If you work for a county
One record for the county and every town inside it.
A county's public record isn't one record. It's the commissioners, the planning commission, permits and half a dozen departments — plus the municipalities inside the county, each with a government of its own. Residents don't know or care which produced the answer they need.
Why a county is different
You serve two populations at once.
Residents you govern directly
Everyone outside a town's limits has no municipal government — you are their local government, and most of them have never attended a commissioners' meeting.
Towns you work alongside
Annexations, water and sewer, growth boundaries and shared services all cross the line between county and municipal authority — and the record of each sits on a different website.
People who don't know the difference
A resident with a town mailing address and a county parcel asks one question and gets bounced. One record across both means the answer arrives without the tour.
A day in the life
Thursday, in a county office.
- 8:50
A site selector emails about a 40-acre parcel Economic development pulls the parcel: zoning designation, growth area, priority funding area, enterprise zone, Critical Area class — and every meeting that has discussed it. The answer goes back the same morning instead of after three internal emails.
- 9:40
“Has the county ever taken a position on this?” A commissioner asks before a vote. Search across years of minutes returns the previous discussions in date order, each linked to the meeting it came from — including the one from two administrations ago.
- 11:00
A town asks what the county said about their annexation Both sides of the conversation are in one place, so the answer doesn't depend on which office kept the better file.
- 1:30
A state reporting deadline The filing opens with its evidence gathered from the county's own record and every figure showing its source. Staff review and promote each value; nothing is final, or filed, without a person.
- 3:15
A resident calls about a road they think is county It's town. You can see that from the parcel in seconds and transfer them with the right name, rather than a guess.
For economic development in particular
The questions that arrive with money attached.
Businesses and site selectors ask land questions that span every layer at once — what it's zoned, whether infrastructure reaches it, what incentives apply, and what the local politics of the last decade have been. Answering quickly is a competitive advantage; answering slowly is how a prospect goes elsewhere without telling you.
The public-facing side of that is the business and investment page — the same record, pointed at someone deciding whether to come.
Straight about the state of it
County records are the hardest ones we handle.
Volume isn't the problem — condition is. A large share of county permit and archive material is scanned images with no text layer. We store it, hash it and link to it, and we mark it as unread rather than letting an empty search look like an empty history. Making that material searchable is a well-understood job we'd like to do, and it's the single biggest improvement available for most counties.
Some sources say no. Codified ordinances often sit on platforms that decline automated access. Where that happens we ask for proper access through the jurisdiction — which is usually the customer of that platform — rather than working around the restriction.
We tell you what we're taking. We write to jurisdictions about what we crawl, at what pace, and how to make us stop. If our traffic is ever a nuisance, one email ends it.
Where to start
One department, one real question.
The useful pilot isn't a county-wide rollout. It's one department with a question they field constantly, and a fixed annual price rather than a meter — because a county cannot budget against usage, and a bill that grows when staff use a tool teaches staff not to use it.