Simulation for contested land-use hearings

The first time your team hears the hard questions shouldn't be at the podium.

HearingReady places your team before a realistic board, staff, and members of the public. Practice the questions, pressure, and commitments before they become part of the public record—then see which answers held up and which need work.

Enter invite code

View a fictional sample close-out

Illustrative excerpt, shown in the actual interface

Commissioner Reyes

Can you provide any third-party wage documentation to support that above-median figure?

You (Applicant)

There is no third-party wage documentation in the packet today. Based on our experience at comparable facilities, we expect these positions to pay above the county median, and we are comfortable making that representation.

Needs work Wage documentation question

The unsupported estimate was restated as a firm representation, with no independent documentation behind it.

Play the applicant, or take a seat on the deciding body
Typed or voice responses
A configurable board and public-comment environment
Optional grounding in your own jurisdiction's ordinance and comprehensive plan
A structured post-hearing debrief

What actually happens at the podium

Unsupported claims made under pressure

An estimate gets stated as fact, then repeated once someone asks for the document behind it.

Answers that miss the concern actually raised

A trust or fairness question gets a technical answer -- correct, and beside the point.

Commitments offered before authority or terms are clear

A bond, a deadline, a scope -- offered on the spot, with no record support behind it.

How it works

Configure the hearing

Choose your role and the project. Optionally supply your own jurisdiction's real ordinance and comprehensive plan.
Rehearse under pressure

A board, staff, and public commenters -- built from patterns observed across real hearings -- question you, argue with each other, and testify.
Review and repeat

A structured debrief shows exactly which answers held up and which need work. Run it again with what you learned.

Product tour

Code-native previews of the real interface, built from sanitized simulator content -- not stock hearing-room photography or generic AI imagery.

Packet reveal

Traffic Impact Study
Decommissioning Plan

The record you're arguing from -- every document, and what's plainly missing -- before questioning starts.

Board Q&A

Chair Whitfield Before we move to a decision, would you like to respond?

Board members question each other, not just you -- reflecting how these hearings actually run.

Public comment

A resident Why should this community trust you'll actually clean this up?

Residents testify, reference each other, and put the room's mood on the record.

Response evaluation & close-out

High risk

A scannable close-out: top corrections, response-by-response verdicts, and a commitment ledger -- built from the same debrief, not a second pass.

Sample evaluation

An illustrative, fictional scenario -- not a real applicant's session.

Question “Can you provide any third-party wage documentation to support that above-median figure — a wage survey, a labor agreement, anything independent of the company's own estimate?”

Weak answer “There is no third-party wage documentation in the packet today. Based on our experience at comparable facilities, we expect these positions to pay above the county median, and we are comfortable making that representation. We can provide wage ranges to staff later in the process.”

Finding Needs work

What needs work The honest admission that no documentation exists is undercut immediately -- the unsupported estimate is reasserted as a firm representation, and a promise to provide it later substitutes for the evidence actually being asked for tonight.

Better answer “There is no third-party wage documentation, labor agreement, or independent economic-impact analysis in the packet. Our above-median figure is our own estimate, not a documented fact.”

Research foundation

HearingReady's room behavior, pressure dynamics, and evaluation design are drawn from a systematically coded set of real, contested land-use hearings -- how boards actually raise concerns, press for evidence, and respond to commitments.

This shapes how the room behaves and what the evaluator looks for. It does not predict whether any particular project will be approved.

Limitations: the underlying set of hearings is not a statistically representative sample of every hearing everywhere, and its patterns have not been validated as a predictor of any hearing's outcome.

Data handling

Access is controlled by invite code. There are no public accounts and no self-service signup.
What you type or say during a session is sent to the AI models that play the room and generate your debrief.
A session produces a transcript, a debrief, and (if supplied) a packet -- each downloadable during that session.
Session state lives in server memory for the length of your session and is cleared after a period of inactivity. Saved transcripts, debriefs, and packets remain on the server after the session ends -- there is currently no automatic deletion of these saved files.
HearingReady is a rehearsal tool. It is not legal advice, and it does not predict whether a real application will be approved.

Private access

HearingReady is currently available by invitation. Enter the code provided to your team to begin.