How We Read Agendas

A General Contractor's question deserves a General Contractor's answer: can I trust the contact info on this site? Here's the honest answer.

What we're doing

Every day at 14:00 UTC, our pipeline pulls the latest planning commission, city council, and county board agendas from the regions across the states we cover. Each document is read by an AI model — currently Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 — which extracts the project information you see on the platform: names, addresses, applicants, contractors, planners, contact info where it appears, project type, and the action being sought at the meeting.

What "AI reads the agenda" really means

The model is good. It's not perfect. Two runs of the same agenda will usually produce nearly identical contact lists, but not always — there's natural variation in how the model interprets edge cases. We've measured this. For the projects that matter most (developer names, project owners, applicant LLCs), the model converges run-to-run with high confidence. These are the names that appear cleanly on staff reports, in bold, with addresses attached. For peripheral contacts (a planner's phone number buried in page 47 of an exhibit appendix, or a sub-contractor mentioned offhand in public comment) the model varies more. Sometimes it surfaces those contacts; sometimes it doesn't.

Why we run it this way

We tested a more conservative version of the model that produces identical results every time, and it found fewer contacts overall. The trade-off was clear: cast wide and surface every plausible contact (which is what a GC actually wants — give me everyone connected to this project, I'll filter), or run lean and miss real names to gain consistency we don't need. We picked wide.

What this means for you

Treat the contact list as a starting point, not a phone book. The high-signal contacts — the developer LLC, the project applicant, the property owner — are reliable. The peripheral contacts are leads worth checking. None of these names came from us guessing; they all came from public agenda documents that anyone can pull from the same municipal sources we do. We just got there 60-90 days earlier and read the document for you.

If you ever see something that looks wrong — a name that doesn't match, a phone number that goes to a wrong line, a project that's clearly mislabeled — email me directly at aaron@agendainsider.com. I'm one human, real response time, no ticketing system. We fix things.

— Aaron