Municipal Agenda Keyword Radar

What does Municipal Agenda Keyword Radar do?

Municipal Agenda Keyword Radar watches US city-council and county-board agendas for the keywords you care about — and tells you the moment they show up, with the exact agenda snippet, meeting date, and a link to the agenda. It reads official government sources directly across four platform families — the Legistar InSite API, PrimeGov portals, legacy Granicus (ViewPublisher) sites, and eScribe meeting portals — which together host most US local governments. No proxies, no blocking, no brittle HTML scraping of consumer sites.

Point it at your cities, give it phrases like data center, short-term rental, battery storage, rezoning, or a competitor's name, and run it on a schedule. In alert mode it remembers everything it has already told you and only outputs new hits — you pay only when something new appears.

Why use Municipal Agenda Keyword Radar?

Local government is where revenue-moving decisions surface first — and almost nobody reads the agendas:

• Data-center, solar, and battery developers: catch moratoriums, zoning changes, and rival projects the week they hit a committee agenda.
• Short-term-rental operators and property managers: know when an ordinance targeting STRs is scheduled — before the vote, not after.
• B2G and civic-tech sales teams: an agenda item mentioning your category is a buying signal with a date attached.
• Journalists and researchers: track an issue across many cities without reading 40 agendas a week.
• Government-affairs teams: enterprise policy-monitoring platforms charge $10,000+/year for this. This Actor costs cents per alert.

How to use Municipal Agenda Keyword Radar

1. Add your keywords (plain phrases; matching is case-insensitive and whole-word).
2. Add your jurisdictions: the subdomain of {city}.legistar.com goes in Legistar cities, {city}.primegov.com in PrimeGov cities, {host}.granicus.com in Granicus sites (as host:viewIds, or just the host to auto-discover its agenda views), and {name}.escribemeetings.com in eScribe portals. Pasting full URLs works too.
3. Click Start. Matches appear in the dataset with snippets and links.
4. For monitoring: turn on Alert mode, add a webhook URL (Slack, Zapier, Make, or your own endpoint), and put the Actor on a schedule — daily or weekly. Each run then delivers only new matches.

Verified example cities

Platform	Tested slugs
Legistar	seattle, mesa, longbeach, oakland, sanjose, kingcounty, pittsburgh, columbus, madison, fortlauderdale, fulton (Fulton County GA), dekalbcountyga (DeKalb County GA), phoenix, mecklenburg (Mecklenburg County NC), santaclara (Santa Clara CA)
PrimeGov	lacity (Los Angeles), sanantonio, tucson, oaklandca
Granicus	pwcgov:23,12,24 (Prince William County VA — Board of County Supervisors, Planning Commission, Zoning Appeals)
eScribe	pub-loudoun (Loudoun County VA — Board of Supervisors and committees)

Any other jurisdiction on those platforms works the same way — check whether yourcity.legistar.com, yourcity.primegov.com, yourcity.granicus.com, or pub-yourcity.escribemeetings.com exists.

Input

See the Input tab for the full schema. Minimal example:

{
    "keywords": ["data center", "substation", "moratorium"],
    "legistarClients": ["seattle", "dekalbcountyga"],
    "primegovClients": ["lacity"],
    "granicusClients": ["pwcgov:23,12,24"],
    "escribeClients": ["pub-loudoun"],
    "daysBack": 14,
    "daysAhead": 60,
    "onlyNewResults": true,
    "alertWebhookUrl": "https://hooks.zapier.com/..."
}

Output

One record per keyword match. You can download the dataset in JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML, or read it via API.

{
    "platform": "legistar",
    "client": "seattle",
    "keyword": "housing",
    "matchType": "agenda-item",
    "snippet": "…of Council Bill 121254 as shown in the underlined and strike through language below: Rental junk fees are a growing issue within the housing affordability crisis. These unavoidable and often hidden fees increase the cost of living…",
    "meetingTitle": "City Council",
    "meetingDate": "2026-08-11",
    "meetingTime": "2:00 PM",
    "meetingStatus": "final",
    "isUpcoming": false,
    "itemTitle": "An ordinance relating to rental agreement regulation; requiring disclosure of fees, prohibiting and limiting certain fees…",
    "matterFile": "CB 121254",
    "matterType": "Ordinance (Ord)",
    "matterStatus": "Passed",
    "agendaUrl": "https://legistar2.granicus.com/seattle/meetings/2026/8/6854_A_City_Council_26-08-11_Full_Council_Meeting_Agenda.pdf",
    "meetingUrl": "https://seattle.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?LEGID=6854&GID=393&G=FFE3B678-CEF6-4197-84AC-5204EA4CFC0C",
    "videoUrl": "https://seattlechannel.org/FullCouncil?videoid=x189286"
}

Main output fields

Field	Meaning
keyword	Which of your keywords matched
matchType	meeting-title, agenda-item (Legistar item/matter), or agenda-text (full HTML agenda)
snippet	±140 characters of context around the match
meetingDate / isUpcoming	When the meeting happens/happened
meetingStatus	e.g. final, cancelled — cancellations are signals too
matterFile / matterType / matterStatus	Legislative file details when the match is a Legistar matter
agendaUrl / meetingUrl / videoUrl	Deep links to the official agenda, meeting page, and video

How much does it cost to monitor city-council agendas?

Pricing is pay-per-event — you pay for what the radar actually does:

Event	Price	What it covers
Actor start	$0.01	Run bootstrap
Meeting scanned	$0.002	One meeting's agenda items / full agenda text fetched and scanned
Keyword match	$0.15	One new match delivered (the thing you actually want)

Example: a weekly run over 10 cities (~40 meetings each) that surfaces 6 new matches costs roughly 400 × $0.002 + 6 × $0.15 + $0.01 ≈ $1.71. A year of weekly monitoring ≈ $90 — versus $10K+/year for enterprise policy-monitoring suites. Use maxTotalChargeUsd when calling the Actor to hard-cap any run's spend.

Tips

• Alert mode + schedule + webhook is the intended way to run this Actor. First run seeds the memory (you'll get a burst of current matches); every run after that is new-only.
• Keywords are whole-word: solar will not match solaris. Multi-word phrases match across line breaks.
• daysBack also catches published minutes of recent meetings; daysAhead catches agendas as soon as clerks publish them (often 3–7 days before the meeting).
• Turn Scan full agenda content off only if you need a very cheap title-level sweep.

FAQ, disclaimers, and support

Is this legal? The Actor reads official public-record APIs and public agenda pages published by governments for exactly this purpose. It sends a handful of polite, rate-limited requests per city.

A city returns no meetings? Check the slug (yourcity.legistar.com must exist), and note some cities publish agendas only days before meetings. Failed cities are listed in the run's SUMMARY key-value record and the run log.

Which platforms are supported? Legistar InSite, PrimeGov, legacy Granicus (ViewPublisher/AgendaViewer), and eScribe today. CivicClerk, Municode Meetings, and per-item PDF attachment scanning (some Granicus towns keep item detail in attached PDFs rather than agenda text) are on the roadmap — open an issue on the Issues tab to vote, report a broken jurisdiction, or request a feature. Custom variants and white-label monitoring available on request.