ZoneWire API

ZoneWire monitors public city council, county commission and planning commission meetings, transcribes them, and turns the land-use items into a structured record: the project, the case, the vote, and the conditions attached to an approval. This API is read-only access to that record. There is nothing to write and no way to file anything with a jurisdiction through it.

Two of the six endpoints are reference indexes. Search and the changes feed hand back ids, names, counties and dates so you can find the record you want; you then pay for the detail endpoint that carries the full card. That split is deliberate: it keeps a cheap lookup cheap and keeps the paid corpus behind the tier that buys it.

Every response is private, no-store. Nothing here is a CDN surface, and none of it is meant to be cached by a shared proxy.

Every request carries an API key in the Authorization header. Only ZoneWire keys are accepted; a Supabase session token is refused with a 401.

Authorization: Bearer zw_live_...

Mint a key on your account page. An account can hold 5 active keys at a time; revoke one to mint another. The raw secret is shown exactly once, at mint time, and is never retrievable afterwards. We store a hash, so a lost key has to be revoked and replaced.

The account page mints a plain key. To narrow a key to a subset of your counties, call POST /api/v1/keys directly and pass restrict_counties in the JSON body, an array of active county ids. In this release that field is available on the mint API only, not in the account UI. A restriction always intersects the scope your subscription already grants, and never expands it: restricting a key to a county you do not pay for leaves that county unreachable.

curl -X POST https://www.zonewire.co/api/v1/keys \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --cookie "your browser session" \
  -d '{"name": "sync worker", "restrict_counties": [1, 8]}'

{
  "id": "0f2c...",
  "key": "zw_live_...",
  "prefix": "zw_live_AbC3"
}

The key field is the raw secret. Store it now. The mint and revoke routes are session authenticated (they are the account UI talking to itself), so they take your browser session rather than a bearer key.

Six endpoints. All are GET, and all take county as a slug where a county filter applies. Search and decisions also report a real total alongside whatever rows your tier is served. Counties returns a plain list with no total, and the changes feed never counts: a count over the whole window is work no caller reads.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer zw_live_..." \
  https://www.zonewire.co/api/v1/me

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer zw_live_..." \
  https://www.zonewire.co/api/v1/counties

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer zw_live_..." \
  "https://www.zonewire.co/api/v1/search?q=data+center&kind=agenda&limit=20"

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer zw_live_..." \
  https://www.zonewire.co/api/v1/meetings/7287

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer zw_live_..." \
  "https://www.zonewire.co/api/v1/decisions?county=clark-county&since=2026-07-01&limit=25"

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer zw_live_..." \
  "https://www.zonewire.co/api/v1/changes?since=2026-08-01&kind=sellable_decision"

Your key inherits the tier of the account that minted it. A lapsed subscription does not break the key; it is served as free.

A sampled response is honestly truncated, not quietly trimmed. It keeps the full schema, sets truncated: true, and reports the real total plus an upgrade_url, so you always know how much you are not seeing. On the decisions endpoint the free rows keep every field name and null out the paid values, rather than dropping the fields.

Pro covers the counties on your plan. Elite covers every active county, currently about 161 markets, and is the only tier that receives delete rows on the changes feed. Enterprise is a contract, not a checkout: it is where full history beyond the 90 day window and redistribution rights live. Email support@zonewire.co to start that conversation, or see pricing.

Two authentication failures, both 401, told apart by code:

• missing_api_key: no Authorization header, or it was not a Bearer header.
• invalid_api_key: the token was not a zw_live_ key, or the key is unknown, or it has been revoked.

Both carry code and message. The 400, 404 and 500 bodies use error instead of code, with values bad_request, not_found and internal_error. Parse both field names.

There is exactly one 403 shape, served as application/problem+json. It covers both paywall branches and tells you what would unlock the call:

{
  "code": "tier_required",
  "required_tier": "pro",
  "upgrade_url": "https://www.zonewire.co/pricing?src=api_402",
  "message": "Meeting detail is a paid endpoint. Pro covers the counties on your plan; Elite covers every active county."
}

The same shape with code set to forbidden_county and required_tier set to elite means your key is paid but the county you asked for is not on it. The body never reports counts or ids you have not paid for, so it cannot be used as an oracle for the size of what is behind the gate.

Search, decisions and changes page with an opaque cursor. When a response carries a non-null next_cursor, pass it back verbatim as the cursor param on the next request. A null next_cursor means you have reached the end.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer zw_live_..." \
  "https://www.zonewire.co/api/v1/decisions?county=clark-county&cursor=eyJtZWV0aW5nRGF0ZSI6..."

• Treat the cursor as opaque. Do not decode it, edit it, or build one. Its contents are an implementation detail and will change.
• Free keys and the shared demo key cannot page. Sending a cursor on a free key returns 400 bad_request rather than a page. The sample is the whole of what the free tier serves, and paging past it is what a paid tier buys.
• On search, a cursor applies to a single source. Send kind with it, and send the same kind the cursor was issued for.
• On search and decisions the cursor carries the total from the request that issued it, so a count stays stable across a paging run instead of shrinking page by page. The changes cursor carries only a scan position; that endpoint reports no total at all.
• On the changes feed a page can come back empty while the cursor still advances: the scan moves forward and the page is then filtered to the counties your key covers. Keep following the cursor until next_cursor is null.

The same six reads are exposed as MCP tools for agent clients. Connect to https://mcp.zonewire.co. The transport is served at the root, and /mcp is an alias for the same endpoint. It runs stateless: no session ids and no state between requests.

Bring your zw_live_ key as an Authorization: Bearer header. The server holds no credentials of its own and proxies your key straight through, so tier and county scope behave exactly as they do on the REST API.

Clients must send Accept: application/json, text/event-stream. The streamable HTTP transport requires both media types, and a request missing either one is rejected with a 406 before it reaches a tool.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "zonewire": {
      "url": "https://mcp.zonewire.co",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer zw_live_..." }
    }
  }
}

The six tools:

• whoami: tier, county scope and key metadata.
• list_counties: the active market catalog.
• search: keyword lookup across projects, decisions and agendas.
• get_meeting: one meeting's insights and zoning mentions.
• list_decisions: the decision catalog.
• list_changes: the incremental changes feed.

Failures do not come back as protocol errors. Every failed tools/call returns a successful tool result with isError: true, carrying the REST API's own error body as text. A 403 therefore arrives as readable content your agent can act on, upgrade link included, instead of a transport-level failure it has to guess about.

A demo key is open to everyone. It is forced to the free tier, so responses are sampled: 3 rows on search, 5 gated rows on decisions, a 403 on meeting detail and on the changes feed. It is shared with everyone else trying it and carries no per-caller quota, so treat it as a way to see the response shapes rather than as a dependency. It rotates without notice, and it is baked into this page at build time, so a rotation only reaches you after a redeploy rather than instantly. Mint your own key for anything you intend to keep running.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer zw_live_8wvtwatQql221i1PjIPOx66NAC17w9q3kH5Jmh5Tft0" \
  "https://www.zonewire.co/api/v1/search?q=rezoning"