Coverage
Every source we read, and every gap we have.
Arcalect runs in two Massachusetts cities. This page lists each source, how much of it we hold, how current it is, and what is missing — including the things a competitor would be glad we left out. If your city is not here, it is not covered, and we will say so rather than imply otherwise.
| Source | City | Records | Runs through | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Council & committee record701 meetings and 17,733 agenda items, with 31,591 roll-call votes attached to the officials who cast them. | Somerville | 18,434 | 1 Oct 2026 | Current |
| Building permitsEvery permit back to 2022, refreshed nightly. 95.1% carry coordinates from the city's own feed. | Cambridge | 40,328 | Current | Current |
| Board of Zoning AppealVariance and special-permit cases with their dispositions, fully geocoded. | Cambridge | 759 | 29 Jun 2026 | Not publishing |
| Meeting archiveHistorical meeting records reaching back to 2002. Preserved, but no longer growing. | Cambridge | 2,574 | 12 Jan 2026 | Archive only |
| Development logLarge-project entries, geocoded. The city publishes no dates on these rows, so they cannot be placed in a timeline. | Cambridge | 519 | No dates published | Not publishing |
62,694 records in total. Figures as of September 2026.
Across both cities
26,205 parcels
The assessor roll for both cities. 26,071 carry an owner of record, with assessed value and lot geometry.
19 officials, 203 roles
Somerville only. Cambridge publishes no equivalent record, so it has none.
Raw archive
Every upstream response is stored as captured, before parsing, so the original survives a city rewriting its own record.
What we do not have
Stated here rather than left for you to discover in month two.
Cambridge agendas stop at 1 February 2026
The city's former meeting portal froze at a vendor migration, and the replacement is closed to automated access pending a decision by the City Clerk. This is a permissions question, not an engineering one, and no amount of work on our side reopens it. Until it does, Cambridge cannot produce a forward-looking brief and we do not sell one.
The Cambridge zoning feed has gone quiet
759 Board of Zoning Appeal cases are held and geocoded, but the city has not published a new one since late June. The records we have are sound; the feed behind them is not currently moving.
The development log carries no dates
519 large-project rows, all geocoded, none with a date published by the city. They can be found by parcel or by name, but they cannot be ordered in a timeline or carried in anything date-driven.
Most Somerville records have no coordinates
Somerville publishes no location data, so a record is tied to a parcel by reading the clerk's prose. About 1 in 15 resolves exactly. The rest are held for review rather than pinned to a guess — a wrong pin looks exactly as confident as a right one.
The historical document archive is still being retrieved
Roughly 36,000 documents sit behind the Cambridge meeting archive, and they are being fetched at the rate the vendor permits. Only a fraction are in hand, and none of the text inside them is searchable yet.
No press, elections, or community sources
None of these is ingested. They are on the roadmap and listed as such on the platform page; they are not part of what you would be buying today.
Your city is not on this page
Then we do not cover it yet. Adding a city that publishes through a platform we already read is configuration rather than a rebuild, and we sequence by where institutions ask. Tell us which city and which venues matter, and we will tell you honestly what it would take and where it sits.
Request a cityFree · 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.