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.
- Elected officials: listed by hand from official city and school websites, last checked October 1, 2026. See Who represents you.
- 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, the latest figures this site has, and when it last checked. Meetings and requests are checked every day. Figures that are published monthly or yearly are checked weekly or monthly, and are marked "Behind" only when newer figures should have been published by now; the maintainer is alerted automatically.
| Source | Latest | Last checked | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meetings calendar | – | Up to date | |
| 311 requests | – | Up to date | |
| 311 scorecard | – | Up to date | |
| Building permits (city Data Hub) | – | Up to date | |
| School Committee documents (Google Drive) | – | Up to date | |
| Average tax bill (Mass. DLS) | Fiscal year 2026 | Up to date. Next: Fiscal year 2027 usually by February 1, 2027. | |
| City budget (Mass. DLS) | Fiscal year 2025 spending | Up to date. Next: Fiscal year 2026 spending usually by June 1, 2027. | |
| School figures (DESE) | Class of 2025 graduation rate; Spring 2026 MCAS results; 2025–26 attendance | Up to date. Next: Class of 2026 graduation rate usually by May 1, 2027; Spring 2027 MCAS results usually by October 1, 2027; 2026–27 attendance usually by October 1, 2027. | |
| Unemployment rate (BLS) | July 2026 rate | Up to date. Next: August 2026 rate usually by October 10, 2026. | |
| Housing figures | 2025 building permits; August 2026 building permits; ACS 2024 5-year estimates; Fiscal year 2027 parcel counts | Up to date. Next: 2026 building permits usually by June 1, 2027; September 2026 building permits usually by November 1, 2026; ACS 2025 5-year estimates usually by December 15, 2026; Fiscal year 2028 parcel counts usually by March 1, 2028. | |
| Meeting summaries | – | – | Up to date |
AI summaries
Meeting summaries 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.
Scanned agendas and minutes, which screen readers can't read, get a readable version of their full text, transcribed by AI and labeled that way. Where a document's own text can be laid out, the full text is the city's own words instead. Every page links the city's PDF.
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.
- If you use "Find my ward," your location is checked on your device. It isn't sent anywhere or saved.
- 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.