A 35,000-resident city: 20 years of council records, 4 seconds

The brief

A city in southeastern France, 35,000 residents, 280 staff spread across seven sites. The city manager, four years into the role, inherits twenty years of council resolutions, half of which exist only on paper in the city hall basement. The legal department loses, on average, two days a week searching for references in binders.

We don’t know anymore what we voted on in 2009. We know it matters, because we cite the resolution at every council meeting. But the exact wording? Takes two people three hours.— City manager, 35,000-resident municipality

Digitization, the thankless but unavoidable step

First step: 3.2 linear meters of binders to scan. A local vendor digitized them in high resolution (300 dpi color), with fine OCR for pre-2008 resolutions (the most degraded). Four weeks, €18,000 — cost covered under the BPI grant agreement.

The raw result: 47,000 PDF pages, of which 12,000 required a second OCR pass (signatures, stamps, handwritten margins).

Ingestion, in two passes

First pass: everything post-2008, already digital, ingested in two days. 22,000 documents.

Second pass: the scans, ingested over five days with manual segmentation by term of office (2001-2008, 2008-2014, 2014-2020). We refused bulk ingestion — each term has its own terminology, its own elected officials, its own context. Mixing them hurts quality.

The political question of guardrails

A city hall is not neutral. The political leadership changes every six years. An assistant that discussed the previous administration’s decisions with positive or negative bias would be politically explosive.

Three explicit guardrails were written and validated in a technical steering committee:

1. The assistant always cites the source resolution, without commentary.
2. The assistant never synthesizes “the spirit” of a decision — it reports the text as voted.
3. Questions like “what did the previous majority do?” are reformulated as “what resolutions were voted between X and Y?”. Factual answer, no interpretation.

Intranet rollout

Three concentric access tiers:

• City manager, legal, general secretariat: full access, including closed-session resolutions.
• Operational departments (urban planning, social services, public works): access to public resolutions plus their business scope.
• All staff: access to public resolutions only.

Each tier has an interface that shows only what it’s allowed to see. The same question, asked by three different staff members, doesn’t return the same thing. That’s a GDPR and political requirement, not a bug.

Six months later

The legal department recovers 1.5 days per week. The urban planning department prepares its committees in half the time. City council members requested access — granted on the public scope.

The city manager, one year out from the next election: “Whatever team arrives in 2026, they’ll be able to go ten years back in four seconds. Before us, you had to start over with every term.”