Thumbnail photo by Paul Critz A month after they approved minutes dating back to January, Crescent City Harbor commissioners decided artificial intelligence might make compiling those records easier on staff. The discussion came after the Board of Commissioners on Wednesday approved minutes from a special meeting on Aug. 13. The minutes from Crescent City Harbor District’s most recent regular session, which was also held Aug. 13, were not included in Wednesday’s consent calendar, something Commissioner Annie Nehmer pointed out. “We shrank it down to just the action minutes so it was more manageable and it still seems to not be manageable,” she said, adding that the Del Norte County Grand Jury had concerns about meeting minutes being unavailable to the public. When Crescent City Harbormaster Mike Rademaker said the clerk of the Board had been out on extended leave due to illness, Nehmer said another Harbor District staff member should take on that job. “They’re action minutes,” she said. “They should take five or 10 minutes to complete.” Nehmer and her colleagues voted 4-1 in favor of attaching AI-generated summaries to the official action minutes of CCHD Board meetings. Commissioner John Evans dissented, saying that the AI-generated summary looks like a list of the agenda and the items that the Board approved. Evans said he felt attaching an AI-generated summary was unnecessary. The other commissioners were skeptical as well. Dan Schmidt applauded Nehmer’s commitment to expand transparency at the harbor, but said he didn’t like the idea of AI deciding what is to become a historic public record of the district’s actions. Still, Schmidt said he supported Nehmer’s argument about streamlining the process of taking and compiling the minutes and suggested making the audio recordings of the minute permanent. Currently, according to Nehmer, the CCHD is able to delete them after 30 days. “The person who reviews the summary can dig in further and they know precisely where to go in these hours-long Zoom meetings,” he said. Board Chairman Gerhard Weber said commissioners wouldn’t be able to vote on Schmidt’s motion since a proposal to preserve the Zoom recordings wasn’t on Wednesday’s agenda. Weber promised to bring it back for further discussion at another meeting with Rademaker saying that he’d also look into how much it would cost to store those recordings. “I don’t think it would be that much money, but it’s something the Board should probably know,” he said. Nehmer’s proposal to use AI came after public commenters criticized Harbor District staff on July 23 for placing meeting minutes on the consent calendar that were from May and June and Jan. 22. The proposal also comes after the Del Norte County Grand Jury released a report stating that by not posting meeting agendas or minutes correctly, the Harbor District was violating the Ralph M. Brown Act, California’s open meetings law. On Thursday, Nehmer said that the Board of Commissioners had changed the CCHD bylaws in January, deciding to use action minutes instead of summary minutes. However, she said, she didn’t realize that the action minutes just included a record of the items she and her colleagues decided on. “We just [wrote] down the vote,” she said. “So you don’t know what happened.” Nehmer argued that having an AI-generated summary attached to the minutes would allow someone to get up to speed on Harbor District issues without listening to hours of recordings. She said it would also save staff time. According to the proposed policy Nehmer submitted to her colleagues, it would be up to the clerk of the Board or another staff member to ensure the summaries are generated promptly and are included with the action minutes the Board is asked to approve. Each AI-generated summary will also include a disclaimer informing readers that the summary was generated by artificial intelligence, that it’s a supplemental record only and is not the official meeting minutes. Public commenters Stephanie Abrams and Linda Sutter, who were critical of the Harbor District’s method of keeping minutes in the past, supported using AI to streamline the process. Previously, Abrams, a self-described travel expert who’s hosted radio and TV shows and maintains an online blog, had argued that meeting minutes should be read aloud at subsequent meetings to ensure people were up to speed on what was discussed. On Wednesday, she said while AI is new and her experience with it is limited, she’s gotten some “amazing summaries of things.” Abrams also pointed out that if an AI-generated summary was inaccurate or if it did overlook something, a staff member could go in and edit it. “You’d have the skeleton and a whole lot of flesh and then you could just finish building the body within minutes as opposed to hours,” she said. “You would wind up with a comprehensive story that’s correct because there was human intervention on top of the AI and, bingo, you’d be done in a hurry.” Sutter said that since Rademaker became the harbormaster, the meeting minutes “are nothing reflective of what they were last year.” “AI, it’s not perfect, but it’s like [Abrams] says, you can make corrections and it’s within seconds that it comes out to be exactly the way it’s supposed to be,” she said. Sandy Moreno, the Harbor District’s financial advisor who said she had been secretary for a board of directors for 15 years, had a different perspective. Meeting minutes are where the Board of Directors has complete control over what the public sees, she said. “It’s where you write your history,” she said. As a result, Moreno said, the Board of Commissioners could leave out voices that are critical, which is why some governing bodies opt for a simple record of the actions they take. “I don’t think you should put AI [summaries] up on your website and I don’t think you should put recordings on your website,” Moreno said. “If people want to be involved with the operation of your business then they should show up. They can go on Zoom and they can be here and they can offer constructive criticism. I think all these other options give naysayers a chance to dirty you up.” Nehmer, however, said that the AI-generated summaries give brief descriptions of what was discussed. She referred to a recent discussion about a request for proposals for development of the RV parks and said that the AI-generated summary said nothing about naysayers. “I didn’t edit this,” she said. “This is how it was reported to me.” Nehmer’s colleague, Rick Shepherd, said he liked the way the AI-generated summaries read. He said they were simple. Shepherd said he supported using AI because it saves staff time, but he appreciated being able to edit the transcripts, saying he had been misquoted in past meeting minutes.