City Council Watch — New Ordinances & Upcoming Meetings

Give it a list of cities. Get back new ordinances/resolutions filed since a date, and upcoming council/committee meeting agendas — pulled straight from each city's own Legistar system, the software behind most US (and some Canadian) city council websites.

Built for local journalists, government-affairs and lobbying professionals, real-estate developers tracking zoning votes, and civic-tech researchers who currently check multiple city council sites by hand.

Input

{
  "cities": [{ "client": "seattle" }],
  "sinceDate": "2026-07-01",
  "keywordFilter": ["zoning", "housing"],
  "matterTypeFilter": [],
  "includeUpcomingMeetings": true
}

Field	Type	Description
cities	array	One entry per city: { "client": "seattle" }. The client code is the subdomain of that city's Legistar site.
sinceDate	string	Only include matters introduced on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD).
keywordFilter	array of strings	Only keep matters whose title contains one of these (case-insensitive).
matterTypeFilter	array of strings	Only keep matters whose type exactly matches one of these (e.g. "Ordinance").
includeUpcomingMeetings	boolean	Also fetch upcoming council/committee meetings (default true).

Finding a city's client code: open that city's council site — if it's Legistar-powered, it'll redirect to or link https://<client>.legistar.com. seattle.legistar.com → "seattle". Not every city runs Legistar, and not every guess matches the subdomain exactly (e.g. some counties use a different code than their common name) — an unsupported/incorrect client code fails that one city gracefully and the run continues with the rest.

Output

Two kinds of records, tagged by kind:

{
  "kind": "matter",
  "client": "seattle",
  "matterId": 17394,
  "file": "Appt 03569",
  "title": "Appointment of Kelli Larsen as Director of the Office of Housing.",
  "type": "Appointment (Appt)",
  "status": "Committee Agenda Ready",
  "body": "Housing, Arts, and Civil Rights Committee",
  "introDate": "2026-07-28T00:00:00",
  "agendaDate": "2026-08-12T00:00:00",
  "passedDate": null,
  "url": "https://seattle.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=17394&GUID=..."
}

{
  "kind": "meeting",
  "client": "seattle",
  "eventId": 6814,
  "body": "Select Committee on the Comprehensive Plan",
  "date": "2026-08-05T00:00:00",
  "time": "9:30 AM",
  "location": "Council Chamber, City Hall\r\n600 4th Avenue\r\nSeattle, WA 98104",
  "agendaStatus": "Final",
  "agendaFile": "https://legistar2.granicus.com/seattle/meetings/.../Agenda.pdf",
  "url": "https://seattle.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?..."
}

How it works

Direct calls to each city's own Legistar Web API — no scraping, no proxy, no key:

• Matters (legislation): webapi.legistar.com/v1/{client}/matters
• Events (meetings): webapi.legistar.com/v1/{client}/events

Both are OData endpoints with server-side date filtering (MatterIntroDate ge datetime'...'), so this actor only pulls what's actually newer than sinceDate/today rather than filtering client-side after downloading everything.

Pricing note

Billed per city queried, not per matter or meeting returned — a city with 50 new ordinances this month costs the same as one with 2.

Related products

• Federal Register Tracker — the federal-level equivalent: new proposed/final rules and comment deadlines
• Disaster Declaration Tracker — another civic/government data source, for FEMA disaster declarations instead of council actions