API

Every meeting, agenda item and summary on this site is readable as JSON, CSV, RSS or a calendar subscription. No key, no account, no sign-up. Local government records are public, and so is reading them.

Meetings

GET /api/meetings

The meeting list. It takes the same filters as the pages on this site, so any view you can build by clicking is also an address you can fetch.

GET /api/meetings?entity=cary&topic=rezoning&when=all&limit=5

{
  "meetings": [
    {
      "id": 412,
      "title": "Town Council Regular Meeting",
      "government": "Town of Cary",
      "board": "Town Council",
      "board_kind": "governing",
      "starts_at": "2026-08-27T18:30:00-04:00",
      "location": "Town Hall Council Chamber",
      "status": "scheduled",
      "meeting_type": "regular",
      "topics": ["rezoning", "water-sewer"],
      "item_count": 34,
      "summary": "Two paragraphs on what this body will decide.",
      "agenda_url": "https://carync.iqm2.com/Citizens/FileOpen.aspx?Type=14&ID=2843",
      "minutes_url": "",
      "url": "/meetings/412"
    }
  ],
  "count": 1
}

agenda_url, packet_url, minutes_url, stream_url and detail_url point at the government's own documents, not at copies held here. They are the record. summary is absent until somebody has read the agenda.

GET /api/meetings/{id}

One meeting with its agenda items. Each item carries its number and title, what kind of action it asks for, the subjects it was sorted under, a summary, and the recorded outcome where the source published one. It may also carry matter_url, which is the item's own document: a staff report on most agendas, and the bill itself on a General Assembly calendar.

An item that names a property also carries places, with whatever the county parcel file answered.

"places": [
  {
    "kind": "address",
    "raw": "4312 Jacobs Creek Lane",
    "status": "matched",
    "parcel": {
      "county": "Wake",
      "parcel_no": "0723194404",
      "owner": "STERLING WEST LLC",
      "acres": 8.92,
      "assessed": 1188857,
      "lat": 35.8217, "lon": -78.8695,
      "url": "/parcels/17"
    }
  }
]

status is matched or not_found, and is absent when the reference has not been looked up yet. not_found is ordinary rather than an error. Land is merged, split and renumbered between the agenda and the parcel file, and some counties publish thinner records than others.

Property

GET /api/parcels.geojson

Every matched property as GeoJSON, which is what the map on this site reads. Takes entity, county, topic, from and to as YYYY-MM-DD, and limit from 1 to 2000, default 500. When more match than the limit allows, truncated comes back true. The answer to that is a narrower filter rather than a second page: a thousand outlines on one map is a smear.

GET /api/parcels/{id}

One parcel, as a single-feature collection.

Vocabularies and coverage

GET /api/vocabulary

The three closed lists this site sorts everything into: subjects, meeting types and action types. They are also printed at the bottom of this page.

GET /api/concepts

The wordings search treats as the same thing, so a query for "granny flat" reaches an item that says "accessory dwelling unit". Each group has a canonical phrase and the phrases that reach it.

GET /api/status

The Sources page as JSON, in three parts. sources is one row per government with its state and how many meetings are held for it. holdings is what came of that across the whole site, including unread, which is how many meetings have a document nobody has read yet. queue is the reading backlog's own bookkeeping.

found_last_run and meetings_on_file are different numbers and only the second means what a reader expects. A government whose whole published calendar has already been collected finds nothing new on the next run, so found_last_run drops to zero while nothing is wrong. Use meetings_on_file for how much this site holds.

GET /api/finances

Audited figures from each government's annual financial report. With no parameters it answers the coverage question first: which governments are short of years. With entity it gives that government's rows and the note written about them. With year, every government for that fiscal year.

Every figure carries whether it was reported. Without that a zero is unreadable: a town that levies no sales tax and a town whose sales tax was never filed both store zero and mean different things.

GET /api/channels

Where each government streams its meetings, one row per government.

GET /api/build

Which version of this site is running, and when it started.

Feeds and exports

Not JSON, but the same surface and the same filters. A narrowed view becomes a narrow subscription.

/items.csv takes entity, board, topic, action, q, months, and from and to as YYYY-MM-DD. It returns at most 500 rows, so page it by government and month to walk the whole corpus.

Rate limits

Requests are counted per address, in three separate budgets. Spending one leaves the other two untouched, so a script pulling exports cannot lock a reader out of the meeting pages, and a reader searching hard is not competing with it.

The whole minute's worth can be spent at once and then refills steadily, so a burst is fine and a sustained loop is what runs out. Stylesheets, scripts, robots.txt and the health check are not counted at all. Every answer carries RateLimit-Limit and RateLimit-Remaining. Going over gets a 429 with Retry-After in seconds; wait that long and the next request goes through. If you want more than this, the exports hand over the whole corpus in one request, which is cheaper for both of us than paging.

What to know before you publish anything from this

• The agenda documents are the record. Every meeting links to the government's own, and where this site and that document disagree, the document is right.
• Summaries and the written narratives are produced by a language model reading the published documents. Treat them as a reading aid and open the agenda before quoting anything.
• Captions are automatic transcripts. They misrender names and figures, and a search hit marked as one should be checked against the recording.
• An empty result is not proof of nothing. Read the Sources page for what was reachable and when.

Governments

The entity slug for each government currently collected.

Subjects

The topic slugs. One fixed list for every government, which is what makes a rezoning in Apex countable against a rezoning in Cary.

Meeting and action types