A plain-language council newsletter: here’s a working sample
Published October 14, 2026
On public engagement, I’ve committed to two things. First, I fully support the quarterly town hall meetings that Sylvie Charron-Lemieux has proposed: residents deserve a regular public place to raise questions, and council needs a proper venue to explain projects, bylaws and budgets in plain language. Second, I would push for a plain-language newsletter summarizing every council meeting.
Talk is cheap during an election, so instead of just describing the second idea, I built one. Below is a sample Council Highlights newsletter for the September 22, 2026 regular council meeting, made entirely from the public record.
What you’re looking at
Every item from the meeting, in plain words, on one page. Each item carries its resolution number, linked to the draft minutes, and a Watch button that jumps to the exact moment in the Town’s own video where that discussion starts. The full agenda, the minutes and the complete recording are linked at the top, so anyone who wants the whole picture is one click away from it.
This isn’t a new invention. Other northern towns already do a version of it: Smooth Rock Falls publishes a one-page Council Highlights sheet after its meetings. My proposal borrows that format and adds two things. The timed video links, which I haven’t seen any town up here do. And the piece I consider essential: making the newsletter a standing agenda item that council signs off on, the same way it adopts the minutes. A summary council has put its name to is accountable. A summary nobody owns is just another handout.
Why this matters
Council meetings follow strict rules. There’s an agenda, minutes get adopted, everything is recorded. The raw material of transparency already exists. What’s missing is the readable layer on top: most residents will never scroll a 400-page agenda PDF or watch a 90-minute video, and I don’t blame them. When accurate, understandable information isn’t easy to find, rumour fills the space, and the mayor, council and staff all wear the result. A one-page summary after every meeting is the cheapest rumour-prevention program a town can run.
How it was made, and why it’s not a burden on staff
A first draft was generated from the transcript of the Town’s own public meeting recording, with AI doing the heavy lifting, then checked line by line against the published agenda and the draft minutes on CivicWeb. Total effort: well under an hour, and that includes building the page itself. A recurring edition using a fixed template would take a fraction of that. As I wrote in my post on AI in the workplace, these tools are already on the desks of anyone who works in an office; meeting summaries are the single most ordinary thing they do.
The checking step is not optional, and the transcript proved it. The auto-captions renamed the Cochrane Municipal Airport the “Coffman Municipal Airport” and mangled half the names at the table. Every figure in the sample was verified against the agenda or the draft minutes before it went in. That is exactly why council sign-off is part of the proposal rather than an afterthought: the tools make the draft cheap, and the sign-off makes it trustworthy.
One honest caveat: a few numbers in the water and sewer section (the roughly 35 percent utilization, and capacity for about 3,000 more residents on water and 4,000 on wastewater) come from the discussion at the council table rather than a published document, and the sample says so. If you spot anything I got wrong, tell me and I’ll correct it. That’s how this is supposed to work.
Whoever you elect on October 26, this idea is free to steal. The meetings are already recorded, the tools already exist, and the format is sitting right here.