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. Coverage spans roughly the last 6 months of council activity — starting with 10 of those 88 cities and expanding across the county.

Our data can serve several readers:

• 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.

For open government solicitations (the Bids & RFPs section) we index each official posting's factual metadata — title, number, type, dates, department — and deep-link to the source portal for documents, Q&A, and submission. We do not mirror the solicitation documents themselves, and we never scrape behind a login. Listings are refreshed manually and every jurisdiction shows when it was last checked — always confirm details and apply on the official portal.

Sources include each city's official bid portal, the City of Los Angeles RAMP open-data feed (released CC0 / public domain), and the County of Los Angeles LACoBids public export. Bid notices are public notices that agencies want distributed; if you represent an agency and want a listing corrected or removed, send us a note.

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.

Questions, corrections, data requests, or ideas? We'd like to hear them — no account needed, and we reply by email.

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