Dekree — Where Municipal Law Meets Modern Software
Year 1 (2025-26)
by Garrett Patnoude
Dekree is an AI-powered compliance platform that helps Michigan townships manage FOIA requests, track legal deadlines, and stay compliant across 14 state statutes, all in one place.
About This Idea
Michigan has 1,240 townships, each one legally required to comply with 14 state statutes covering FOIA requests, Open Meetings Act, budgeting, elections, records retention, and more. Miss a deadline? Your township faces lawsuits, fines, and public trust violations. Today, most township clerks track all of this manually with sticky notes, spreadsheets, and memory.
Dekree is the all-in-one compliance platform built specifically for Michigan municipalities. We've built the Compliance Graph, a proprietary database of 90+ legal obligations extracted directly from Michigan statute, each mapped to deadlines, required actions, and verified MCL citations. Dekree automates FOIA response drafting with AI, tracks every legal deadline across all 14 statutes, manages documents with smart categorization, schedules meetings with Open Meetings Act compliance built in, and provides a public portal for citizen submissions.
This isn't a concept. Dekree is live, deployed, and already being piloted. See it yourself at dekree.ai. Our first pilot municipality, Wakeshma Township, put it best: "This is completely changing the way we track FOIA. Dekree has eliminated our compliance challenges. Now we have everything in one place with known deadlines. It's a huge step forward for our township." (Jason Gatlin, Township Supervisor)
Our pricing at launch and legal formation will be tiered based on municipality size, with plans designed to fall within discretionary spending thresholds so clerks can adopt without board approval. With 93% gross margins and a 1,240-township addressable market in Michigan alone, the math speaks for itself.
Where Did This Idea Spark at WMU?
It started with a one-on-one conversation with a close professor of mine. We were talking about recognizing opportunities, understanding risk, and knowing when to dig deeper. He pushed me to look more closely at what I could actually build and offer. That conversation directly led me to uncover a challenge facing a local municipality in my hometown. The South Kalamazoo County Fire Authority needed a solution within their budget to manage FOIA requests, legal deadlines, and compliance obligations. The problem? Nothing existed. I started reading the actual statutes (the Freedom of Information Act, the Open Meetings Act, the Township Act) and found over 90 distinct legal obligations buried across 14 laws. No software mapped all of them together. So I built it. Every line of the Compliance Graph traces back to real Michigan Compiled Law, and every feature was validated by actual township clerks who told me they'd been waiting years for something like this.
Impact in Kalamazoo
The townships surrounding Kalamazoo (Wakeshma, Oshtemo, Comstock, Texas, Pavilion, and more) are the first to benefit. These clerks serve thousands of residents while juggling legal compliance largely by hand. Dekree gives them back hours every week, reduces their legal exposure, and makes their operations transparent to the public through our citizen portal.
Beyond the clerks themselves, residents win too. Faster FOIA responses, properly noticed meetings, and accountable governance. When a township runs smoothly, the whole community benefits, and right now, Kalamazoo County townships are first in line.
Dekree is also creating a govtech company headquartered right here. As we scale, that means local jobs, local tax revenue, and Kalamazoo becoming known as the place where the future of municipal technology started.
How Investment Helps
Funding unlocks two things that aren't possible without it: speed and credibility.
Right now, Dekree is live and validated, but I'm a solo founder building and supporting simultaneously. It took 43,000 lines of code and 6 months of solo development to write the first version of Dekree. Investment lets me hire targeted help, attend the Michigan Townships Association Conference in April 2026 (the single highest-leverage sales event in our market), and onboard our first 10 paying townships in the Kalamazoo region.
The first local milestone: 5 Kalamazoo County townships on paid Dekree subscriptions within 90 days of funding. That creates a local proof cluster. When neighboring townships see their peers using Dekree, adoption spreads through the clerk-to-clerk referral network that drives every purchasing decision in this market.
Funding also lets me establish Dekree as a Kalamazoo-based company with real infrastructure, not a student project that could relocate anywhere.
What I'll Do With the Money
MTA Conference & Sales: $25,000. Booth, materials, and travel for the April 2026 Michigan Townships Association Conference, our primary customer acquisition event with 3,000+ municipal officials attending.
Product Development: $35,000. Hire contract developers to build Phase 2 (advanced document intelligence with AI indexing) and Phase 3 (automated meeting transcription and minutes), accelerating our roadmap by 6 months.
Customer Onboarding & Support: $15,000. Dedicated onboarding support for first 20 townships, including training, migration assistance, and feedback loops that shape the product.
Operations & Infrastructure: $25,000. Legal entity formalization, expanded cloud infrastructure for scaling, and 12 months of operational runway to reach profitability.
About the Founder
I'm Garrett, a 22-year-old WMU student who saw a gap nobody was filling: 1,240 townships running on spreadsheets and memory while tech companies chased flashier markets. I taught myself Michigan statute, built the Compliance Graph from 14 laws, and shipped a production platform that's already changing how townships operate. I have a deployed product, a pilot customer testimonial, and a clear path to revenue. I'm not only pitching an idea. I'm scaling a future business.