About The Town Minute

I’m a bit of a nerd with this stuff. I actually watch Select Board meetings for fun. Every time I do, I notice the YouTube stream has a couple dozen views max. For a town of 9,500 people, that always struck me as pretty low. These meetings decide out taxes, our roads, our water.

The problem isn’t that people don’t care.

It’s that local politics is full of jargon, buried in PDFs on a town website most people have never visited. Even if you wanted to follow along, you’d need to sit through a two-hour meeting or dig through documents with names like “FY26 Capital Improvement Plan.” Most people don’t have that kind of time — and they shouldn’t have to.

The Town Minute is the shortcut. Plain English, once a week, straight to your inbox. What happened, what it means, why it matters to you. Five minutes and you’re caught up.

Why I believe this matters

Local government is where decisions actually touch your daily life — your property tax rate, the roads you drive on, what gets built next to your neighborhood. This isn’t abstract politics. This is your town.

I genuinely believe that if more people paid attention to their own communities, our country would be better for it. Not because they need to agree on anything — just because an informed neighborhood is a stronger one. That’s not political. That’s just true.

I also built an AI assistant for Sturbridge residents

It’s trained on Sturbridge’s meeting minutes, town bylaws, and other publicly available records. You can ask it a question in plain English — “What did the Select Board decide about the water rates?” or “What are the rules for building a fence?” — and actually get a useful answer without wading through government documents.

It’s built into the site. Same idea as the newsletter: your town’s information should be easy to access, not locked behind jargon and PDFs.

The bigger goal: Annual Town Meeting

The Annual Town Meeting is where Sturbridge residents vote on the major issues shaping this town — budgets, bylaws, big decisions. Attendance is consistently low. That’s not a criticism of anyone; it’s hard to walk into a room and vote on things you’ve never heard of before.

My hope is that by keeping residents informed all year long, more people will feel confident enough to show up when it counts. An informed resident is a participating resident. Democracy only works if people walk through the door.

What The Town Minute is

One resident, me, Connor, reading the minutes, watching the meetings, and publishing a plain-English summary every Monday morning. That’s it. No staff, no office, no funding from anyone. Just someone who cares about this town and has a newsletter.

The Town Minute is free. It’s nonpartisan. It has no affiliation with the Town of Sturbridge, any political organization, or any candidate for office. I started it because I wanted it to exist and I figured other people probably did too.

Editorial commitments

I report what happened, not what I think about it. The Town Minute covers the facts from the meeting, votes, decisions, discussions without editorializing or taking sides.

Everything I publish is sourced from official approved minutes and public records. If I can’t verify something, I don’t publish it.

The Town Minute has no affiliation with the Town of Sturbridge, any elected official, any political organization, or any candidate for public office.

If you live in Sturbridge or care about this town, I’d love to have you as a reader.

Free. Once a week. Five minutes. You can unsubscribe anytime and I won’t take it personally.