CASE STUDY 02 / API APPLICATION · LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Congress is watched. Your council is not. CheckYourCouncil covers all 273 incorporated municipalities in Colorado: where each one publishes its record, who sits on the council, and which towns publish nothing at all.

THE PROBLEM

Every Colorado municipality publishes agendas, minutes, and rosters differently: PDFs on a city site, a third-party agenda portal, a Facebook page, or nothing at all. A resident who wants to know what their council decided last Tuesday has to know where to look, and many never find it. There was no single place that said where the record lives for every town in the state.

THE BUILD

COVERAGE

Every city council and town board in Colorado, from Denver to the smallest statutory town.

SOURCES

Published agendas, approved and draft minutes, and official municipal rosters, collected and normalized.

STRUCTURE

The Record, Money, Your Seats, and How We Know: the same navigation for every town.

HONESTY

Towns that publish no records are listed as such. Absence of a record is itself a finding.

DATA

Built on the same Postgres and ingestion patterns as CheckYourRepresentative, so both platforms improve together.

STANCE

The site publishes the record and lets residents draw their own conclusions.

WHY IT MATTERS

Zoning, water, policing, and budgets are decided at the council table, and far fewer people watch those meetings than watch Congress. CheckYourCouncil gives residents a starting point: pick your town, see who sits on the council, open the official agenda portal, and know whether minutes are draft or approved.

For clients, it demonstrates the hardest part of a data product: taking hundreds of inconsistent sources and making them navigable without inventing anything.

NEXT