pvcouncil — Prairie Village City Council document search

As a sitting councilor, a group of questions would routinely come up during meetings and discussions with constituents: "When did this item pass?" "Who voted for it?" "What were the discussions around it, if any?"

I made this tool to process and document council packets going back to 2015 (the earliest ones still available) so I could get some historical context into past council thought and decision-making processes. The technical bits follow.

Semantic and keyword search, plus cited RAG Q&A, over Prairie Village, Kansas city council packets and minutes (2015–present). PDFs are chunked and embedded into a local ChromaDB index with Voyage AI embeddings; pvc ask synthesizes answers with Claude, citing the source packet, page, and meeting date.

Documents are fetched from the city's public CivicClerk portal API. Scanned/image-only PDFs are OCR'd with Tesseract.

Setup

Requires Python 3.12+, uv, and optionally Tesseract (brew install tesseract) for OCR of scanned documents.

cp .env.example .env   # add your Voyage AI and Anthropic API keys
uv sync

Usage

uv run pvc download    # fetch new packets/minutes from CivicClerk
uv run pvc index       # chunk + embed new documents (incremental)
uv run pvc index --ocr-gaps   # re-index docs whose scanned pages OCR missed

uv run pvc search "stormwater drainage"
uv run pvc search "ordinance 2428" --keyword
uv run pvc search "housing density" --type packet --after 2023-01-01

uv run pvc ask "What has the council decided about the community center?"

uv run pvc stats

City reports archive

pvc download-archive crawls the Archive Center on the city website, a separate CivicPlus site from the CivicClerk meeting portal. It holds the published reports that never appear in a council packet:

• budget books (2006 onward)
• annual comprehensive financial reports (1997 onward)
• quarterly financial reports and popular annual financial reports
• community improvement district reports
• police annual reports, bias-based policing analyses and stop data summaries

Files go to pv_council_docs/archive/, and archive.json records each document's category, title and source URL. Reruns fetch only new items. These reports have no meeting date, so the filename date comes from the title:

• a quarterly report gets its quarter's end date
• a budget gets January 1 of its budget year
• other annual reports get December 31 of the year they cover

uv run pvc download-archive --list          # show categories and their IDs
uv run pvc download-archive                 # download everything new
uv run pvc download-archive --category 37   # one category (Budget)
uv run pvc index                            # then index as usual

uv run pvc search "fund balance policy" --type archive

Voting records

pvc extract-votes runs every minutes document through Claude with a JSON schema, producing votes.json: each formal motion, its mover/seconder, result, tally, and — where the minutes explicitly record them (roll calls, named dissents) — who voted yes/no/abstain. Individual votes are never inferred from attendance. Extraction is incremental; pass --batch to use the Message Batches API (50% cheaper) for large re-extractions.

uv run pvc extract-votes                  # extract new minutes (incremental)
uv run pvc extract-votes --batch --force  # full re-extraction via Batches API

uv run pvc votes --result failed --after 2024-01-01
uv run pvc votes --member Reddell --side no
uv run pvc votes --search "community center" --summary
uv run pvc votes --markdown council-votes.md   # regenerate the full report

The full voting record is checked in as council-votes.md — every recorded vote from April 2015 onward, grouped by meeting.

Budgets

pvc extract-budgets tracks the city budget year over year. Each budget moves through the packets in stages: the preliminary budget in May/June, the published hearing notice in July, and the adoption hearing in August/September. Budget-season packets are scanned for pages about the coming year's budget, and only those pages go to Claude. Claude returns:

• headline figures: total budget, General Fund, property tax levied, mill levy, revenue-neutral rate, assessed valuation, reserves
• General Fund spending by expense category and by department
• the cost drivers and assumptions staff cite, each with its source page

Results go to budgets.json. Adopted figures take precedence over proposed or preliminary ones. Where a packet shows a prior-year column, that column fills gaps for the earlier year.

uv run pvc extract-budgets                  # extract new packets (incremental)
uv run pvc extract-budgets --batch --force  # full re-extraction via Batches API

uv run pvc budget                           # headline trend across all years
uv run pvc budget --year 2027               # 2027 vs 2026: what changed and why
uv run pvc budget --compare 2020 2027       # any two years
uv run pvc budget --markdown budget-history.md

A comparison shows how the headline figures changed and how much of the General Fund change each expense category accounts for. It also lists the largest department changes and the reasons staff gave. Category and department changes come from a single document's budget and prior-year columns where one exists, so renamed or regrouped lines don't show up as false changes. Coverage is thinner before 2019 because the packets from those years carry only summary budget pages.

Parcels and property values

pvc import-parcels reads a Johnson County AIMS parcel export (.xlsx) and writes parcels/<year>.csv, one row per tax parcel. The rows include address, land use, zoning, tax unit, year built, the county's grade and condition ratings, and appraised and assessed values. The county export lists condo and townhouse units twice, once for the unit and once for the shared common area. Import keeps one row per parcel and records the common-area acreage separately.

Owner names and mailing addresses go to parcels/<year>-owners.csv. That file is gitignored and stays on your machine. The --owner and --mails-elsewhere filters only work where it exists. The checked-in CSV keeps three columns derived from the owner data, none of which says who the owner is:

• corp_or_llc_owned: 1 if an owner name shows a corporation, LLC, or partnership: LLC, L.C., Inc., Corp., Company, Ltd., LP, LLP, or Partners/Partnership. Trust companies acting as trustee aren't counted.
• owner_out_of_state: 1 if the owner's mailing address is outside Kansas, including foreign addresses
• owner_mail_state: the two-letter state on the owner's mailing address

The --corp-or-llc, --out-of-state, and --mail-state filters use these columns.

Platted parcels also get subdivision_code, subdivision, plat, block, and lot. The code and the block and lot come from the county parcel ID: OP55000002 0030 is subdivision 5500 (Prairie Village), block 2, lot 30. The plat name is parsed from the legal description. A subdivision code can cover several plats, such as West Riding and West Riding 2nd Plat, so the subdivision takes the name of its most common plat. Unplatted acreage (OF… parcel IDs) has none of these fields.

uv run pvc import-parcels "2026 Parcel Data.xlsx" --year 2026

uv run pvc parcels --address "4000 W 68TH"            # one parcel's full record
uv run pvc parcels --owner "PRAIRIE VILLAGE" --class Exempt   # needs the local owners file
uv run pvc parcels --use duplex --sort value
uv run pvc parcels --subdivision "West Riding" --summary
uv run pvc parcels --subdivision 5500 --block 2           # by subdivision code
uv run pvc parcels --built-after 2020 --zoning R-1B --summary
uv run pvc parcels --mails-elsewhere --class Residential --summary
uv run pvc parcels --corp-or-llc --use "single family" --summary
uv run pvc parcels --mail-state MO --class Residential
uv run pvc parcels --markdown property-2026.md        # the full report

property-2026.md has 2026 totals by class, zoning, subdivision, and housing type. It also covers single-family values by decade built, new construction, tax-exempt property by use, tax units, and the largest parcels. The report names no owners. Its ownership section gives the shares of corporate- or LLC-owned and out-of-state-owned parcels, broken down by mailing state and by use. If the local owners file is present, it also adds the share of tax bills mailed somewhere other than the property. If budgets.json is present, the report also checks the parcel total against the assessed valuation in the budget.

Recorded plats (Recorder of Deeds)

pvc plat-survey finds the recorded plats for every subdivision in the parcel data, using the Johnson County Recorder of Deeds subscription site (TrakRecord Public Access). It needs a subscriber login in .env:

JOCO_RECORDER_USER=...
JOCO_RECORDER_PASS=...

pvc recorder-check tests the login and one search without printing the credentials or session values.

The recorder indexes a plat under the plat's own name, and older plats have no legal description in the index, so the survey runs one name search per plat name, limited to the PLAT category. It writes:

• deeds/plats.json: every recorded plat instrument found, with recorded date, book and page, instrument number, and the recorder's record IDs (id, docid) for pulling images later. It records only the plat names, not other parties.
• subdivision-plats.md: each subdivision's original platting date and every plat recorded for it.

Replats are searched under both their full name ("REPLAT OF PART OF LOT 5 MEADOW VIEW") and their parent subdivision's name. A name search is a prefix match, so it also finds plats with longer names. Each instrument is marked as one of these:

• exact: indexed under one of our plat names
• variant: a longer name, such as "MISSION VILLAGE BLOCK 2", placed in Prairie Village by its section, township, and range (Township 12 or 13, Range 25) or by its subdivision legal
• prefix: a longer name that the index gives no location for
• elsewhere: located elsewhere in the county

Only exact and variant count toward a subdivision. The rest are listed in the report for review. When a plat's place can only be settled by reading its image, the decision goes in deeds/plat_review.json, keyed by book and page, and the survey applies it. Reading the images placed the 1937–1946 COUNTRYSIDE plats in Mission, not Prairie Village.

pvc plat-images downloads the plat image PDFs for every Prairie Village plat in the manifest to deeds/images/, which is gitignored. Viewing and downloading images is free on the subscription; certified copies are not. Old scans run up to about 9 MB each, so expect a few hundred MB in all. Reruns skip images already downloaded:

uv run pvc plat-images --limit 5   # try a few
uv run pvc plat-images             # all of them

Raw search results are cached in deeds/cache/, which is gitignored because rows can carry other party names. Reruns reuse the cache:

uv run pvc plat-survey             # search names not yet cached, rebuild
uv run pvc plat-survey --offline   # rebuild from the cache only
uv run pvc plat-survey --refresh   # search everything again

Restrictions and covenants

Three commands find each subdivision's recorded deed restrictions and covenants:

uv run pvc plat-images                  # plat image PDFs → deeds/images/
uv run pvc plat-ocr                     # OCR the plats → deeds/plat_restrictions.json
uv run pvc restriction-survey --walk    # restriction instruments → subdivision-restrictions.md

On the plat. pvc plat-ocr reads every plat image with Tesseract at 0, 90, and 270 degrees, since some plats print their dedication sideways. It flags restriction language. Some plats carry their covenants in full, such as the 1923 Ridge View resurvey and the 1937 Sunset Heights View plat. Others state that restrictions are recorded separately. The full OCR text and the excerpts stay in deeds/ocr/, which is gitignored because plats name their signers.

Filed with the plat. Developers recorded a subdivision's restrictions right after its plat. The 1941 Prairie Village plat is document 289996, and the J.C. Nichols Declaration of Restrictions for the same land (MISC 26/349) is 289997. The survey looks for instruments recorded the same day as a plat whose document number is within five after the plat's. This is the strongest evidence of a subdivision's original restrictions.

Indexed as restrictions. The recorder labels some instruments "Declaration of Restrictions" (1914 on) or "Declaration of Home Owners Association". A document-type search works only with no category selected. The survey pulls every such instrument county-wide and matches them to our subdivisions by legal description or by a party named for the subdivision ("KENILWORTH HOMES ASSOCIATION").

The MISC walk. Before about 1976, most restrictions were indexed only as "Miscellaneous". --walk pulls every Miscellaneous filing recorded from three months before to twelve months after each pre-1976 plat. It drops utility easements and scores the rest on several signals:

• a developer party, such as the J.C. Nichols companies
• an UNKNOWN or PUBLIC grantee
• a subdivision legal
• no lot in the legal
• a recording date within a week of the plat

High scorers are listed as candidates to read. No Miscellaneous filings are indexed for 1972–74. Twelve months in the walk also come back empty when fetched again: 1925-01, 1925-02, 1939-02, 1948-02, 1948-04 through 1948-07, 1952-05, 1952-06, 1962-08, and 1962-09. Filings from those months would have to be found by book and page.

Reading them. pvc restriction-read downloads the image of each instrument filed with a plat and OCRs it. It classifies each one as a restriction declaration, homes association declaration, easement, deed, and so on. It also notes each declaration's terms: how long it runs, setbacks, use limits, and any racially restrictive covenant. About 40 of the 1950s instruments are low-resolution photostat negatives that OCR can't read. Those were classified by eye from their headings, in deeds/restriction_review.json, which also marks papers filed the same day that concern other land. The results go to deeds/restriction_reads.json and feed the report. Images and OCR text stay local.

Viewing them. uv run pvc deed-viewer serves a viewer at http://127.0.0.1:8765/ for the downloaded plats and restriction instruments. It lists them by subdivision and lets you filter by type, search, or show only racially restrictive covenants. You can page through each document, zoom with Ctrl/⌘-scroll, a pinch, or a double-click, drag to pan, rotate, and invert the photostat negatives. Pages render from the local PDFs at the resolution the zoom needs and are cached in deeds/cache/pages/. The server listens on localhost only. Links like #r:4442333/2 (instrument r:<record id> or plat p:<record id>, then page) open a document directly.

Raw rows are cached in deeds/cache/restrictions/ because they carry party names. The checked-in deeds/restrictions.json and subdivision-restrictions.md list instruments by date, book and page, and record ID, with no party names. Pass --offline to rebuild from the cache.

An MCP server (pvcouncil.mcp_server) exposes search, ask, votes, budget, list_documents, and stats as tools for MCP clients. Search, ask and list_documents accept doc_type="archive" for the city reports.

Data

pv_council_docs/ (source PDFs) and chroma_db/ (the vector index) are not tracked in git. Rebuild them from scratch with pvc download && pvc index (embedding the full corpus costs roughly $0.20 in Voyage API usage).

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later