Philadelphia City Council Calendar Events

Purpose

Return the list of Philadelphia City Council and committee meetings ("events") from phila.legistar.com, optionally filtered by year and/or meeting body — meeting name, date, time, body, location, links to agenda / minutes PDFs, and the canonical MeetingDetail.aspx URL. Read-only; never modifies, subscribes, or signs in.

When to Use

• Monitoring upcoming City Council, Committee, or joint-committee meetings for a specific year.
• Bulk-extracting meeting history for civic-tech analysis (open data, journalism, transparency tooling).
• Resolving an EventId / LEGID from a meeting date + body, so a downstream skill can fetch the agenda items.
• Any time you'd otherwise drive the Calendar.aspx UI: the JSON/XML API is ~50× faster, has no anti-bot, and exposes fields the grid hides (EventGuid, EventBodyId, draft/final status).

Workflow

Philadelphia Legistar (and every Granicus Legistar deployment) ships a fully public REST API at https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/{client}/Events with the phila client slug. No auth, no cookies, no anti-bot, no residential proxy required. OData query strings filter by year, body, and date range. The browser at https://phila.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx is a thin client over the same data — driving it costs ~10–15 turns per page of results vs. one HTTP call to the API, and the Telerik RadGrid that backs it requires anti-bot stealth that the API does not.

Lead with the API. Browser fallback (Step 4 below) is documented only for the case where the API is geo-blocked or rate-limited from your network.

Step 1 — Hit the Events endpoint

GET https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/phila/Events
    ?$top=1000
    &$filter=year(EventDate) eq {YYYY}
    &$orderby=EventDate desc
Accept: application/json     # XML returned by default; set this header to get JSON

URL-encode the $ (%24), = and spaces if your HTTP client doesn't auto-encode. Example with year=2025:

GET https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/phila/Events?%24top=1000&%24filter=year(EventDate)%20eq%202025&%24orderby=EventDate%20desc

Confirmed 2026-05-22: returns 154 events for year(EventDate) eq 2025, 150 events for year(EventDate) eq 2024, served in ~0.5–1.5s with no auth headers.

Step 2 — Decode each event

JSON returns an array [{ Event… }, …]; XML wraps in <ArrayOfGranicusEvent>…<GranicusEvent>…</GranicusEvent>…</ArrayOfGranicusEvent>. Fields per event (same names in both formats):

Step 3 — Filter further (optional)

Compose additional OData predicates with and:

The body id catalog is fetched once from https://webapi.legistar.com/v1/phila/Bodies (returns every GranicusBody with BodyId, BodyName, BodyTypeName). Known stable ids: 10 City Council, 39 Committee of the Whole, 37 Committee on Public Safety, 42 Committee on Public Property and Public Works, 51 Committee on Appropriations, 94 Committee on Fiscal Stability and Intergovernmental Cooperation. New committees get new ids each council session; don't hardcode beyond 10.

Step 4 — Paginate (only when expected > 1000 rows)

The default page is the full filtered result up to $top. $top accepts values up to ~1000 — $top=2000 returns HTTP 400 (ObjectContent serialization failed). Use $skip to walk further:

GET …?$top=100&$skip=0&$orderby=EventDate&$filter=…
GET …?$top=100&$skip=100&$orderby=EventDate&$filter=…

A year of Philadelphia events fits comfortably in one page (max observed ~250). Pagination is only relevant for full-archive sweeps across all years (since 2000).

Browser fallback

Use only if the API is unreachable from your network. The grid is fully JS-rendered Telerik RadGrid — browse snapshot does work after the page settles (we observed 18 grid rows in default This Month view, 100 per page when filtered to 2025).

1. Open https://phila.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx with a verified Browserbase session and residential proxies (browse cloud sessions create --keep-alive --verified --proxies). Without --verified the session sometimes serves a hardened challenge page; with it, the calendar loads cleanly.
2. Snapshot the page. The year combobox is the cell containing the current selection (default "This Month", ref e.g. [1-146]) and its trigger link ([1-374]-ish, label select). Click the trigger to open the dropdown.
3. Re-snapshot to find the year option. Snapshot labels include 2026, 2025, 2024, …, All Years, This Year, This Month, Next Year. Click the option's StaticText ref directly — browse click [1-385] selected 2025 in the iter-1 run.
4. Wait 2–3s for the RadAjax refresh — the grid swaps in-place, no full navigation. browse wait timeout 2500 is enough; browse wait selector against the grid is fragile because the grid id is constant across loads.
5. Re-snapshot and walk the [1-NNN] row nodes under the tbody. Each row has cells in this fixed order: Name, Meeting Date, ICS (Export-to-iCalendar), Meeting Time, Meeting Location, Meeting Details (link), Agenda (link), Accessible Agenda, Agenda Packet, Minutes, Accessible Minutes.
6. Pagination: the grid says "Page 1 of N, items 1 to 100 of M". The M total can exceed the API count for the same year (observed 426 in UI vs 154 in API for 2025) — the UI appears to count agenda-item-bearing rows differently. Treat the API count as canonical if the two disagree.

Site-Specific Gotchas

• The CDN host is different from the API host. Agenda + minutes PDFs live on philadelphia.legistar1.com (note the 1, the city slug rendered out, and .com not .com/Calendar.aspx). The HTML calendar lives on phila.legistar.com. Don't conflate them when validating URLs.
• $select is broken in XML output — ?$select=EventId,EventDate returns HTTP 500 XmlMediaTypeFormatter.WriteToStreamAsync failure. Request all fields (the response is small) or set Accept: application/json first if you need projection.
• $format=json is rejected — Query option 'Format' is not allowed. Use the Accept: application/json header to control format; query-string format negotiation is disabled on this server.
• $inlinecount=allpages is silently ignored — the XML payload has no count wrapper. Count by issuing a parallel $top=1 call and counting client-side, or estimate from $top.
• $top ceiling is between 1000 and 2000 — $top=1000 works, $top=2000 returns HTTP 400 with ObjectContent serialization failed. Keep page size at 1000 max.
• EventDate carries no timezone. The ISO 8601 string 2025-12-11T00:00:00 is wall-clock America/New_York. Combining it with EventTime ("10:00 AM") requires manual parsing — there is no EventDateTime field. The Legistar API has had this shape since at least 2018-12-14 (EventLastModifiedUtc on the earliest events).
• EventBodyName casing is inconsistent — CITY COUNCIL is uppercase but every committee is mixed case (Committee on…). Compare body names case-insensitively. The numeric EventBodyId is the only stable foreign key.
• Cancelled meetings stay in the result set — EventAgendaStatusName: "Cancelled" with a comment in EventComment ("THIS MEETING HAS BEEN CANCELED"). Filter them client-side if you want only meetings that occurred.
• Old-archive sentinel rows: meetings from 2000–2002 sometimes have EventTime: "9:00 AM"/"10:00 AM" and EventComment describing a tabling that re-scheduled the meeting ("Council President tabled meeting until Feb 10, 2000 at 2:00 P.M."). These are first-class rows, not duplicates.
• No residential proxy required for the API. The API endpoint is reachable from any IP; only the phila.legistar.com UI needs --verified --proxies on Browserbase to avoid a challenge page (and even then the challenge is uncommon).
• UI grid total disagrees with API total. Calendar.aspx filtered to 2025 shows Page 1 of 5, items 1 to 100 of 426, but ?$filter=year(EventDate) eq 2025 returns 154 distinct events. The UI count appears to include some other axis (possibly agenda items or duplicated joint-committee rows). The API count is canonical for "distinct meetings".
• The browser calendar default is This Month + City Council and All Committees. To get a full year you must click into the year combobox — there is no ?year=2025 query param shortcut on Calendar.aspx. The API is materially less work.

Expected Output

A Zod-validated array of events. Schema (TypeScript):

const EventSchema = z.object({
  event_id: z.number().int(),                        // EventId
  event_guid: z.string().uuid(),                     // EventGuid
  body_id: z.number().int(),                         // EventBodyId
  meeting_body: z.string(),                          // EventBodyName
  meeting_date: z.string(),                          // "YYYY-MM-DD" (date portion of EventDate)
  meeting_time: z.string(),                          // "10:00 AM" — EventTime as-is
  meeting_location: z.string().nullable(),           // EventLocation
  detail_url: z.string().url(),                      // EventInSiteURL
  agenda_url: z.string().url().nullable(),           // EventAgendaFile
  agenda_status: z.string(),                         // EventAgendaStatusName: Final | Draft | Cancelled
  minutes_url: z.string().url().nullable(),          // EventMinutesFile
  minutes_status: z.string(),                        // EventMinutesStatusName
  video_url: z.string().url().nullable(),            // EventVideoPath
  comment: z.string().nullable(),                    // EventComment
  last_modified_utc: z.string(),                     // EventLastModifiedUtc
});

const OutputSchema = z.object({
  source: z.literal("legistar-webapi-v1"),
  client: z.literal("phila"),
  year_filter: z.number().int().nullable(),          // null = no year filter applied
  body_filter: z.number().int().nullable(),          // null = all bodies
  event_count: z.number().int(),
  events: z.array(EventSchema),
});

Example output (year_filter = 2025, body_filter = 10 → City Council only, truncated to 2 events):

{
  "source": "legistar-webapi-v1",
  "client": "phila",
  "year_filter": 2025,
  "body_filter": 10,
  "event_count": 5,
  "events": [
    {
      "event_id": 6288,
      "event_guid": "F8B07668-09DD-443A-B770-8C38F335AA88",
      "body_id": 10,
      "meeting_body": "CITY COUNCIL",
      "meeting_date": "2025-12-11",
      "meeting_time": "10:00 AM",
      "meeting_location": "Room 400, City Hall",
      "detail_url": "https://phila.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?LEGID=6288&GID=30&G=A5947DFE-5A17-435B-A57D-5F0923C2343D",
      "agenda_url": "https://philadelphia.legistar1.com/philadelphia/meetings/2025/12/6288_A_CITY_COUNCIL_25-12-11_City_Council_Calendar.pdf",
      "agenda_status": "Final",
      "minutes_url": "https://philadelphia.legistar1.com/philadelphia/meetings/2025/12/6288_M_CITY_COUNCIL_25-12-11_Meeting_Minutes_%28Long%29.pdf",
      "minutes_status": "Final",
      "video_url": null,
      "comment": null,
      "last_modified_utc": "2026-01-13T20:29:20.243"
    },
    {
      "event_id": 6093,
      "event_guid": "BCAFB815-DC0D-4423-AAFE-44150A03BBFA",
      "body_id": 10,
      "meeting_body": "CITY COUNCIL",
      "meeting_date": "2025-01-23",
      "meeting_time": "10:00 AM",
      "meeting_location": "Room 400, City Hall",
      "detail_url": "https://phila.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?LEGID=6093&GID=30&G=A5947DFE-5A17-435B-A57D-5F0923C2343D",
      "agenda_url": "https://philadelphia.legistar1.com/philadelphia/meetings/2025/1/6093_A_CITY_COUNCIL_25-01-23_City_Council_Calendar.pdf",
      "agenda_status": "Final",
      "minutes_url": "https://philadelphia.legistar1.com/philadelphia/meetings/2025/1/6093_M_CITY_COUNCIL_25-01-23_Meeting_Minutes_%28Long%29.pdf",
      "minutes_status": "Final",
      "video_url": null,
      "comment": null,
      "last_modified_utc": "2025-01-30T15:19:51.813"
    }
  ]
}

Cancellation example (single event):

{
  "event_id": 5904,
  "meeting_body": "CITY COUNCIL",
  "meeting_date": "2024-09-19",
  "meeting_time": "10:00 AM",
  "agenda_status": "Cancelled",
  "comment": "THIS MEETING HAS BEEN CANCELED",
  "agenda_url": null,
  "minutes_url": null
}