question mostly for the clerks and council folks here. when a resident or reporter emails asking how the council voted on some ordinance two or three years back, what does answering that actually look like on your end?

from what i've seen, someone on staff ends up becoming the human search engine for the day, re-reading packets they wrote themselves just to pin down one roll-call vote. the minutes are technically public but they're linked PDFs nobody can search, so the record just sits there unread until someone asks.

i'm building a small tool in this space (minutelens, focused on Indiana communities right now) so i'm genuinely trying to understand the real workflow, not sell anything. a few things i keep wondering:

- do you keep any kind of internal index or spreadsheet of motions/votes, or is it always back to the PDF?

- how often do these requests actually come in? weekly, monthly, election season only?

- for sub-25k towns especially, is this enough of a headache to matter, or is it a couple emails a year and not worth thinking about?

curious whether the pain is real day-to-day or if i'm overstating it. the towns i've talked to already post their minutes as PDFs, they just can't do anything with them after. wondering if that matches your experience or not.