About
Built on official
city records
Petaluma Civic is a civic transparency platform built on official City of Petaluma 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
Six years of city data, searchable
Full transcripts from City Council meetings, roll-call votes, dissent patterns, and attendance records. Ask how a member voted, what was said about a specific project, or who dissented on a close vote.
Every CIP project from FY2023–FY2027, with life-to-date actual spend, funding sources, and percent funded. Ask where the trestle money went, how the skate park was funded, or which projects are most underfunded heading into the next budget cycle.
All 18 active titles of the Petaluma Municipal Code plus the Integrated Zoning Ordinance, searchable by topic. Ask what's required for an ADU, what the setback rules are, or how a specific ordinance was written.
64,000+ building and planning permit records. Look up permit history for any address, track active construction, or find who pulled permits on a parcel.
The full March 2026 draft General Plan, searchable by topic, policy, and element.
Form 700 financial interest filings for all current council members, with conflict-of-interest context and vote records.
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.
Petaluma Civic solves this with semantic search. Every document is processed by a language model (Voyage AI's voyage-3) 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, updated regularly
All records come from official City of Petaluma sources: Legistar (agendas and minutes), Swagit (meeting video and transcripts), Accela/EnerGov (permits), the City Clerk's office (ordinances and General Plan), and the City's adopted budget documents. Form 700 disclosures are sourced from the California FPPC NetFile portal.
The platform is updated within days of new meetings. Budget and permit data is updated periodically. Some historical records are incomplete — transcript coverage begins in 2024, and not all meeting types have full records.
Built by Jan Jirout · petalumacivic.org · Data from City of Petaluma official records