Redwood City’s Veterans Memorial Senior Center Phase 1 came in 34 months late at significant public cost. I filed a Public Records Act request, got documents back in batches, and have been turning them into a structural root-cause analysis. The goal at the end is a publication-ready piece plus a journalist who’ll take the story further. AI is the analyst; I’m the editor and the one whose name goes on it.
2026-05-23 — Three different pitches, three different reporters
Sent first-touch emails to three local journalists today: the local-civics blogger, the daily-of-record beat reporter, and the regional investigative writer with the strongest CPRA track record. Each draft led with the specific finding most likely to land for that reporter — different angles, same underlying analysis.
Two years ago I would have sent the same email to all three and gotten zero replies. The unlock isn’t writing three drafts (that’s table stakes now), it’s having the model honestly model each reporter’s beat from their recent bylines before drafting. Follow-up check-in is May 30.
2026-05-22 — 200 PDFs at the door
The city produced 200 schedule files from the CPRA — every monthly construction schedule update from Feb 2022 through Aug 2025, plus the underlying Primavera P6 source files. 188 MB of stuff.
Ran three different LLMs (Claude, Codex, Gemini) over the documents in parallel as independent analysts, then merged. Got back a structured RCA with 10 candidate causes, three of which are dominant: a subcontractor default in late 2023, an RFI thread that sat on the critical path for 9 months in 2024, and a 14-month escalation lag before the city issued a Notice of Material Breach.
Honest part: I’d have read ten of those PDFs and given up. Doing real forensics on 200 of them in a week wasn’t possible for an unpaid citizen before.
2026-04-18 — The CPRA
Filed the original request. Two productions so far. The schedule data didn’t arrive until five weeks in — until then I was reasoning from staff reports and the project extension agreement, which is summary-level. With the schedule data, the analysis changed.
What still doesn’t work: getting the city to post productions publicly on the portal so other residents can see them. They produce to me privately and the links expire in 30 days. I have to mirror everything to Drive.