To hear when a rezoning near your site comes up in public meetings, do two things on Audioscrape: follow the bodies that decide land use where your site is (usually the planning commission and the county board or city council), and set keyword alerts on the words people will actually say: the project name, the applicant, the street, the case number. Following gets you an email for every new meeting of those bodies; a keyword alert gets you an email whenever any transcribed meeting mentions your words, with the quote, the speaker and a link to that moment in the official video.
Why listen to the meeting, not only the agenda
An agenda tells you an item is scheduled. The meeting tells you what the commissioners asked, which conditions they floated, who spoke against it in public comment, and whether staff signalled a continuance. That is where a project is won or delayed, and most of it never makes it into the minutes. Searching the transcript gets you those passages in seconds instead of hours of video.
How to set it up
1. Check that your bodies are covered. Open /gov and find the county, the planning commission and the city council for your site. Coverage is a list of public bodies across the US, growing as new places are added; if yours is missing, it is not searchable here yet.
2. Follow them. On each body’s page, click Follow and switch on email alerts. You get an email when a new meeting of that body is transcribed. Following needs a free account.
3. Set keyword alerts. Search for the words that will be said out loud, then click “Alert me on new results”:
- the project or development name (
"Riverside Commons"), - the applicant or developer (
"Acme Land Partners"), - the street or landmark (
"Route 9" rezoning), - the case number the way staff read it out (
"ZMAP 2026"; numbers are often transcribed in more than one way, so try a variant), - the issue itself near your site (
data centerAshburn).
Email alerts need no account: enter your address and confirm it. Choose a daily digest or an email per match. Each one has the body, the date, who said it, the passage and a link to that second in the recording. The free plan includes 3 keyword alerts.
4. Ask instead of reading. With Audioscrape in ChatGPT or Claude, ask “What did the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors say about data center applications since September? Quote it with links.” You get the passages, the speakers and the links.
5. Send it to your team’s tools. Pro and Enterprise workspaces can receive the same matches as signed webhooks, for a channel or a deal tracker.
Limits and honest caveats
- After the meeting, not before. Audioscrape matches what was said, once the official recording is posted and transcribed: usually days after the meeting, sometimes longer. It does not read agendas, so it will not warn you that an item is scheduled. Agenda-monitoring services do that; the two work well together.
- Coverage is the bodies listed at /gov. It is hundreds of bodies, not every jurisdiction in the country.
- Machine transcripts. Names of streets, people and case numbers can be transcribed oddly. Alert on more than one variant, and check the linked recording before you rely on a quote.
- Speaker names are machine labels where they appear, and many public commenters stay unnamed.
Related: What are city councils and county boards saying about data centers? · How do I get searchable city council meeting transcripts with speaker names?