Re: Sectioning up the Omaha City Council Journal.. - Google Groups

[Jay Hannah]

Hi Jack,

Great! Thanks for sending the github link. I'll poke around tonight at our OMG!Code meeting and see if people can help. :)

j






> On Jun 16, 2015, at 2:32 PM, Jack Dunn <off...@prineb.org> wrote:
> Jay,
>
> Here's the Github reference:
>
> https://github.com/modi1231/ParseCityCouncilToDB
>
> I also found this on Google Groups:
>
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/opennebraska/uIa2amlnpks
>
> --
> Jack Dunn




> From: Jack Dunn <off...@prineb.org>
> Subject: Tax Increment Finance report update
> Date: June 12, 2015 at 12:07:33 PM CDT
> To: jha...@mutationgrid.com, Sandi Barr <sandi....@gmail.com>, Naomi See <naom...@seenaomi.net>
>
> Jay, Sandi and Naomi,
>
> You indicated you might want to help update the two TIF (Tax Increment Financing) reports done by PRI (2008 - 20011). If you are still interested, I will send out a Doodle poll to find out when we can all meet. Let me know if there are periods (days/weeks) that are not good by replying to this email.
> And you may know that one of the Omaha Hackathons produced code for creating a database from the Omaha City Journals (meeting minutes).
> In addition to updating the TIF reports, I would like to consider tracking the connections of City Council and Planning Board members to real estate and construction firms.
> Recent legislation allows the State Auditor to review TIF proposals, although it does not mandate such. Public support for an audit might tip the balance.
> I'm guessing we will need a couple of meetings to plan the project.
> Let me know your availability and your thoughts.
>
> Thanks.
> --
> Jack Dunn
> Co-Executive Director
> Policy Research & Innovation
> 402 599-0868
> 4200 N 30th St, Ste 203
> Omaha, NE 68111
>
> www.prineb.org

[Jay Hannah]

http://www.meetup.com/Open-Nebraska-Meetup/events/223501025/

Jack Dunn could use some developer help refreshing an Omaha City Council database with recent Tax Increment Financing (TIF) data.

Let's get together and get this done! :D See you there!

- Jay Hannah
402-598-7782

http://www.meetup.com/Open-Nebraska-Meetup/events/223501025/





> On Jun 19, 2015, at 1:44 AM, Jack Dunn <off...@prineb.org> wrote:
>
> All,
>
> The objective of this project is to update two PRI reports on Tax Increment Financing (TIF). These two reports, which can be found on the Policy Research & Innovation website (www.prineb.org), cover TIF projects for the City of Omaha for the years 2008 through 2011. I would like to update these reports with data from 2012 through 2014.
>
> The source data are located in the Archived City Council Journals, which are the minutes of past City Council meetings. The Journals are PDFs. I have no interest in the City Council Agendas for this project.
>
> The Journals for 2014 are found at:
> http://www.cityofomaha.org/cityclerk/city-council/journals-a-videos
> Prior Journals are found at:
> http://www.cityofomaha.org/cityclerk/archived-city-council-documents
>
> The variables of interest are found in two spreadsheet from a 2011 PRI report:
> http://www.progressiveresearchinstitute.org/Papers/2011/TIF/revenue_lost.pdf
> http://www.progressiveresearchinstitute.org/Papers/2011/TIF/ctl_project_name-project_date.pdf
>
> Both spreadsheets are cited in that 2011 TIF report titled: What is Tax Increment Financing (and Why Should Anyone Care)?
> http://www.prineb.org/Papers/2011/TIF/tif_white_paper2.pdf
>
> A second, follow up report was published in 2012:
> http://www.prineb.org/Papers/2012/TIFReportUpdateFinal.pdf
>
> It would be a great help just to go through the Journals from 2012 through 2014 and capture the TIF ordinance description and attached files. If there is a way to capture the variables of interest mentioned above for each proposed TIF ordinance, even better!
>
> There's more that I would like to propose; for instance, tracking the real estate, banking and construction connections including campaign contributions for City Council members, but let's take one project at a time.
>
> I'm sure I have left questions unanswered, so please let me know what they are and I'll do my best to respond.
>
> Thank you,

>
> Jack Dunn
> Co-Executive Director
> Policy Research & Innovation
>
>

> On 06/18/2015 10:51 PM, Matt Steele wrote:
>> The agendas website is back up and running. Looks like the ElasticSearch service had crashed; it's back up now.
>>
>> There's not much to the page. A perl script scrapes the site Nate linked, and we convert the PDFs to text (using pdf2text) and place them in a search engine (ElasticSearch) with a web frontend. Still kicking around after 3 years.
>>
>> On Jun 18, 2015 9:45 PM, "Nate Benes" <nate...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Jay, Jack,
>>
>> http://www.cityofomaha.org/cityclerk/city-council/agendas is the canonical source for these agendas.
>>
>> During the first Hack Omaha, a team put together a service that automatically downloaded these from the city's website and added them to a simple, searchable web interface. There's a demo live at http://agendas.dataomaha.com/ although it seems broken right now.
>>
>> I bcc'd the original author of that project to see if he knows the current status.
>>
>> Jack, how would you like to see the agendas presented? What would a user hope to learn from agendas and how can we best get them that information?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Nate

>>
>> On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 4:27 PM Jay Hannah <j...@jays.net> wrote:
>> On Jun 16, 2015, at 2:32 PM, Jack Dunn <off...@prineb.org> wrote:

>> > https://github.com/modi1231/ParseCityCouncilToDB
>>
>> Hi Jack,
>>
>> So it looks like what you've got there is a pretty simple text parser which then shoves the text into a database. Looks like it's written in C# 4.0.
>>
>> I suspect that the Omaha City Council documents are PDFs, so the actual data flow is:
>>
>> download .pdf from somewhere
>> -> convert .pdf to text
>> -> parse the text, put it in a database
>> -> ??? website?
>>
>> Do you know where the original data source is?
>>
>> Is it just these agendas?
>>
>> http://www.cityofomaha.org/cityclerk/city-council/agendas
>>
>> The other data that you mentioned -- do you have that data somewhere? Is it all .pdf files?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> j
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Open Nebraska" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to open-ne+u...@googlegroups.com.
>> To post to this group, send email to ope...@googlegroups.com.
>> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/open-ne.
>> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-ne/93B88CBF-3A2E-4A82-B333-9BA08C178606%40jays.net.
>> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Open Nebraska" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to open-ne+u...@googlegroups.com.
>> To post to this group, send email to ope...@googlegroups.com.
>> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/open-ne.
>> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-ne/CAMjp6Gef%3D9zAoL%3DarqSgiOnMcLhBdNb9Kkak9ypP9ArQuQTC7Q%40mail.gmail.com.
>> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
>

[Loyall, David]

Hello, team of people who have some desire to liberate data from Omaha City Council PDF files!

Today I read about a tool that does that. I don't know if it will be useful to you, but here's hoping.

http://tabula.technology/

Related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10021561 and here: https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula/issues

I hope this helps.

Cheers,
--Dave

-----Original Message-----
[...]

> > The source data are located in the Archived City Council Journals, which are
> the minutes of past City Council meetings. The Journals are PDFs.

[...]