Zoning Signal

Sources · Provenance

Where the readings come from

376 harvested meeting records across 25 jurisdictions, 2024-01-04 through 2026-08-11. Every reading lists its sources in line, and every claim carries a citation chain back to the original document on the city’s own portal.

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.

JurisdictionRecordsPortalPlatform
Clermont35docs.clermontfl.orgLaserfiche
Leesburg33leesburgflorida.govDirect HTML directory
Winter Park31
Minneola29minneola.usDirect HTML directory
Groveland24groveland-fl.govCivicEngage / AgendaCenter
Kissimmee19
Mascotte18
Winter Garden17
Mount Dora16
Eustis16
Lake County (Unincorporated)15
Apopka13
Ocoee13
Lake Wales13
Orlando12
Tavares12
Haines City12
Maitland11
Sanford10
Davenport9
Montverde8
Lake Mary5
Winter Springs3
Altamonte Springs1
Oviedo1

Six document types make up the substrate.

TypeWhat it carries
Agenda packetsThe board’s pre-meeting bundle — agenda plus each item’s staff report and 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.

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 — document types per reading, ordered, with dates and source IDs that resolve back to this page.

The provenance reaches through the discovery server.

AI agents reading the observatory get the same provenance. Every MCP tool response includes the citation chain. Every projection preserves its sources. The discovery surface is /.well-known/mcp.json; the long-form ingest substrate is /llms-full.txt; the index is /llms.txt.

Read the methodology for how the substrate is read. See a place dossier for what the discipline produces.