Editorial responsibility and corrections

Publisher and reviewing organization: GroundSignal. The organization is responsible for the connection between a claim and its sources, source dates, geographic scope and unresolved questions. Agency attribution identifies the document issuer; it is not an endorsement of this site.

No personal biography, invented reviewer credentials or government affiliation is implied. About the research product.

• Public record: a fact stated in an identified source, with its source date.
• Calculation or estimate: a derived value with the inputs and method identified. An assessment reduction is not itself a tax saving.
• Possible effect or inference: a hypothesis requiring further evidence. Proximity, timing and similar names do not establish causation or identity.
• Open question: a specific missing connection or record to investigate. A record not reviewed here may still exist.

Findings attach sources to factual steps and calculations. Project pages distinguish proposals, authorization, funding, conditions, work and completion. The visible source-review date differs from an event date, document date and publication date.

Material updates identify the changed claim and the source supporting it. A successful link check or a new software deployment alone does not advance a substantive review date. A source that becomes inaccessible remains a disclosed limitation until checked.

Some findings and meeting records are prepared with AI assistance and are labeled AI-assisted research. AI reads collected public meeting records and proposes statements, each tied to a quoted passage on a numbered page of an official document. Software then checks every quote word for word against that page, computes every number and date itself, and publishes only when all of these checks pass:

• every quoted passage matches its source page exactly;
• a finding rests on at least two independent source documents;
• no private resident, public commenter, individual payee or appointee is named;
• no language implies wrongdoing that the record does not state;
• every number in the text was computed from the cited records.

AI-assisted items are published automatically when they pass, then reviewed by the organization afterwards; an item can be withdrawn at any time, and its withdrawal is recorded. Agreement between AI models is never treated as verification. Private background notes and hypotheses are not published.

Email support@cookcountyrecords.com with the page URL, the wording in question and the official document or other evidence supporting the correction. Do not send passwords, payment details or unrelated sensitive personal documents.

When a material published claim changes, its page's correction history records the date, what changed and why. If an underlying agency record is inaccurate, the agency must correct that record; we can correct our interpretation, identify the issue and refresh our copy when a corrected source is available.

The methodology page owns the record, estimate, comparison and geography rules. Version 2026-09-24 adds collected meeting records and AI-assisted research published under the checks above. Version 2026-09-10 adds normalized street entities, explicit parcel publication gates and source-linked permanent evidence pages. Version 2026-09-06 established the civic accountability evidence labels and release coverage audit.

We retain the underlying event and source dates. The coverage page exposes release dates and data limitations, rather than treating every record as newly updated.