Meetings & votes
City Council meeting transcripts, roll-call votes, and attendance records. Ask how a member voted, what was said about a specific project, or who dissented on a close vote.
About Charlottesville Civic
Built on official city records
Charlottesville Civic is a civic transparency platform built on official Charlottesville records. It exists to answer the questions residents actually have — not the ones that happen to match a keyword in a database.
01 · What you can find here
City data, searchable
Connected views help residents move from a question to the underlying public record.
Permits
Building and planning permit records. Look up permit history for any address, track active construction, or find who pulled permits on a parcel.
02 · How it works
Search by meaning, not by keyword
City government has its own vocabulary. A resident searching for “road repair” won't find the agenda item approved under “Arterial Rehabilitation Program, Capital Improvement Item 4c.” The words don't match — so the document disappears, even though it contains exactly what they were looking for.
Charlottesville Civic solves this with semantic search. Every document is processed by a language model and converted into a set of numbers that encode its meaning. When you ask a question, your question gets the same treatment — and the platform finds documents that mean the same thing as your question, not just documents that share the same words.
Every answer is grounded in a real city record. No fabrication — if the document doesn't exist, the platform says so.
03 · About the data
Official sources, on a published schedule
All records come from official Charlottesville sources — meeting agendas and minutes, video transcripts, permit records, adopted budget documents, and policy documents published by the city. Meetings refresh daily; transcripts, summaries and votes three times a week; permits weekly. Budget, financial and policy documents are loaded when the city publishes new ones.
Some historical records may be incomplete. Transcript coverage and data availability vary by record type. When a question falls outside what's been indexed, the platform will say so rather than guess.
Data from Charlottesville official records · Built with pgvector + Claude