Tampa City Council is off this week for Spring Break, so unless you want to hear about what else I’ve been working on or my rant, see you here next week.

Sunshine Week & Goals

Transparency. Sunshine Laws. They used to mean something, but these days it’s hard to take serious some days, especially at the state level. But at it’s core, what I have tried to do with Tampa Monitor really is about bringing awareness and transparency in the process.

One of my initial goals in all of that can be summed up on the about page. What if?

The agenda and maps here have come along and continue to improve. But the video and transcripts? That’s been something I’ve been slowly tinkering with for the last few months. It’s still a work in progress—most of the pieces are pulled together—but not quite all fully automated. I’ve shared this a few places, but the basics can be seen in this demo. I’m taking the all-caps transcripts from the city that identify speakers and the time, run that through a couple of scripts to use proper capitalization (that’s way harder than it sounds, it’s not “AI” but does use machine learning). Another set of scripts grabs the associated Youtube videos metadata and assembles the video portion of the page. Another set of scripts (also trickier than it sounds) using more machine learning (Whisper) to figure out the intro-buffer so the video timestamp can by synced with the timestamp in the transcript.

All with full page text search so you can type what you’re looking for, find the spot in the transcript where it’s being discussed and then click the timestamp in the transcript to play the video. The latest iteration also has a pop-out tab for the agenda so you don’t have to leave the window.

It’s working, mostly. There’s still some bugs in the video/transcript sync, sometimes it’s off 10-15 seconds. If anyone knows someone at Tampa City Council who starts the meetings and wanted to suggest they speak loud and clear as the meeting starts so it’s picked up both in the video and transcript I could nail the feature.

What I need to do is focus some time to finish wiring all the parts up together and building the deploy pipeline to efficiently put it out every week.

That’s where you can come in. As part of Sunshine Week I’d like to finish this project. I’m asking readers and folks in the community who have ever found themselves frustrated trying to find where in a city council meeting they discussed a topic to support my work. I’m asking for an investment in these tools and more like them to come.

All of the code will be open and on GitHub and there will never be a paywall to access the content. It’s all the city’s work, I’m just remixing it.

From there the next goal is cross-meeting search. The groundwork is in place in how all of the information is being stored in a database, but implementing is for a future version. Additionally, I haven’t mentioned here, but I started mirroring the supporting documents instead of trying to use the agenda links. They change sometimes twice a day due to a design decision in the agenda software, and it’s whack-a-mole trying to keep them in sync. Mirroring them and adding new documents is easier, won’t cost that much in the long run, and keeps those documents in the sunshine. On the roadmap is to use more scripts to parse the pdfs and use optical character recognition (OCR) to make the documents searchable along with the global search.

And all of that sounds great but what are we doing folks?

None of that is going to matter the way things are going at the state and federal level. We are having memo wars and debates over the role of the City Attorney while the unelected State Attorney runs around like someone lost on a snipe hunt in Ocala National Forest threatening Mayor Castor. And I just have to say, I looked for statements from council members after that and didn’t see one. It was disappointing. When the issue of immigration and 287(g) agreements comes before council they’ll give heartfelt speeches to the camera about their concerns and assurances but when the mayor comes under attack for potentially upholding the guardrails and concerns—crickets. Or worse, the brunt of a Council member Carlson joke.

The number one job of a legislative body is supposed to be the budget. Tampa City Council adopts a budget based on a recommendation from the mayor. Meanwhile, the Florida Legislature failed to do their job. Instead they are too busy doing the bidding of special interest and taking away home rule. Passing laws to give the governor the right to remove the people we elect from office if they support diversity, equity and inclusion. As if a city recognizing Hispanic Heritage or Pride Week is the downfall of society and not the greedy, hateful and environmentally destructive laws they’re passing in Tallahassee.

Nothing was fixed with SB 180, rather another law was passed putting a gun in the hand of developers to point at the city’s head if they don’t do exactly what the developers want. You’re worried about a 3-story duplex on your street now, just wait. But don’t count on there being any funding to pave roads or upgrade stormwater from the growth because they’re coming to take away revenue at the same time. Doubtful those multi-modal impact fees will go into effect based on the failure of the SB 180 fix. Good luck increasing the fees on permitting, even if they are from 1970s.

Everyone seems confident “some kind of property tax reform” is coming. Not property insurance reform. Tax. The people who moved here for no income tax when interest rates were historically low bought all of the new houses and now they don’t want to pay for the streets and sewers to connect them. Or public safety. Or parks. Just some kind of magic free ride as if it’s the first time they visited Disney.

Get off my overgrown lawn.

I will be watching very closely the turnout and vote percentages for city residents in the Special Call State Senate District 14 election next Tuesday. A seat formerly held by now Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins. I think it will tell us a lot about where the voters in influential parts of the city stand on the current state of affairs and what to expect.