About MetroScope

Non-profit initiative

MetroScope is a non-profit civic-technology initiative. It is free to use, not affiliated with any government, and carries no advertising — its only goal is to make local government easier to understand and compare.

Los Angeles County has 88 incorporated cities, each publishing its city-council agendas and decisions across a patchwork of incompatible systems. MetroScope gathers those public records, extracts structured facts (dollar amounts, vendors, topics, votes), and turns them into briefings, benchmarks, money trails, and cross-city comparisons — starting with 9 cities and expanding across the county.

City officials and staff lead the audience, but the same data serves several readers deliberately:

• City officials & staff — benchmark against a peer cohort, find precedents, and see what to bring to council.
• Council members & clerks — what was decided: the money, the vendor, the vote.
• Residents & advocates — a plain-language read on a topic, and what meeting to weigh in on next.
• Journalists & watchdogs — follow the money, vendor patterns, the rare contested vote, and verify the source.
• Vendors & businesses — which cities are buying what, who the incumbents are, and what's upcoming.
• Regional / SCAG planners & researchers — region-wide patterns, policy diffusion, and a transparent methodology.

1. Activity is not priority. We never present a raw item count as what a city cares about.
2. Composition is the size-comparable primitive. We compare shares of attention that sum to 100% within a city, not absolute counts.
3. Normalize by population only when the denominator is causal. Money ÷ residents is meaningful; items ÷ residents is not.
4. Substantive beats procedural. Boilerplate (minutes, warrants, proclamations, appointments, presentations) is stripped before measuring priority.
5. Money and named decisions beat volume.
6. Missing data is not zero. A blank means "no amount extracted", never "$0".
7. Respect small n. We show denominators and suppress thin comparisons.
8. Built to scale to 88 cities via peer cohorts, not all-city noise.

Every figure and statement links back to the primary source record (the agenda item or document it came from), and each stored fact keeps the verbatim evidence behind it. A standing audit re-checks every fact against its source, so the data can be verified at any time — accuracy and traceability come first.

Known limits we don't paper over: vote records are currently ~96% Long Beach (no cross-city contestedness is implied); dollar figures are item totals naming an amount, not verified award totals; per-city budget data is not yet loaded; and cross-city similarity links are sparse for lightly-covered cities.