Warrenton’s transparency fee spent over $34,000 on fo…

At the council’s July 14 assembly, Ward 4 Council Member Michele O’Halloran, who voted to determine the fee, mentioned she couldn’t vote to pour extra money into it and that elevated expenditure would not essentially be price it.

“Sometimes, I don’t want to pay $200,000 for the truth,” O’Halloran mentioned. “I think we have bigger fish to fry in this town – we have infrastructure problems, and we need to address those things first.”

Other members, reminiscent of Ward 1 consultant Roy Francis and Ward 3 Council Member Larry Kovalik, known as for extra data earlier than agreeing to any enhance in funding. But there have been some, like Ward 5 Council Member Eric Gagnon and At-Large Council Member David McGuire, who acknowledged their perception that the reality is “priceless.”

Semple, although, mentioned there could possibly be an answer to keep away from discovering precisely the place the council’s spending restrict is perhaps. That is the place AI got here into the image.

“I recommended we do this incrementally,” Semple mentioned, “and that we use artificial intelligence as a way of greatly reducing the requirement of the new independent counsel to look at every email.”

Semple mentioned the fee is utilizing synthetic intelligence, principally Claude, to do a few of the grunt work, pulling collectively paperwork and offering a framework for the investigation. He gave credit score to Gagnon, the opposite council member on the fee, for his work with Claude to place collectively the AI part of the investigation.

According to Semple, Claude pulled from a “relatively small” portion of the information associated to the Amazon resolution, together with emails, FOIA responses, the energetic court docket case and extra. It then organized a logical sequence of occasions and in contrast it to the “standards” of the fee – requirements Semple mentioned had been derived from the Town Council’s code of ethics, the city constitution, city code and extra.

“We asked it to be impartial,” Semple mentioned. “We asked it not to draw any conclusions. We asked it not to make any accusations.”

Instead, the fee requested the AI mannequin to generate a report referring to “documents we think we need to pay attention to,” and to “potentially give us some ideas how we might improve the process.”