forms and payments purveyor, offers one solution, ClerkMinutes, which launched in 2024 and transcribes relevant information and actions taken by elected officials. More than 34,000 municipal clerks across the country are charged with generating, sharing and storing meeting minutes for their cities, HeyGov officials said.
“We’re hearing from many people that it’s saving them hours and hours of time, just because it used to be such a manual process. And I feel like the software that we’re providing is modernizing local government,” Dustin Overbeck, HeyGov founder, said.
Heather Minor, the town clerk for tiny Long View, N.C., uses ClerkMinutes to compress the time she would otherwise spend compiling meeting minutes. Its AI listens to a recording of the event and provides written minutes with context, composed in the required format.
“It’s allowed me to be able to basically, shorten the minutes, make them relevant, and still be able to capture the information that’s needed without making it a 92-page-long scroll,” Minor said, recalling a job that previously involved listening to recordings of the meetings in 15-second increments and then making a decision around what details needed to be included in the minutes.
“So it was stop and go. And this took forever,” she said, calling the job of creating minutes “one of my most daunting tasks … I dreaded doing the meeting minutes.”
Digital files like those from video-conferencing and video-sharing platforms can typically be uploaded into ClerkMinutes. AI technology takes over from there, generating draft minutes and letting actual clerks go in “and fine-tune things.”
“We’re providing them an interface that’s similar to something like Google Docs,” Overbeck said, noting the software requires two files: a meeting agenda and a recording.
ClerkMinutes is now used by more than 400 municipalities, and its technology is able to shave about five hours per meeting off of the process of compiling minutes, according to the company.
Automating rote tasks is often seen as the kind of job made for AI — and an area where cities are showing a willingness to experiment. Officials in Saratoga, Calif., use an AI tool known as Hamlet, which is able to take the City Council agenda, supporting documents, and audio and video recordings and create a summary. Similarly, Santa Cruz County, Calif., is using AI for a document translation project to help serve the county’s large Spanish-speaking population, and in another tool to help residents search Planning Commission meeting agendas, minutes and documents.
The Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting is using AI-enabled technology from CivCheck to quickly read through development applications, checking for compliance with applicable code regulations and local permitting requirements, and submittal of all required documents — all tasks formerly done by clerks in the department.
These are the kinds of innovations some observers speculate could lead to reduced staffing and job losses.
Looking back to other technological innovations, “there’s always been the fear of what’s going to happen, but I don’t think our software is going to reduce the number of staff in a municipality,” Overbeck said. “It allows them to have more hours in the day and allows them to work on the day-to-day workload that is more human-facing, more human-touch. And if anything, it helps balance the burnout.”
