Common questions

What this is, where the information comes from, and what we do — and don't do — with it.

About the service

What is Town Communicator?

It collects the things your local government already publishes — meeting agendas and minutes, ordinances, notices, budgets, permits — puts them in one searchable place, and lets you ask questions about them in plain language. Every answer points you at the document it came from.

Is this my town's official website?

No. We are an independent service and we are not affiliated with any town, city or county. If you need something official — to file a form, pay a bill, or rely on a document in a legal matter — go to your government's own website. What we publish is a copy with a link back to their original, which is always the authority.

Who runs it?

A small independent team, based on Maryland's Eastern Shore. If something here is wrong or troubling, tell us — a person reads it.

Where the information comes from

Where do the answers come from?

From your local government's own published documents, and nothing else. We do not write articles, we do not editorialise, and the assistant is not drawing on general knowledge about your town from elsewhere on the internet. If the answer is not in the record we hold, it says so instead of guessing.

Can I trust the answers?

Trust them the way you would trust a helpful colleague who hands you the file: useful for finding things and getting oriented, and always worth checking against the source, which is why every answer links to it. Summaries and answers are generated by AI and are labelled as such wherever they appear. They can miss things and they can misread a table. The underlying documents are exact copies — those are not generated.

How current is it?

We re-check the sources we cover regularly, but there is always a lag between a town posting something and it appearing here, and some sources update more reliably than others. Never assume the absence of a document means it does not exist. If a date matters — a hearing, a deadline, a comment period — confirm it with the town.

Something here is wrong. What do I do?

Tell us and we will look at it. If the underlying document itself is wrong, that is the town's to correct — but we would still like to know, because it usually means our copy or our summary needs fixing too.

Coverage

Which places are covered?

The data sources page lists them, and it works out the answer from what we actually hold each time you load it rather than from a list someone typed. If a place is named there without records behind it yet, that page says so.

Why isn't my town here?

Usually one of three reasons: nobody has asked us for it yet, the town publishes very little online, or its website will not let an automated visitor read it politely. The first is the easiest to fix — tell us where you live.

Permission and conduct

Are you allowed to use my town's documents?

Public records are public, and we only ever collect what a government has already chosen to publish. We never take anything behind a login, and we never collect anything about individual residents from these sources.

But being allowed to read something and being welcome to are different questions, so we treat the town's own wishes as the deciding one. We write to the towns and counties we cover to tell them who we are and what we are doing, our automated collector identifies itself with a working email address, and it obeys the instructions a website publishes for automated visitors — including how slowly to go. Where a town asks for a slower pace than ours, we use theirs.

What if a town doesn't want you to?

We stop. Not eventually, and not after an argument — a town or county only has to ask, and we would rather hear it from them directly than find out some other way. We have already done this: where a town has asked us to take a different approach, or where we were not yet confident we were welcome, we stopped collecting from that town's website while the question was settled.

We would always rather be given the documents than take them. If a clerk would prefer to send us files, or would rather we made a formal public-records request, that suits us better than crawling does.

Your information

Do you sell my data?

No. We do not sell your information, we do not share it with advertisers, and there is no advertising anywhere on the site. We are paid by the people and towns who choose to pay for the service, which is the whole business model.

Do you keep what I ask?

A question you type on the Ask page is not kept. We count how many questions have been asked so we can apply fair limits, but not what they were.

A conversation you save inside a project is kept — that is what saving it is for, and it is how a project can be shared with someone else. You can delete a project, or your whole account and everything in it, whenever you like.

Do you need an account?

Not to read. Browsing documents, meetings and topics is open to anyone. An account lets you save things, follow topics, and ask more questions than an anonymous visitor can.

Cost

What does it cost?

Reading the public record is free and stays free. Asking questions is free up to a limit, because each one has a real cost to us; beyond that there are paid options, and some towns pay so that their own residents can ask more. Nothing charges you without asking first.

For towns and counties

We work for a town. Can we get our own data out?

Yes — any town we work with can download everything we hold for it, at any time, without asking us: the full list of records we have with where each one came from, and every report and log your own staff have filed here. Maryland local governments have records-retention duties, and material your staff create here is yours to keep.

We'd like to talk to you.

Please do — get in touch. That includes if the conversation you want to have is "stop".