Each year during 7th grade government day, City Administrator Danielle Young pulls out the book of city council minutes from 1919-1932 and opens a page showing cursive writing. She asks the students what topic they think was discussed at a council meeting over 100 years ago. She slowly lets each student get a good look at the handwritten minutes and then lectures them on the importance of good penmanship because someday, someone, 100 years later, may have to read their handwriting.

Over the past 14 years of working for the city, Young has read through numerous years of council minutes while doing hours of research on when infrastructure was built, easements were obtained, utilities were installed or disgruntled citizens attended Council meetings. Through the decades the paper bound books show transitions from calligraphy, to cursive, to the Courier font of a typewriter, and then to Times New Roman font of Word Documents. But the reality is that if the ink starts to fade, the historical discussions could be lost with time.

Enter 2020, amid the pandemic, the City of Cheney transitioned to paperless council agendas, posting them online, and creating an online document center, where council minutes and other city documents could be uploaded electronically for the public to view.

With a city hall staff of three and limited electronic records, staff set a goal to digitize all the paper council minutes into searchable text and upload them into the new online document center. This would allow decades of text to be searched by keywords, saving staff research time when looking for key events within Council minutes. City Clerk Angie Gassmann led the project with Deputy Clerk Mary Bronston (retired 2024), and Andrea Smyth helping finish the project.

Getting started on the project in October 2020 was easy as electronic word documents were available on the computer from the current timeframe back to 1997 and were easily uploaded as PDF files; however, unable to scan handwritten minutes as a searchable text format from 1891-1932, Gassmann found it as a challenge to decipher and re-type the minutes into new word documents.

The first Council minutes where a typewriter was used dates to April 8, 1932 and the original image of the minutes from that date forward can be found on the city’s website. Pages were carefully removed from the books and scanned, saved, and then uploaded. The electronic files do not replace the original books, as the pages were returned to their books and placed back in storage after being scanned.

Cheney is excited to have over 120 years of history in a searchable format that the public can view online. The project was officially completed in early 2025 and not only allows staff to easily search topics discussed during council meetings, but shows commitment from our staff to bring historical significance to our community and transparency to our public.