by Dave Soulia, for FYIVT.com

Try to answer a simple question: Who testified on the education bill?

The state has an answer. It is scattered across dozens of committee pages, hundreds of meeting-day documents, and PDF filenames like W~Somebody~Something~4-8-2025.pdf.

If you know exactly where to look, have an afternoon to spare, and do not mind that some of the documents are photographs of pieces of paper, it is all right there.

Public, in name.

We think “public” should mean findable.

So we built the tools ourselves.

A search engine that only knows Vermont

As of this morning, there is a search bar at the top of FYIVT, and it does something Google does not: It searches only Vermont, including public information the major search engines cannot see.

The FYIVT Finder currently indexes more than 90,000 documents (and growing as you read this).

That includes every Vermont bill dating back to 2010, searchable by subject rather than only by bill number. It includes more than 45,000 legislative committee documents — testimony, amendments, reports and fiscal notes — stretching back through the 2019 session.

It searches state-agency pages, approximately 16,000 town pages and PDFs, municipal agendas, meeting minutes, budgets, town calendars and news from 17 Vermont outlets.

The index refreshes itself every night while Vermont sleeps.

Some of the information in the Finder is not meaningfully searchable anywhere else. We process scanned municipal records with text-recognition software, making photographs and image-based PDFs searchable by their actual contents.

For some small-town agendas and meeting records, the Finder may hold the only searchable version on Earth.

On Friday, we also brought 10 Vermont towns out of the digital dark. Their websites had been quietly instructing search engines not to index them — likely because of a software setting the towns never knowingly selected.

Twenty-eight Vermont towns appear to be configured that way.

Their records may technically be online, but unless someone already knows where to look, those records are effectively invisible. We will have more to report about that soon.

Try the Finder: fyivt.com/finder

The Bill Wrangler: every bill’s war room

Search for a bill — or search for a subject that leads you to one — and the results include a link marked “Bill file.”

That opens what we call the Bill Wrangler: the entire recorded life of a Vermont bill assembled on one page.

We do not believe anything comparable currently exists in Vermont, including on the Legislature’s own website.

Take H.454, the education-governance bill.

The Bill Wrangler displays every recorded roll call as a red-and-blue bar, with the number of votes needed for passage marked directly on it. You can see the bill fail by 12 votes in April and later return to pass by 16.

Every legislator’s name and vote is available.

Nearly 30,000 individual legislative votes are currently indexed, covering every session since 2019.

The Wrangler also joins committee documents back to the bills they concern. Testimony, proposed amendments, fiscal documents and other materials can be downloaded individually or by committee in a single batch.

Search “Act 181” — the way an ordinary Vermonter is likely to describe the law — and the Finder explains that the 2024 Act 181 began as H.687, was vetoed by the governor and then enacted through a legislative override.

Its Bill Wrangler page contains seven roll calls and 283 committee documents from nine committees. Earlier laws also numbered Act 181 appear below it so users do not accidentally land on the wrong one.

See the H.687 Bill Wrangler: fyivt.com/finder/bill/H.687/2024

Who testified? Now it is sorted

One of the most useful additions is the “Who testified” section.

People who submitted testimony are divided into three groups.

Registered lobbyists appear first, checked by name against the Vermont Secretary of State’s lobbying roster.

State employees appear second, checked against state payroll records.

Everyone else appears after them.

For the 2024 Act 181 land-use law, the Wrangler identifies eight registered lobbyists, 22 state actors and 35 other participants.

That is not an accusation, and it is not an editorial judgment.

It is context.

The state stores lobbying registrations, employee records and legislative testimony in separate systems. It makes the documents public but never assembles those relationships for the reader.

Now they are assembled.

Every document still links directly to the state’s own servers.

We point. You verify.

One honest caveat before you dive in

These tools are days old, and the state’s records were never designed to be read by machines. Filing conventions change from session to session. Names are matched by exact spelling against official rosters, and same-name coincidences are possible — the pages say so where it matters. Scanned documents are only as good as the scans.

We will stub a toe here and there.

When we do, we will fix it fast and say so — the same way our weather page publishes its own report card.

If something looks wrong, tell us. Around here, the misses are how it gets better.

Run a Vermont site? Get in the Finder — free

The current index is only the beginning.

We are working toward adding every Vermont website we can find — businesses, farm stands, town groups, clubs, blogs, schools, public bodies, local organizations and other Vermont-based sites.

If it is in Vermont, we want the Finder to know about it.

Website owners who want to be included sooner can make a request at fyivt.com/finder/about.

Fill out the short form, and every request is reviewed by an actual human — me, basically.

Listing is free, always.

Nobody from FYIVT will ever charge anyone to be included in the Finder. Anyone asking for payment in exchange for a Finder listing is a scammer, and we would like to hear about it.

Actual data privacy looks like this

Vermont recently enacted a sweeping consumer-data privacy and online-surveillance law.

Such laws attempt to control what businesses may collect, how collected information may be used and when it must be deleted.

The Finder begins with a simpler question:

Why collect personal information in the first place?

The Finder records what Vermonters search so we can identify failures, improve results and discover which public records remain difficult to locate.

It does not record who searched for them.

There are no Finder accounts. No advertising trackers. No behavioral profiles. No search histories attached to individual users. No personal information sold to advertisers, political campaigns, data brokers or anyone else.

We measure usage, not users.

That is not merely a privacy policy. It is how the system was designed.

And now, the Cyberbeg

People often say that if an online service is free, you are the product.

Usually, they are right.

There is another possibility: The people who value the service voluntarily support it.

Indexing more than 90,000 documents, processing scanned public records, maintaining databases, operating servers and developing tools such as the Finder and Bill Wrangler are not cost-free activities.

We could put the Finder behind a subscription and charge Vermonters to search their own public records.

We could finance it with advertising, tracking and user profiling.

We will do neither.

The Finder will remain available without a subscription, account or paywall. Nobody will receive better search results because they paid, and nobody will be prevented from using it because they did not.

But keeping a project of this size independent, private and freely available requires paid supporters.

Fellow Vermonters who believe this kind of public infrastructure should exist can help fund it by becoming FYIVT supporters.

That is the deal.

You are not buying access. You are helping make access available to everyone.

Hear it live today

I will be on Chronicle Conversations with Guy Page on WVMT AM 620 today at noon — listen live from anywhere — to talk about the Finder, the Bill Wrangler, how they were built and what comes next.

FYIVT owns and operates its own infrastructure here in Vermont because tools intended to serve Vermonters should not rent their existence from corporations that view the state as a rounding error.

Our tagline has been the same since the first article: News That Affects You!

This is that.

The public record belongs to you.

Now you can search it.

fyivt.com/finder — bookmark it, beat on it and tell us what it cannot find.

The misses are how it gets better.