About

Eyes on Hawkeye is a volunteer project by residents who want to understand what our local government is doing about a proposed data center, and who think everyone else should be able to understand it too.

Who’s Behind This

Eyes on Hawkeye was created, and is maintained, by Michael Hart. He is a local activist and organizer, and a software engineer by trade. In the age of AI, he is using AI to give power back to the people: to read, sort and search the public record so that residents don’t need a team of lawyers or a records request to know what their government is doing. He gathers the documents and runs the site. The summaries are written by AI, as explained under How We Work.

What You’ll Find Here

• Documents. Public records the city has released, saved here as the city published them. Where we know the original web address, we link to it.
• A timeline. The documents and the events inside them, in order, so you can see what happened and when.
• Search. Full-text search across everything we’ve posted.

How We Work

1. We get documents from the city’s own public releases or from public records requests.
2. We keep an unedited copy of each file and link to where it came from.
3. Many of the files are scans. We run them through text recognition so they can be searched. That text is machine-made and can be wrong; the PDF is the record.
4. The summaries are written by AI. Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic, reads the text of each document and writes the short summary and the timeline entries that help you find your way. Michael Hart doesn’t write them by hand. Key figures and dates are checked against the scanned pages, but an AI can still get things wrong. The documents speak for themselves, so read the original when it matters.
5. If we get something wrong, including in a summary, tell us and we’ll fix it and note the correction.

What We Are Not

We’re not the city and we don’t speak for it. We don’t have inside information. Everything here is something any resident could request, and we’d like to save you the trouble.

What This Site Records About You

This site counts page views using GoatCounter, an open-source analytics service. It sets no cookies and collects no personal data, which is why you weren’t asked to dismiss a banner to read this. It records the page, where you arrived from, your country, your browser and operating system, and your screen size. Those are counted in aggregate, never tied to a person, never sold and never shared.

You don’t have to take that on trust. The numbers are public, and you can see the same view we do. A site that asks you to hold the government accountable shouldn’t keep its own readership a secret.