About this project
The public record, indexed by the word.
Gulchwire is a full-text index of agendas, packets, minutes, and meeting transcripts published by local public bodies in Lewis & Clark County, Montana. It exists so that a name, an address, or a phrase can be searched across every page of every document a body has published.
Currently indexed
- City-County Board of Health
- East Helena City Council
- Fairgrounds Advisory Board
- Helena City Commission
- Helena School District 1 Board of Trustees
- Heritage Preservation and Tourism Development Council
- LCC Behavioral Health Local Advisory Council
- Lewis and Clark County DUI Task Force
- Lewis & Clark Conservation District
- Lewis & Clark County Commission
- Local Emergency Planning Committee
- Montana Legislature (local government subjects)
- Noxious Weed Board
- Open Lands Citizen Advisory Council
- Planning and Zoning Commission
- Scratchgravel Solid Waste Management District
- Water Quality Protection District
Coverage grows as more sources are added. If a body you care about is missing, let us know at the address below.
What it does
A scheduled crawler fetches documents directly from each body’s own site or portal, as published: the same PDF or file you would find there yourself. Text is extracted from every page (falling back to OCR for scanned documents that have no underlying text layer) and indexed for full-text search. Every result links back to the original document.
What it does not do
Gulchwire does not rank, score, summarize, or interpret the documents it indexes; it surfaces them as published and gets out of the way. It is not the official record; where a page was read by OCR rather than extracted from the document’s own text, double-check exact wording against the original before relying on it (those results are marked).
Corrections & missing documents
If a document is missing, misfiled, or indexed incorrectly, email [email protected].
For site operators
Gulchwire’s crawler identifies itself in every request’s User-Agent header as GulchwireBot, with a link back to this page. It fetches only documents and listing pages already made public by the body it is indexing, makes one request at a time with a deliberate delay between them, and does not attempt to bypass access controls. If it is causing trouble on your site, or you would like to allowlist it, email [email protected] and we will sort it out.