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Concepts
The words the console, the API and the MCP server all use, and what each one holds.
Two conventions hold everywhere. Names are singular nouns and none of them contains a verb, so you fetch a district and there is no getDistrict. Anything that carries a rule is versioned and has an effective date, which is what lets you ask about a past date.
Authority and geography
Resolve these first. The government that governs a subject is not always the one whose boundary you are standing in.
- jurisdiction
- A general-purpose local government, with its Census identity and population. Any place lookup returns one, and its id is what other calls take.
- authority
- Which government's rules govern a subject at a point. Read it when a county zones a township, a regional agency drafts the code, or the state overrides it.
- agency
- A planning department, clerk, building department, fire marshal or permit issuer.
- body
- A planning commission, governing board or zoning board of appeals. The thing that votes.
- boundary
- A jurisdiction's geometry.
- parcel
- Property lines and identifiers as the county records them. Ask by APN with its county FIPS if that is what you hold.
- address
- A point you can resolve a question to.
Public property records
Public sources only: assessor, treasurer, recorder, parcel GIS and permit records. A value the source does not disclose comes back as withheld or unknown, never estimated.
- property
- The public-record profile of a piece of real estate: the parcels and addresses it spans, its use, and how fresh each layer is.
- assessment
- One assessment year: assessed, taxable, land and improvement values, exemptions and status.
- tax
- One tax bill: levy, installments, due and paid dates, delinquency.
- ownership
- Who the public record says owned it, over an interval. Expect several rows on a property that has changed hands.
- structure
- A building or improvement: year built, area, stories, height, units, footprint.
- transaction
- A recorded instrument that transfers or encumbers an interest: a sale, a mortgage, a lien.
Source and provenance
Every asserted fact points at a passage. Every passage points at the document it sits in and where that document came from.
- source
- A publisher endpoint: a county, a portal, an ArcGIS layer, a clerk request.
- platform
- The records system a source publishes from, where it is identifiable. Use it to tell two counties running the same software apart from two that happen to agree.
- document
- A retrieved artifact: a PDF, a page, a dataset, a map export, a recorded instrument.
- version
- A retained snapshot of a document or rule. This is what lets you ask about a past date.
- citation
- A locator for a passage inside a document. Every rule carries one, and you can fetch the full record from its id.
- provenance
- How a document was obtained: the URL, when it was fetched, the hash of what came back, and whether the copy is the jurisdiction's own or a codifier's.
The rule
- ordinance
- An adopted legal instrument. The primary thing.
- code
- The compiled zoning code, assembled from the ordinances that make it up. A citation into a code still resolves to the ordinance that put the words there.
- section
- A structural unit of a code.
- district
- A zoning district.
- overlay
- A district layered on top of another.
- use
- A normalized land use, with the town's own term for it beside it.
- permission
- A use in a district, resolving to permitted, conditional or prohibited.
- control
- A dimensional standard: setback, height, FAR, coverage, lot area, lot width, parking, landscaping, impervious.
- definition
- A local term mapped to the shared vocabulary.
Process and practice
The process is what a jurisdiction says you may apply for. The practice is what it has actually done.
- process
- What you can apply for: a rezoning, a variance, a special use, a site plan.
- requirement
- What an application must include.
- fee
- What it costs.
- review_step
- Which approvals are needed, and in what order.
- review_clock
- The published or statutory review duration.
- case
- One application, filed.
- decision
- The outcome of a case, with any conditions attached.
- milestone
- A timestamped event in a case. Use these to measure how long a case actually took.
Change
- amendment
- A change to an ordinance, adopted or still proposed. You meet it as a pending count on a rule and as a kind of change event.
- moratorium
- A pause on a class of development.
- change_event
- The difference between two versions, with its adopted, effective and detected dates. Watches fire on these.
- coverage
- What Placestack holds per jurisdiction per layer, how fresh it is, and what it does not hold.
Words that get mixed up
These pairs sound interchangeable. Treating one as the other is the most common way to misread an answer.
- property and parcel
- A property is the public-record profile. A parcel is the county's land identity. One property can span several parcels, and one parcel can hold many properties, which is what a condo stack is.
- ordinance and code
- The ordinance is primary. The code is the compiled view assembled from ordinances and their amendments. Cite the ordinance when you need the instrument that changed the law.
- code and model_code
- A code is the compiled zoning code. A model_code is IBC, IFC, IRC, NEC and their editions, which a jurisdiction adopts rather than writes.
- amendment and code_amendment
- An amendment changes an ordinance. A code_amendment is a local change to an adopted model code.
- process and permit
- A process is what you may apply for, with its requirements, fees and review steps. A permit is a record of one that was issued.
- transaction and change_event
- A transaction is a recorded instrument. A change_event is a change detected in a record or a rule.
- an assessor's zoning label and a district
- The label on an assessor's record is a property attribute, not a district assignment. Take rules from the rule layer only: the assessor is not the zoning authority.