Tri-Lakes Town Square Has Collected 3,559 Government Documents — and Counting. Here Is What Is in the Archive and Why It Matters.
Since launching in 2025, Tri-Lakes Town Square has automatically archived 3,559 public documents from eleven government entities across the Tri-Lakes region. Every document is AI-summarized and searchable. The archive grows every night. It is free and always will be.
Most local government documents disappear. Meeting minutes get buried on agency websites. Budget resolutions sit in folders nobody knows exist. Agendas get posted the week of a meeting and vanish shortly after.
Tri-Lakes Town Square has been quietly building a solution — and will keep building it.
Since launching in early 2025, the platform has automatically scraped and archived 3,559 public documents from eleven government entities across the Tri-Lakes region. The archive runs every night, adding new documents as agencies publish them. The documents are served directly from public agency sources — no account, login, or personal information is required to access them.
What Is in the Archive
The archive currently holds documents from:
- Franklin County Legislature — 595 documents, including meeting minutes, agendas, proposed resolutions, and budget materials going back more than a decade
- Village of Saranac Lake — 424 documents
- Essex County — 56 documents
- Harrietstown Town — 76 documents
- Saranac Lake Central School District — 25 documents
- Tupper Lake Village — 764 documents
- Tupper Lake Town — 268 documents
- Lake Placid Central School District — 328 documents
- Town of North Elba — 319 documents
The documents include meeting minutes, agendas, proposed resolutions, budget presentations, audit reports, and policy documents. Many are available nowhere else in a searchable, centralized format.
Why This Exists
Local government transparency depends on access. When meeting minutes are buried three clicks deep on a municipal website, or when agendas disappear after a meeting passes, the public record becomes inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t in the room.
The Enterprise used to cover these meetings. With reduced staff and a paywall, that coverage has thinned. The documents still exist — they are public records — but finding them requires knowing where to look and checking each agency’s website individually.
The Tri-Lakes Town Square records archive automates that process. Every night, scrapers check each agency’s document repositories and download anything new. The documents are indexed, searchable, and free. The archive will grow as long as this platform does.
How to Use It
The archive is accessible through the Records tab on this site. You can filter by source agency and search by keyword. Every document is a PDF. Nothing requires an account or a subscription.
If you are researching a local issue — a budget dispute, a zoning decision, a school board vote — the archive is a starting point. If you find something worth reporting, the Report button on this site sends it directly to our editors.
This is what local journalism infrastructure looks like when it is built to last.