By Burt Mummolo, FOX23.com News Staff
SAND SPRINGS, Okla. — From the get-go, many folks in Sand Springs felt like they were playing catch-up in the battle against the proposed data center.
“A lot of us didn’t even find out about the annexation until after the fact,” said Kyle Schmidt. He’s been a vocal opponent of the initiative and found that getting information from city hall was anything but easy.
“We called the city to find out, is this for a data center, and we were told no. We didn’t really know any better to not believe them and file an open records request,” he said.
Since then, he’s been on a mission of transparency and accountability, including leading the effort to recall the entire city council. And while that wasn’t successful, all of this effort hasn’t been for naught.
“The lawsuits are still going, they’re still active,” he said.
Also perpetually active, that part of his brain yearning for a way to improve government transparency, until one day he thought…
“What if there was a service out there that could notify people when the new meeting notice has been posted so we don’t have to go to the city website every single day and look for new notices,” he said.
And from that, Schmidt created MuniWatch, with the tag line, ‘Your city government, finally easy to watch.’ An app that monitors local government websites.
“If a new document gets posted you get an email saying, ‘Hey, there’s a new meeting scheduled,'” he said.
The app can also search for specific topics you’re interested in.
“You can also flag keywords that you want to watch out for things like zoning, annexation, industrial, data center,” he said.
There’s even an AI feature that will summarize documents.
“You can get a summary basically that’s broken down, it’s already read by AI and they summarize it so you don’t have to sift through the agendas and pick out the bits and pieces,” he said.
It’s a subscription service priced from $6 to $12 per month.
“I tried to keep it as cheap as I could because the whole goal is for an informed public that feels like government is becoming more transparent,” he said.
Fighting fire with fire, how the battle against the data centers that fuel AI, ended up with the creation of an app that uses AI in the process.
“Having those tools at your disposal is just going to help you stay ahead of local governments that don’t want to be seen,” he said.
