Legistar Agenda Radar

Get keyword alerts for zoning, contract, RFP, and bid items on city council agendas — automatically.

This tool scans public meeting agendas for 86 U.S. cities and counties that use Legistar (including Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Austin, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, San Jose, Denver, and more). You tell it which city and which keywords to watch, and it returns every matching agenda item with direct links to the attached documents.

It runs on Apify (a cloud automation platform), uses zero browser automation, and can be scheduled to run daily.

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What You Get

For every agenda item that matches your keywords, you get:

• What it is — the agenda item title, matter title, and which committee/body it belongs to
• When — meeting date and time
• Where to read more — direct link to the Legistar event page
• Attachments — direct download URLs for every PDF, Word doc, etc. attached to that item
• Vote records (optional) — who voted and how
• RSS feed (optional) — plug it into Slack, email, Zapier, or any feed reader for real-time alerts

You can download results as JSON, CSV, or Excel from the Apify Console.

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Quick Start

Copy this into the Apify Console input editor (or save as INPUT.json locally):

{
  "client": "seattle",
  "daysBack": 14,
  "keywords": "zoning"
}

That's it. This scans Seattle City Council agendas from the last 2 weeks for anything mentioning "zoning" and returns matching items with all their attachments.

Want to monitor multiple keywords?

Separate them with commas:

{
  "client": "chicago",
  "daysBack": 30,
  "keywords": "zoning,RFP,contract,bid"
}

Want everything (no filter)?

Leave keywords empty:

{
  "client": "boston",
  "daysBack": 7,
  "keywords": ""
}

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Which Cities Work?

86 cities and counties are confirmed working. Here are some of the big ones:

City	Client ID	City	Client ID
Seattle, WA	seattle	Chicago, IL	chicago
Boston, MA	boston	Detroit, MI	detroit
San Jose, CA	sanjose	Denver, CO	denver
Phoenix, AZ	phoenix	Sacramento, CA	sacramento
Oakland, CA	oakland	Pittsburgh, PA	pittsburgh
San Francisco, CA	sfgov	Nashville, TN	nashville
Baltimore, MD	baltimore	Milwaukee, WI	milwaukee
Long Beach, CA	longbeach	Kansas City, MO	kansascity

Watch out — some cities use non-obvious IDs:

City	You might guess...	Actual ID
Austin, TX	austin	austintexas
Dallas, TX	dallas	cityofdallas
Atlanta, GA	atlanta	atlantaga
Charlotte, NC	charlotte	charlottenc
Miami, FL	miami	miamifl
Minneapolis, MN	minneapolis	minneapolismn
Cleveland, OH	cleveland	cityofcleveland
Albuquerque, NM	albuquerque	cabq
San Francisco, CA	sanfrancisco	sfgov

Counties work too: kingcounty, lacounty, miamidade, broward, pinellas, mecklenburg.

See SUPPORTED_CLIENTS.md for the full list of all 86.

How to find your city's ID

1. Google "your city" legistar and look for a URL like https://seattle.legistar.com
2. The part before .legistar.com is your client ID
3. If that doesn't work, try {city}{state} (e.g. miamifl) or cityof{city} (e.g. cityofdallas)

Cities that DON'T work

Some major cities use different platforms entirely (not Legistar), so they'll never work with this tool: Houston (uses Swagit), Los Angeles (uses PrimeGov), Portland (uses their own website). NYC and Philadelphia require an API key — pass yours via the apiKey input field.

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All Input Options

Field	What it does	Default
client	Your city's Legistar ID (see above)	seattle
daysBack	How far back to search (in days)	14
keywords	Comma-separated keywords to match. Empty = get everything	""
includeAttachments	Grab attachment download URLs?	true
includeVotes	Fetch vote records? (slower — extra API call per item)	false
rss	Generate an RSS feed?	false
maxEvents	Max number of meetings to scan	50
maxItemsPerEvent	Max agenda items per meeting	200
debug	Show extra logging (URLs, raw data)	false
apiKey	API key if your city requires one (NYC, Philly)	""
authHeaderName	How to send the key: Authorization or X-API-KEY	Authorization

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What the Output Looks Like

Each matching agenda item looks like this (real data from Seattle):

{
  "client": "seattle",
  "eventId": 6581,
  "eventDate": "2026-02-10T00:00:00",
  "eventTime": "2:00 PM",
  "eventName": "City Council",
  "bodyName": "City Council",
  "agendaItemTitle": "AN ORDINANCE relating to land use and zoning; revising environmental review thresholds...",
  "agendaItemOrder": 18,
  "matterId": 16444,
  "matterTitle": "CB 121093",
  "legistarEventUrl": "https://seattle.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?LEGID=6581&GID=393&...",
  "matchedKeywords": ["zoning"],
  "attachmentUrls": [
    "https://legistar2.granicus.com/seattle/attachments/8e51b18e-...docx",
    "https://legistar2.granicus.com/seattle/attachments/57775d1e-...pdf"
  ]
}

RSS Feed

Set "rss": true and the actor generates an RSS 2.0 XML file saved in the Key-Value Store as OUTPUT_RSS. Plug the URL into Slack, Zapier, Microsoft Teams, or any feed reader to get notified when new matches appear.

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Who This Is For

You are...	You care about...	Try these keywords
A GovTech sales team	RFPs and contract awards	RFP,contract,bid,procurement
A real estate developer	Zoning changes and permits	zoning,variance,permit,rezoning
A journalist	Policy debates and votes	ordinance,resolution,hearing
A civic watchdog	Budget and spending	budget,appropriation,grant,funding
A lobbyist or advocate	Legislation on your issue	cannabis,housing,transit,climate

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Running Locally

You need Node.js 18+ and the Apify CLI.

npm install -g apify-cli  # one-time setup

git clone <repo-url> legistar-agenda-radar
cd legistar-agenda-radar
npm install

Create your input file:

$mkdir -p storage/key_value_stores/default

Then create storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json with your settings (see Quick Start above).

Run it:

$apify run

Results appear in storage/datasets/default/ as JSON files. If you enabled RSS, the feed is at storage/key_value_stores/default/OUTPUT_RSS.xml.

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Publishing to Apify

apify login
apify push

Your actor will appear in your Apify account. You can schedule it (e.g. daily at 8am), set up webhooks, or call it via API.

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Under the Hood

• Talks directly to the Legistar Web API — no browser, no scraping HTML
• If a request fails (rate limit, server error, timeout), it retries up to 4 times with increasing waits
• Pauses 250ms between requests to avoid hammering the API
• If one date format is rejected, it automatically tries an alternate format
• Runs on the cheapest Apify plan (no Playwright/Puppeteer needed)

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License

ISC