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Assembly resolutions dating back to 1989 now searchable online

January 6, 2020 – FYI, News

If you’re looking for a resolution passed by the Juneau Assembly in the past three decades, you can find it online thanks to Nick Bursell. Nick started working for CBJ’s Law Department in October. At that point, the resolutions online only went back to about 2017. Now, you can find resolutions as far back as 1989. Nick uploaded about 1,300 resolutions to the CBJ website. You can find them by going to Juneau.org, clicking on the Assembly button, and in the Documents drop down menu, click “Adopted Legislation.”

“It’s a win-win for the city and the people of Juneau. CBJ doesn’t have to field requests and find physical files; when people need to find this stuff, they can just go online. And we have a PDF ready and available for download or printing,” Nick said.

The ongoing project is done in phases. There’s the physical scanning of the paper copies, next is the naming of the files so they’re searchable in an internal database, then making each document ADA-compliant, and finally uploading the resolutions to the website.

“I started reading the actual resolutions and there’s some really interesting stuff. You can get a good picture on the sort of flow of history just by doing this project,” Nick said.

Nick, originally from Juneau, is a recent grad of University of Alaska Southeast. Sadly, his last day at CBJ was Friday. CBJ thanks Nick for his work on this project and wishes him luck as he takes on a position with the Washington State Legislature. Whoever takes over the project can pick up where Nick left off – uploading Juneau Assembly resolutions dating all the way back to CBJ’s inception in 1970 that Nick has already scanned. After resolutions, it’s onto ordinances pre-2017.