About

Valley Watch is my attempt to make local government actually readable. I pull agendas, transcripts, and video from city platforms across the Kern County 99 corridor and surface what each meeting actually decided, who it affects, and what was debated. For now I'm only tracking Bakersfield, Wasco, Shafter — every city takes time to add, and these were the cities that impact me personally.

An LLM writes the summaries, not a journalist. I've designed the pipeline to be as transparent as possible about that: every claim links to its source document, the exact model and prompt used are published on every page, and nothing gets published without a human review. While LLM/AI usage is still controversial, this type of page would require multiple people hours of effort per meeting. The whole point is turning hours of procedural tape into something you can read in five minutes.

This is a one-person project. If something's wrong, unclear, or missing, email me at valleywatch@edfig.dev