Methodology

How Zoning Docket turns public meeting documents into case histories, and the safeguards we apply.

Sources

We read the official agenda systems of 13 governments in Rutherford, Wilson, Maury and Sumner counties every morning: CivicClerk and Legistar data services, CivicPlus Agenda Centers (with their RSS feeds for posting times) and CHAMP meeting portals. Documents for Rutherford County and Murfreesboro are added from manual downloads (see coverage). We read planning commissions, boards of zoning appeals, and city councils, boards of mayor and aldermen, and commissions.

Extraction

Each land-use item (rezoning, PUD, annexation, site plan, plat, variance, special use, land-use plan amendment) becomes a record with its type, address, tax map and parcel, acreage, current and requested zoning, applicant, engineer or agent, proposed use, units, the hearing body and date, any staff recommendation, and any recorded outcome and vote.

• Structured sources: Legistar and CHAMP publish agenda items as data; Legistar also publishes the recorded action and vote.
• Documents: PDF agendas, packets, staff reports and minutes are converted to text (scanned pages are read with OCR) and fields are extracted with an AI model (claude-haiku-4-5) that must return a fixed structure.
• Checks: a case number, parcel, address or acreage is kept only if it appears in the source document. Outcomes are accepted only from minutes or official action records. Quotes in "From the record" are verbatim from the documents.
• Current mode: AI extraction is not switched on yet. Fields are extracted by pattern rules from agenda wording, which finds the items reliably but misses some fields (often acreage, applicant and engineer). Minutes are not read in this mode, so few outcomes appear except Mt. Juliet's.

Case linking

The same case appears on several agendas: planning commission, then council first and second reading, sometimes deferrals. We link hearings by official case or ordinance number, Legistar matter, address, tax parcel and project name. Address, parcel and name matches only join items of the same kind (a site plan and a rezoning at one address stay separate but are shown as related), never join two items from the same agenda, and never join items with different case numbers. Each case keeps a stable address on this site.

Safeguards

• Items are described as proposed or requested. We never state or imply an outcome unless it was recorded, and then we show the date and source.
• Every case links to the official documents. Each page shows when the data was last updated.
• When an applicant or owner appears to be a private individual rather than a company, we withhold the name and keep the page out of search engines. Addresses are shown only as printed on the public agenda.
• Staff recommendations are labelled as recommendations, not decisions.
• Corrections are answered within two business days.

Timing

Agendas typically post 4 to 6 days before a meeting, so alerts arrive about that far ahead of a planning commission hearing and, for rezonings and annexations, about two months before the final council vote. Outcomes arrive with minutes, often 2 to 5 weeks after a meeting (Mt. Juliet's the same night).

Limitations

• Many towns print no official case number; we assign our own case id.
• Documents sometimes disagree (for example, acreage changes between hearings); we show the latest value and note the conflict.
• Some scanned documents and handwritten forms can't be read reliably.