Bowdoinham man builds AI tool to help residents ask questions about their town
Benjamin Brewer created an artificial intelligence tool “for anyone who’s ever tried to look something up on the town website and ended up 47 PDFs deep at 11 p.m. wondering if you’re even in the right decade,” he wrote on Facebook.
The Ask Bowdoinham AI tool allows anyone to ask questions about Bowdoinham. It generates answers by searching town documents and summarizing relevant portions. Users can choose how many sources they want the tool to pull up and type in a prompt or question. The tool then pulls the information, provides citations, and links to the documents used to answer the question. The tool also directs the user to the information within the document — Brewer said it’s sometimes a little off, but usually links to the correct page.
Brewer said he has been using AI agents to analyze town documents for his Slow Down Bowdoinham campaign, which aims to address speeding in the town. He said using AI been a major time-saving measure, which is helpful to him as a self-employed single dad.
He said he thought this kind of tool could be helpful to other Bowdoinham residents.
“There’s a lot of unhappy town members … and people are doing a lot of digging, so I figured I’d assist with that,” Brewer said.
Brewer is currently a house painter, but said as a former “computer science guy,” creating the tool took two or three nights.
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Ask Bowdoinham is powered by two free programs, Groq and Open Router. Brewer said if too many people try to use it at once, it will stop generating summaries and only pull documents. The tool is an unofficial community project, meaning it is not affiliated with the town government.
Brewer wrote code that allows him to easily scan the town website and import new documents into Ask Bowdoinham. He plans to do this about once a week. When he first took documents from the town website, his IP address was blocked — he said he believes he was flagged as a bot.
In response to the question “What was discussed at Bowdoinham’s first public meeting about the Open Space Plan?” the tool generated a summary drawn from the meeting’s agenda.
Small changes in spelling and wording can change the summaries, and asking the same question multiple times can yield different results. The tool provided an accurate answer to “Who are the current Select Board members?” In response to the search “Current Select Board members,” the summary provided incorrect information drawn from a 2026 sample ballot. A day later, the same search garnered a summary, including two of the five current board members’ full names, and the first name of a third member.
Bowdoinham resident Hope Libby said she is a fan of Ask Bowdoinham because it saves time. She hasn’t been looking at the summaries the tool generates, and is using it purely to find information in long and complex documents. She most recently asked it about the town’s housing density, and located her answer in the 2025 Annual Report.
Brewer said the Ask Bowdoinham site has had low to moderate traffic — anywhere between two and 49 queries in a day, though he said some of the higher numbers may have been inflated by his own tests of the tool. He hasn’t gotten much feedback yet, but said he would appreciate hearing from users about what works and what doesn’t. He said he’ll continue to improve the tool if he can.
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“If it’s gonna say something, I wanted to make sure that it’s legit … we already have enough incorrect information in the world, as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
In a Facebook post, Brewer cautioned town residents to excercise discretion when using the tool. “It reads the town’s documents, not minds — always click through to the original before quoting it at a meeting,” he wrote.
He said he envisions the tool helping Bowdoinham residents get the information they need while saving time.
“I hope … that it lets them get to the point of what they’re trying to do without putting the superfluous man-hours in,” said Brewer.
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Maeve Fairfax is an intern covering the Midcoast region for the Times Record. She grew up in Burlington, and studied Environmental Studies and Journalism at the University of Vermont. She interned as a. More by Maeve Fairfax
