Arcalect maps the local political landscape. Then tells you what's coming.
The intelligence terminal for local government: the proceedings, filings, and votes in your city, resolved into one record, before they become a fight.
The workflow
How Arcalect works
We read every venue a city publishes.
Council and committee agendas, planning and zoning boards, and permit desks, read every night through a per-city adapter. Meetings already on next month's calendar are in the record the night they post.
Illustrative
The terminal
One system. The whole landscape.
Matched to you
Filings are matched against your institution's names and the venues that decide on you, so what reaches you is the part of the record that concerns you.
Every venue a city publishes
Council chambers, committee rooms, planning and zoning boards, and permit desks, read every night.
Never a guess
Where a record's location or identity cannot be established exactly, it is held for review rather than pinned. A wrong pin looks exactly as confident as a right one.
The archive that compounds
Cities rewrite and remove their own records. Every response is archived as captured, before parsing, so the original survives even when the city's copy does not.
Ahead of the hearing
The calendar is read the night it posts, so meetings already scheduled weeks out are in the record before anyone is briefed on them.
Defensible line by line
A deep dive is generated straight from the database: every line is a value read from it or a count of them. No sentence is written by a model, because a report your counsel relies on has to survive being checked one sentence at a time.
The corpus, measured
- 62,694
- records across two cities, read nightly
- 31,591
- roll-call votes, each tied to the official who cast it
- 26,205
- parcels, 26,071 carrying an owner of record
- 3.2 ms
- to search the whole corpus for a street name
Figures as of September 2026. What we cover, and what we do not.
Who it's for
One terminal. Every seat at the table.
Universities
ExploreZoning, permits, and the council record around your campus, read before they reach the trustees. Arcalect holds every board docket and filing on the parcels near you, with the roll call behind each decision.
Use it to
- Brief trustees on zoning risk before the vote
- Find every PILOT mention in the council record
- See each permit and zoning case on the parcels around campus
Signals we hold
Not yet
Free · no seat required
The Daily Metro Brief.
One email each morning with what your city filed, scheduled and decided the day before — agendas, votes, permits and zoning cases, written to be forwarded to a president or general counsel without translation.
Being straight about where this stands: Somerville's record is complete and the brief is being built against it now. Cambridge is queued behind the City Clerk's decision on agenda access. Leave your address and we will email you when the first one goes out — nothing before that, and nothing else.