How a fast-growing Florida county stopped falling behind on meeting minutes

Karen Owens manages meeting minutes and agendas for six different boards for a Florida panhandle county. The work was always demanding, but as the county has more than doubled in population in the past decade, her job changed with it. 

Growth transformed what was once a quieter rural county  into one of Florida's fastest-expanding counties. Development pressure mounted. Residents mobilized. Boardrooms that used to have a handful of attendees started filling up.

"We could have a full boardroom, 70 plus seats of residents coming out to oppose projects and that has led to the longer meetings. And because of that, that itself would cause me to procrastinate on the minutes in the past," Karen says. 

Most of them there to fight rezoning and density applications that threatened what they loved about this tight-knit county. 

The longer the public comment, the longer the meetings went. Karen remembers one that started at 5:00 PM and didn't wrap until 11:00 PM.

"I was at one meeting that lasted from 5:00 PM until 11:00 PM and that's a long day when you're there at 7:00 AM," she says.

With more discussions to capture, verify, and publish accurately, the math wasn't working.

She was attending every meeting twice

Before ClerkMinutes, Karen's process worked like this: attend the meeting, take notes and then go back and re-listen to the entire recording to make sure she'd gotten it right.

She's a perfectionist and a self-described word nerd. Getting it right mattered. So she'd pull up the video, watch for board member cues and motions, filter out the tangents that didn't belong in the official record, and rebuild the minutes from scratch. For a two-hour meeting, that was already time-consuming. For a six-hour meeting, it was brutal.

The predictable result? She procrastinated.

"I would wait until like the week before the minutes needed to be done and I would begin the process, which is start listening to the audio," says Karen.  "Well, actually I would watch the video, that way I can see what board members said or the motions. I had to make sure the motions were accurate, but I would have to listen to each item and read my notes. And of course I'm a perfectionist, so I'm going to change everything I put in during the meeting and basically just try to get the most relevant and important bits to the item." 

With six boards generating minutes on a rolling monthly schedule, there was never a good time to fall behind and she kept falling behind.

Enter ClerkMinutes

A colleague had been paying attention to how AI tools were starting to show up in county workflows. He asked Karen to trial a few different transcription services and report back.

She tried ClerkMinutes first, and was hooked. 

"I do remember going to my director and telling him how wowed I was," Karen says.  "And for the first time in probably over a year I had got caught up on all my minutes. I was so happy." 

Plus, the workflow fit naturally into the system she was already using. After each meeting, Karen uploads the audio or video file to ClerkMinutes, transcribes the recording and assigns speakers, generates the formatted minutes, and saves a Word version for final tweaks, exports to PDF, and loads it for the next meeting's approval. 

It speaks fluent Southern 

The time savings were immediate, but Karen noticed something else. 

"Some of these board members speak very country," says Karen.   

ClerkMinutes handles the gap, and gets it all into the official public record. 

That's especially important due to Florida's "Sunshine Law." 

Karen's minutes are public record, and she's had situations in the past where a board member disputed what made it into the official record. ClerkMinutes includes an AI chat feature that can pull verbatim quotes directly from the recording, so when someone pushes back, she's not relying on her notes. She has the official source.

What she'd tell another Clerk

Karen is caught up. For the first time in over a year, all six boards are current. The meetings are still long. The county is still growing. The boardrooms are still full of residents with opinions. None of that changed.

What changed is that the work no longer follows her home.

"I would tell them that it is a game changer.  It will improve the vocabulary and the quality of minutes."