phila.legistar.com

philly-council-events

Installation

Adds this website's skill for your agents

 

Summary

Extract Philadelphia City Council meetings and committee hearings from phila.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx — meeting body name, date, time, location, event ID/GUID, and canonical detail URL. Year-filterable. Zod-validated array.

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SKILL.md
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Philadelphia City Council Calendar Events

Purpose

Return a list of Philadelphia City Council meetings and committee hearings published on phila.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx — one record per event with the meeting body name, date, time, location, plus stable identifiers (event ID, GUID) and the canonical MeetingDetail.aspx URL. Read-only; never books, edits, or submits anything. Output is a Zod-validated array.

When to Use

  • Watching the Philadelphia City Council calendar for new committee hearings or full-council sessions to attend / cover / track.
  • Building a date-bounded archive of every meeting the City Council and its committees held in a given year (or "All Years" for the full back-catalog to 2000).
  • Filtering by meeting body (CITY COUNCIL, Committee on Finance, joint committees, special committees, etc.) for downstream legislative-tracking pipelines.
  • Anywhere you'd otherwise scrape the Legistar HTML grid — the Granicus Legistar Web API (see step 1) is faster, paginated by OData, and structurally cleaner.

Workflow

phila.legistar.com is a hosted Granicus Legistar instance. The same data the calendar grid renders is also exposed by the Granicus Legistar Web API at https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/phila/Events — no auth, no cookies, no anti-bot, no stealth needed. Lead with the API path. The browser path works and is the literal task description ("navigate calendar, filter by year") — keep it as the documented fallback because the API returns XML only and CORS-blocks in-browser fetch(), so any deployment that can't reach webapi.legistar.com from server-side code has to drive the calendar grid.

Recommended — Granicus Legistar Web API

  1. GET the year-bounded slice:

    GET https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/phila/Events
    ?$filter=EventDate ge datetime'YYYY-01-01' and EventDate lt datetime'YYYY+1-01-01'
    &$orderby=EventDate desc
    &$top=1000

    (Spaces in $filter must be URL-encoded as %20 or +. Single-quotes must be literal — they're part of OData's datetime'…' syntax.) For all years, drop the $filter. Returns application/xml (<ArrayOfGranicusEvent> containing <GranicusEvent> children).

  2. Parse XML. Field map per <GranicusEvent>:

    • EventBodyName → meeting body / committee name (e.g. CITY COUNCIL, Committee on Finance, Joint Committees on …)
    • EventDate → ISO date YYYY-MM-DDT00:00:00 (always midnight; time is in a separate field)
    • EventTime → free-text time string (9:00 AM, 1:30 PM, occasionally blank)
    • EventLocation → free-text location (Room 400, City Hall, sometimes with trailing notes)
    • EventId → integer, stable Legistar primary key
    • EventGuid → uppercase UUID, stable
    • EventBodyId → integer body ID (e.g. 10 = CITY COUNCIL, 39 = Committee of the Whole)
    • EventInSiteURL → canonical MeetingDetail.aspx?LEGID=<id>&GID=30&G=<root-guid> URL
    • EventAgendaFile / EventMinutesFile → PDF URLs (nilled with i:nil="true" when not published)
    • EventComment → notes ("No Calendar for Today", "tabled until …"); often nil

  3. Validate with the Zod schema below and emit the array.

  4. Paginate if you set $top lower than the year's record count: use $skip=<n>&$top=<m> with the same $filter + $orderby. The 2025 record count is ~154; the API will happily return all of them in a single $top=1000 call. For "All Years" (≥50k records), $top defaults to ~1000 server-side; paginate explicitly.

Browser fallback — drive Calendar.aspx

Use this when the WebAPI is unreachable (proxy / firewall / DNS) or when the consuming environment can't run server-side HTTP and only has a browser session.

  1. Open https://phila.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx. Default view is "This Month" with body filter "City Council and All Committees". No stealth required — the site has no anti-bot.

  2. Change the Year filter. The control is a Telerik RadComboBox at [id*=lstYears]. Click the dropdown's "select" link (an anchor inside cell: select in the snapshot, adjacent to the year input), wait ~800ms for the option list to render, then click the listitem whose StaticText matches the target — 2025, 2024, …, All Years, or a relative preset (This Year, Last Year, This Month, Today, etc.). This triggers an ASP.NET full-page postback (~2-3s).

  3. Confirm filter applied. Read document.querySelector("[id*=lstYears] input[id*=Input]").value — must equal the year you picked. The page also persists a cookie Setting-30-Calendar Year=<value> for subsequent visits in the same session.

  4. Extract page 1 from table[id*=gridCalendar]. Filter out pager rows (tr.querySelectorAll("td").length <= 5). Data row columns by index:

    • td[0] — meeting body name (CITY COUNCIL, Committee on Finance, …)
    • td[1] — meeting date as M/D/YYYY
    • td[2] — iCalendar export anchor (a[href*="View.ashx?M=IC"])
    • td[3] — meeting time H:MM AM/PM (occasionally blank)
    • td[4] — location, sometimes followed by a <br> + emphasized note
    • td[5] — Meeting Details anchor → MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=<EventId>&GUID=<EventGuid>&Options=info|&Search=
    • td[6..7] — Agenda + Accessible Agenda anchors (or "Not available")
    • td[8..10] — Agenda Packet, Minutes, Accessible Minutes (often "Not available")

  5. Paginate. Read document.body.innerText.match(/Page (\d+) of (\d+)/) (the string appears twice — once per pager, top + bottom — so dedupe). For pages 2..N, trigger the page postback:

    __doPostBack("ctl00$ContentPlaceHolder1$gridCalendar$ctl00$ctl02$ctl00$ctl04", "");

    The control ID encodes the page number in the trailing ctl04 → page 2, ctl05 → page 3, etc. Discover the exact ID by selecting the anchor whose innerText matches the target page number under #ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_gridCalendar_ctl00NPPHTop. Wait ~2-3s for postback completion before re-extracting.

  6. Stop when the pager shows items A to B of N with B === N or the page number equals the total. Concatenate, dedupe by EventId if you ran into the rare pager overlap, validate with Zod, emit.

Site-Specific Gotchas

  • Granicus Legistar Web API exists and is unauthenticated — https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/phila/Events is the canonical fast-path. Standard OData ($filter, $orderby, $top, $skip, $select, $count). The phila segment is the Legistar client slug; other Legistar cities use the same API shape under their own slug (e.g. nyc, chicago, seattle). No phila.legistar.com cookies or session needed to hit the API — it's a separate origin.
  • API returns XML only. $format=json is explicitly rejected (400 — Query option 'Format' is not allowed). Setting Accept: application/json does not switch the response. Parse the XML — every field is a simple <EventX>value</EventX> tag, no attributes (except i:nil="true" on missing values), so fast-xml-parser or a regex strategy both work.
  • API is CORS-blocked from in-browser fetch(). A fetch("https://webapi.legistar.com/...") from a page on phila.legistar.com (or any other origin) fails with TypeError: Failed to fetch. The API must be called from server-side code (Node fetch, curl, Playwright request context — anything that isn't a browser-page-context fetch).
  • EventDate is always midnight (T00:00:00). The wall-clock time is a separate string in EventTime ("9:00 AM", "1:30 PM", occasionally blank or "TBD"). Combine them client-side if you need a full datetime; don't trust EventDate's time component.
  • EventTime is free-text, not parseable as a fixed format. Most values are H:MM AM/PM. Some events have EventTime blank (especially older records and "No Calendar for Today" placeholders). The grid also shows blank time for the same events.
  • HTML date format is M/D/YYYY, not MM/DD/YYYY. No zero-padding (5/4/2026 not 05/04/2026). Parse defensively.
  • The calendar grid defaults to "This Month" + "All committees". A fresh GET /Calendar.aspx returns ~18 rows (the current month). The Year dropdown must be set explicitly to pull a full year. The body dropdown defaults to "City Council and All Committees" which is all events; narrowing to "CITY COUNCIL" alone filters out committee meetings.
  • ASP.NET WebForms postbacks, not URL-driven filters. Year, body, search, sort, and pagination all go through __doPostBack(...) with __VIEWSTATE cookies — there is no ?year=2025 URL param. You can't deep-link to a filtered view; cookies persist filter state but only across requests in the same session (Setting-30-Calendar Year=2025, Setting-30-Calendar Body=All, Setting-30-ASP.calendar_aspx.gridCalendar.SortExpression=MeetingStartDate DESC).
  • Telerik RadComboBox quirks. The Year and Body dropdowns are not native <select> elements. Open them by clicking the small "select" anchor adjacent to the textbox (cell role select, ref like [1-381] in the a11y tree). Options render in a floating div outside the table cell. <select name=…> selectors do not work.
  • Pagination chunk is 100 rows. Pager text Page X of Y, items A to B of N appears twice (top + bottom pager) — the regex matches both; dedupe before parsing. Total record count is the N at the end. Pages > 1 are reached via __doPostBack("ctl00$ContentPlaceHolder1$gridCalendar$ctl00$ctl02$ctl00$ctl<NN>", "") where <NN> encodes the page number — discover the literal control ID by querying the pager anchors rather than guessing.
  • "All Years" returns the full back-catalog (~50,000 events from 2000 onward). Don't accidentally pick it for a single-year extraction — both the browser path (500 pages) and the API path (50k records over N $skip pages) get expensive. Always pass an explicit year filter unless you actually want everything.
  • "Joint Committees" event names are long. Examples: "Joint Committees on Public Health & Human Services and Public Safety", "Joint Special Committee on Gun Violence Prevention & Committee on Children and Youth". Display-width truncation in the rendered table is a CSS concern only — the underlying EventBodyName (API) or td[0].innerText (browser) contains the full string.
  • EventBodyName is the authoritative meeting-body field. The browser path renders the same string into td[0]; both are consistent. Do not derive body from EventBodyId — body IDs are stable but not human-readable.
  • Location cell has trailing emphasis notes. For CITY COUNCIL rows, td[4] reads Room 400, City Hall followed by <br> + an italicized "PLEASE USE THE AGENDA PDF to select an item for PUBLIC COMMENT, not the MEETING DETAILS." When extracting a clean location, take the first line of the innerText only. Budget hearings on Committee of the Whole append _BUDGET_ similarly.
  • No anti-bot / no stealth. The site is bare ASP.NET WebForms on Microsoft-IIS/10.0 served via Granicus. --proxies/--verified are not required — they cost extra and offer no benefit. Default to a bare cloud session.
  • iCalendar export per event. Each row has an View.ashx?M=IC&ID=<EventId>&GUID=<EventGuid> link that returns a standalone .ics file. Useful as a stable per-event permalink alongside MeetingDetail.aspx.

Expected Output

A flat array of event objects, Zod-validated. One outcome shape:

[
  {
    "name": "CITY COUNCIL",
    "date": "2025-12-11",
    "time": "10:00 AM",
    "body": "CITY COUNCIL",
    "location": "Room 400, City Hall",
    "eventId": 6288,
    "eventGuid": "F8B07668-09DD-443A-B770-8C38F335AA88",
    "meetingDetailUrl": "https://phila.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?LEGID=6288&GID=30&G=A5947DFE-5A17-435B-A57D-5F0923C2343D",
    "icsUrl": "https://phila.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=IC&ID=6288&GUID=F8B07668-09DD-443A-B770-8C38F335AA88"
  },
  {
    "name": "Committee on Public Property and Public Works",
    "date": "2025-12-11",
    "time": "9:15 AM",
    "body": "Committee on Public Property and Public Works",
    "location": "Room 400, City Hall",
    "eventId": 6283,
    "eventGuid": "1EA4C2FB-060C-4EF3-9AC1-E19A1510067C",
    "meetingDetailUrl": "https://phila.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=6283&GUID=1EA4C2FB-060C-4EF3-9AC1-E19A1510067C",
    "icsUrl": "https://phila.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=IC&ID=6283&GUID=1EA4C2FB-060C-4EF3-9AC1-E19A1510067C"
  }
]

Zod schema (also emitted to output_schema.ts alongside this SKILL.md):

import { z } from "zod";

const EventSchema = z.object({
  name: z.string().min(1),
  date: z.string().regex(/^\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}$/),
  time: z.string(),                          // may be empty for "No Calendar" placeholders
  body: z.string().min(1),                   // same as name in this dataset, kept distinct for downstream filters
  location: z.string(),
  eventId: z.number().int().positive(),
  eventGuid: z.string().regex(/^[0-9A-F]{8}-[0-9A-F]{4}-[0-9A-F]{4}-[0-9A-F]{4}-[0-9A-F]{12}$/),
  meetingDetailUrl: z.string().url(),
  icsUrl: z.string().url().optional(),
});

export const OutputSchema = z.array(EventSchema);