Governance, accuracy & limitations

What it is, and how to use it

CouncilTracer reports the public record— what the council decided, when, and what happened next — drawn only from documents the council already publishes. It reports facts and cites them; it doesn't offer opinions, take sides, or give advice. It's a research tool for understanding decisions: every answer points you back to the source documents, and the linked documents are the authority — read them for the full context, procedure and reasoning behind a decision. Always verify anything important against the cited source. Not legal advice.

Scale

This is a working service over a substantial corpus, not a demonstration, or a proof of concept. Indexed and searchable for City of Mitcham right now:

255 meetings · 4,286 decisions · 148 confidential items · 611 voting divisions — all within 13,061 documents. These figures are read live from the index; the coverage page shows the full picture, including where the gaps are.

Who runs it — and the councillor safeguard

CouncilTracer is built and operated by Darren Kruse (Kruse Legal). Darren is also a sitting City of Mitcham councillor — so the lines are deliberately strict. CouncilTracer only ever reads the public record, uses no councillor or staff accessa resident wouldn't have, and takes no side — it reports what the documents say and cites them. See scraping & transparency for exactly what is accessed and how.

How answers are grounded

Answers are written onlyfrom what's found in the council's own documents — never from an AI's general knowledge or opinion — and every claim carries a numbered citation back to the exact source, usually the exact page. Structured records like vote tallies and registers are counted directly from the minutes by code, not summarised by guesswork, so the same question gives the same answer every time. When the tool can't find something in the record, it says so plainly rather than inventing an answer. More on how it works and how sources are found and ranked.

Limitations — what it can't do

Being honest about the edges is part of being trustworthy:

• It can be wrong or incomplete. Answers are AI-written summaries of the record. The grounding and citations exist precisely so you can check — always verify anything important against the cited source document.
• The very latest meeting may not appear yet.A decision only counts once the council publishes the minutes; until then there's nothing to read.
• An answer shows a bounded set of sources (around fifteen, lifted automatically for broad topics) — enough to answer well, not necessarily every document that touches a subject.
• Confidential contents aren't answerable. Where the council holds an item in confidence, its subject is shown and marked confidential, but the tool can't answer about contents it doesn't have — until the council formally releases the item.
• Coverage has gaps, and we show them.Where older material hasn't been published or indexed yet, the coverage page says so — it's an auditable picture, not a claim you have to trust.
• It currently covers one council (the City of Mitcham), and it is not legal advice.

Accuracy, corrections & testing

Answer quality is kept honest by design: everything is grounded in and cited to the source, structured records are computed rather than composed, and the tool declines to guess when the record is silent. Every answer can be rated with a thumbs up or down, which flags it for review. If you spot an error — an answer that misreads the record, a missing document, a citation that doesn't support its claim — please tell us at darren@kruselegal.com.au. We also welcome independent testing and community feedback — scrutiny of accuracy and usability makes the tool better, and we'd rather hear it than not.

What's included, and why

The guiding principle is simple: if the council has published it, it's potentially in scope — agendas, minutes, officer reports and attachments, the confidentiality register, resolution-tracking reports, and standing documents like policies, codes and by-laws. Two firm lines around that:

• Nothing confidential. Only material the council already makes public, obtained the same way any resident with a browser could. The confidentiality register itself is public — it records what is being withheld and why, never the withheld contents.
• Led by the community.What's worth adding next is guided by what residents actually want to follow — tell us what's missing and we'll weigh it.

The transparency policy lists exactly what is taken and how.

Privacy

Questions are scrubbed of personal details before anything is stored, raw question text is never written to a file, and stored text is deleted after 60 days. Full detail is in the privacy policy.