How we verify a municipality

People and AI agents act on zoning answers. A wrong setback is worse than no answer, so every municipality on this site goes through the same pipeline before a single rule is published, and stays under watch after.

The pipeline

1. Draft from the official source. A drafting pass locates the municipality's current zoning ordinance on its actual platform, records the document's table of contents as proof of contact, and reads dimensional tables cell by cell. Where a table cannot be read reliably, the cell is marked as pending review rather than filled with a guess.
2. Independent adversarial verification. A second, separate pass re-fetches the ordinance from scratch and tries to prove the draft wrong: every district checked against the code's own roster, every setback, height, and lot standard re-read from the source tables, citations checked against the real section numbering, and claimed absences re-searched. The drafter never grades its own work.
3. Live GIS testing.Where a municipality publishes a zoning map service, we run real address lookups against it, including negative tests outside the jurisdiction. If the map's codes do not reliably match the ordinance, automatic lookup is disabled and the site asks the user to pick a district instead of guessing.
4. Import gates. The pipeline refuses content without a citation on every rule, and a municipality cannot be published unless every row of its pack imported cleanly.
5. Regression checks on every release. Hundreds of independently verified facts are frozen as fixtures and re-checked automatically on every deployment. If an edit drifts a verified number, the release fails.
6. Amendment watch. Ordinances change. Source documents are monitored, and every answer carries its last-reviewed date so you always know what vintage of the law you are reading.

A real example: Shelby Township, Michigan

The June 2026 verification pass for Shelby Township shows what this looks like in practice:

• Every dimensional cell was re-checked against the live published ordinance, and four draft errors were caught and corrected before anything went public.
• The township's zoning map service was point-tested with real coordinates to confirm the codes it returns match the ordinance's districts.
• One subtle trap was handled by refusing to answer: the postal city "Utica" covers both the separate City of Utica and much of Shelby Township. A name match would have routed City of Utica addresses to township rules, so that match is deliberately not made. Those addresses get an honest "not covered" instead of a wrong answer.

That last point is the standard that governs everything here: when a safe answer is not possible, the system says so. It never fills the gap with a guess.

What this means for you

• Every rule and answer carries its ordinance citation and a source link, so you can check the primary text yourself.
• Every response carries the pack version and last-reviewed date.
• Gaps are labeled as gaps. Parcel-specific instruments such as conditional rezonings, planned developments, and overlays are outside the base-district summaries and are flagged as such.

Zoning data is available from many places. Verified zoning data, with the verification process on the record, is what we sell. The API starts free: developer docs.