77 harvested documents. 4 cities. 3 planning boards. January 2024 through March 2026.

Per-jurisdiction enumeration.

Source documents come from each city's own portal. Some cities use municipal CMS platforms (CivicClerk, AgendaCenter); others publish PDFs directly under municipal subdirectories. The harvest pipeline reads where the city posts.

Six document types make up the substrate.

• Agenda packetsThe board's pre-meeting bundle — agenda + each item's staff report + supporting attachments. The richest single artifact per meeting.
• Meeting minutesPost-meeting record of motions, votes, public comment, and staff discussion. The authoritative account of what happened.
• Staff reportsThe planning department's analysis of each item — the code citations, the comp-plan alignment, the recommended disposition. Often where the structural argument lives.
• OrdinancesAdopted code language. The legal regime that governs the next decisions. Read in chronology — when an ordinance changes, the planning environment changes.
• Comprehensive plansLong-range policy framework — future land use maps, transportation elements, capital improvement schedules. The ceiling and the floor for what cities will approve.
• Supporting attachmentsSite plans, traffic studies, utility capacity letters, public comment correspondence. The evidentiary fabric the board reads alongside the agenda.

Each document standardizes into one Markdown file.

The harvest output is one file per meeting, with a stable frontmatter contract for jurisdiction, board, date, and items. The shape is what allows the lens projection to read across cities without losing per-city texture. The text is plain Markdown; the metadata is structured. Every file is committable, diffable, and version-controlled.

The repository where the harvest lives is the NLAA — the sibling project at ../zoning-signal/. The observatory you are reading is the publishing surface; the NLAA is the harvest and synthesis surface. Cross-reference is via symlink, never duplication.

Every dossier is reviewed before publication. Every citation is walked.

Validation is human. Before any place dossier or signal brief ships, the citation chain is walked end-to-end — back to the source PDF, back to the video recording where one exists. Items are checked for vote tally, public comment, and outcome. When a citation breaks (URL rot, document withdrawn), the dossier holds and is reviewed; when a citation refines (a staff report supersedes a prior version), the dossier moves with it.

The source trail at the bottom of every reading is the visible receipt. The provenance graph in the underlying content is the structural one — six document types per reading, ordered, with dates and source IDs that resolve back to this page.