About
An independent site tracking public data about the City of Gloucester. Not run by or affiliated with the city.
Part of Publick
Gloucester Publick is one of the Publick sites, which publish the public record of towns and cities every day. The name comes from Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, the first newspaper in the American colonies. It was printed in Boston in 1690 and shut down after one issue for printing without permission.
How it works
- Updated every morning from public sources.
- Every number links to where it came from.
- New agendas and minutes are in an RSS feed.
- Summaries written by AI are labeled on each meeting page.
- Mistakes are corrected openly, with a note on the page.
Sources
- 311 requests: SeeClickFix (opens in new tab), public requests only, under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (opens in new tab) license. How the 311 numbers work.
- Meetings, agendas, and minutes: the city's calendar (opens in new tab) and Archive Center (opens in new tab). Copies are saved when posted. Minutes are collected from June 2026 on.
- School Committee agendas and minutes: Gloucester Public Schools, from the public folders linked on the School Committee website (opens in new tab), from June 2026 on.
- Tax bill and city budget: Mass. Division of Local Services (opens in new tab) Municipal Databank, from the city's filings with the state.
- Unemployment: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (opens in new tab). City rates aren't seasonally adjusted, so each month is compared with the same month last year.
- Schools: Mass. Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (opens in new tab) open data. School-by-school detail is on the Gloucester Schools Report (opens in new tab).
- Housing: U.S. Census Bureau Building Permits Survey (opens in new tab) and American Community Survey (opens in new tab) (through Census Reporter (opens in new tab)), the state's Subsidized Housing Inventory (opens in new tab), and Division of Local Services parcel counts.
- Building and demolition permits: the city's Inspectional Services permit data (opens in new tab) on its Data Hub, used for the street lookup.
- Ward maps: MassGIS (opens in new tab), 2022 boundaries.
- Street maps: OpenStreetMap (opens in new tab), drawn with Leaflet (opens in new tab). Map images load from OpenStreetMap's servers.
Data status
Each source and when this site last updated it. A source marked "Behind" has stopped updating; the maintainer is alerted automatically.
| Source | Last updated | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Meetings calendar | Up to date | |
| 311 requests | Up to date | |
| 311 scorecard | Up to date | |
| Unemployment rate (BLS) | Up to date | |
| School figures (DESE) | Up to date | |
| Average tax bill (Mass. DLS) | Up to date | |
| City budget (Mass. DLS) | Up to date | |
| Housing figures | Up to date | |
| Building permits (city Data Hub) | Up to date | |
| School Committee documents (Google Drive) | Up to date | |
| Meeting summaries | – | Up to date |
AI summaries
Meeting summaries, and the readable text of scanned agendas and minutes, are written by AI (Claude Sonnet 5, by Anthropic). They aren't checked by a person before posting. The city's document is the official record, and every summary links to it.
Privacy
We count visits so we know which pages are useful. That's all.
- No cookies, no ads, and no tracking across other sites.
- What you search for, and which street you look up, is never recorded.
- Nothing that identifies you is kept, not even your IP address.
Counting is done by GoatCounter (opens in new tab), a privacy-friendly service. It notes the page, the site that linked here, and your screen size, along with the browser type and rough location (such as the country or state) that every website can see. We only look at the totals.
Corrections and contact
Spot a mistake or have a question? Email gloucester-ma@publick.org or open an issue on the project's public issue tracker (opens in new tab). Fixes are noted on the page they affect.