Municipal Council Minutes & Agenda Scraper

Fetch US city council meeting agendas, minutes, and documents from major municipal government platforms. Supports Legistar and PrimeGov — covering thousands of US municipalities (more platforms coming). Input a platform type and client slug to retrieve meeting records normalized into a single schema.

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Features

• Supports the Legistar and PrimeGov municipal platforms (Granicus and CivicWeb coming soon).
• Returns meeting body, date, time, location, agenda status, document URLs, video URL, and source link for each meeting.
• Filter by date range (startDate / endDate) and governing body name (bodyName).
• Single flat output schema across all platforms — one query, one dataset.

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Who Uses Municipal Meeting Data?

• Civic technology and government transparency tools — Track council votes, planning decisions, and public comment periods across municipalities.
• Real estate and land use intelligence — Monitor zoning hearings, planning commission approvals, and variance requests before they become public news.
• Local news and investigative journalism — Automate monitoring of city council, school board, and special district meetings.
• Government relations and lobbying — Follow agenda items relevant to clients across dozens of municipalities without manual calendar checks.
• Academic and policy research — Build longitudinal datasets of local government activity across cities and regions.

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How It Works

1. Choose a platform (legistar or primegov) and provide the municipality's client slug (e.g. chicago for Chicago on Legistar, or longbeach for Long Beach, CA on PrimeGov). Each city is on exactly ONE platform.
2. Optionally filter by date range or governing body name.
3. The scraper queries the platform's public API and returns normalized meeting records.

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Input

{
    "platform": "legistar",
    "clientSlug": "chicago",
    "startDate": "2024-01-01",
    "endDate": "2024-12-31",
    "bodyName": "City Council",
    "maxItems": 100
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
platform	string	legistar	Platform vendor: legistar or primegov
clientSlug	string	chicago	Municipality client slug on the platform (must match the platform — e.g. chicago, seattle on legistar; longbeach, renton on primegov)
startDate	string	—	Filter meetings on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD)
endDate	string	—	Filter meetings on or before this date (YYYY-MM-DD)
bodyName	string	—	Filter by governing body name (case-insensitive substring match)
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum number of meeting records to return

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Platform & Client Slug Guide

Each platform assigns a slug to each municipality. Here are examples:

Platform	Example Slugs	URL Pattern
legistar	chicago, seattle, mountainview	{slug}.legistar.com
primegov	longbeach, renton	{slug}.primegov.com

A city is on exactly ONE platform — if a slug returns no meetings on one platform, it is almost certainly hosted on the other. To find your city's slug: visit the city's portal (e.g. chicago.legistar.com) — the subdomain is the slug.

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Output Schema

Each record represents one meeting:

Field	Type	Description
platform	string	Platform vendor (legistar or primegov)
city	string	Municipality client slug
state	string	US state abbreviation (when available)
body	string	Governing body name (City Council, Planning Commission, etc.)
meeting_type	string	Meeting type or status
meeting_date	string	Meeting date (YYYY-MM-DD)
meeting_time	string	Meeting start time (HH:MM)
location	string	Meeting location or address
agenda_status	string	Agenda document status (Draft, Final, etc.)
agenda_items	string	Agenda item titles (top-level, comma-separated)
document_urls	string	Space-separated list of agenda/minutes document URLs
video_url	string	URL to meeting video recording (where available)
source_url	string	Canonical URL for this meeting on the platform portal
meeting_id	string	Platform-internal meeting identifier

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Example Output

{
    "platform": "primegov",
    "city": "longbeach",
    "state": "",
    "body": "City Council",
    "meeting_type": "Regular",
    "meeting_date": "2024-09-17",
    "meeting_time": "5:00 PM",
    "location": "City Hall - Council Chambers",
    "agenda_status": "Published",
    "agenda_items": "",
    "document_urls": "https://longbeach.primegov.com/meeting/4567/agenda.pdf",
    "video_url": "",
    "source_url": "https://longbeach.primegov.com/portal/meeting?compiledMeetingDocumentFileId=4567",
    "meeting_id": "4567"
}