About this site

Why it exists

Speigletown had no single place to turn for the basics. A new neighbor could spend weeks piecing together how the police respond here, where the nearest ambulance and fire company are, or even who provides internet and phone service. Anyone curious about how the hamlet is governed met the same wall: decisions scattered across PDFs and scanned files that were hard to search, and meetings that go unrecorded — leaving only the written minutes, sometimes sparse, to piece together what happened and why.

This site was built to close that gap — to be the clear front door the hamlet was missing, and to make its public record easy to find, read, and follow.

What you'll find

It gathers the things residents actually need — public safety contacts, town meeting schedules and minutes, local services, a business directory, community groups, and news — in one place.

Speigletown is a hamlet of the Town of Schaghticoke, but the community it anchors reaches across the town line. The Speigletown Fire District, our closest stand-in for the hamlet's footprint, also covers part of the neighboring Town of Brunswick. Mailing addresses across the area are all Troy, NY — mostly ZIP 12182, with the southern Brunswick end in 12180. The map shows how the district spans both towns.

What we stand for

A few principles guide everything here:

• True accounting, backed by references. Facts should be traceable. When the site describes what a board did or what a rule says, it points to the source — the minutes, the law, the document — so anyone can check it.
• Visibility and accountability for local government. Public decisions should be easy to find, read, and follow over time. Making meeting records searchable, and summarizing them plainly, is a big part of the work.
• A hub for the hamlet and the area around it. One front door for safety, government, services, businesses, events, history, and news — for Speigletown and its neighbors across the town line.
• Respect for neighbors' privacy. This is a community resource, not a surveillance tool. Private individuals are kept out of the record except where they're already part of the public one, and personal details shared with a photo or a tip are handled with care.

In practice, that's a blend of three voices: the reliability of a town reference, the energy of an action group, and the curiosity of a community newspaper.

Who's behind it

For now this is a small volunteer effort — a handful of community members contributing what they can. We're working toward organizing as a nonprofit (a 501(c)(3)), so the site can be community-owned, sustainably supported, and able to do more than inform: to raise concerns about the things that affect the hamlet, and give neighbors a clearer voice on them.

Free, and ad-free

The site is free to use and free of ads. In time we may ask for voluntary donations to help cover the real costs of running it — hosting, storage, and the AI that powers search and the assistant — but there's no paywall on the core community information, and there won't be one.

A note on the technology

Parts of this site are AI-assisted. Dort, the built-in assistant, answers questions from the town's own records, and AI helps summarize long documents — always grounded in real sources and reviewed by a person. The models run on Cloudflare's Workers AI: questions aren't sent to an outside AI company, and aren't used to train anyone's models. Exactly how the technology and your data are handled is on the Privacy and Terms pages.

Get involved

There are lots of ways to help make this genuinely ours:

• Submit news, an event, or raise a local issue
• Add or correct a business listing
• Start or list a community group
• Help maintain a section, contribute photos, or fix an error

Contact & corrections

Spot something out of date or wrong? Have an idea? Reach out at hello@speigletown.org. Corrections are welcome and appreciated — accuracy is the whole point.

• Email: hello@speigletown.org
• Phone: 518-646-6907
• Mail: PO Box 9, Melrose, NY 12121