About
Built on official
city records
Petaluma Civic is a civic transparency platform built on official 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
City data, searchable
City Council meeting transcripts, roll-call votes, and attendance records. Ask how a member voted, what was said about a specific project, or who dissented on a close vote.
Capital improvement projects with funding sources and expenditure tracking. Ask where money went, how a project was funded, or which items are underfunded.
Active and planned infrastructure projects across the city. Track status, budgets, and timelines for streets, parks, utilities, and more.
Building and planning permit records. Look up permit history for any address, track active construction, or find who pulled permits on a parcel.
Key policy documents — general plan, housing element, climate action plan, and more — searchable by topic and policy.
Elected officials, their committee assignments, and voting records. Understand who represents you and how they vote.
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 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 Petaluma sources — meeting agendas and minutes, video transcripts, permit records, adopted budget documents, and policy documents published by the city. Data is refreshed regularly as new meetings and records are published.
Some historical records may be incomplete. Transcript coverage and data availability vary by record type. When a question falls outside what's been indexed, the platform will say so rather than guess.