mytown-mcp

MyTown MCP server

An MCP server that gives an AI assistant grounded, source-linked access to US & Canadian local-government meetings — what your city council, county board, or school board has coming up and recently decided, in plain English, plus place context (demographics, home-value trends, federal awards, permits, campaign finance, EPA/nonprofit ties). Every record links back to the official primary source.

Data comes from MyTown's public, keyless HTTP API, so this server needs no API key and no local database — it works out of the box for anyone. Coverage: ~2,400 municipalities (US + Canada), refreshed daily.

Tools

Per-city (great for "what's happening in my town"):

tool	what it does
list_cities(query, state, country, limit)	find covered cities; resolve a place name → the slug the other tools need
get_city_meetings(slug)	upcoming + recent meetings: date, body, plain-English headline/summary, agenda/minutes/source links
get_city_context(slug)	everything for a city: meetings plus demographics, home-value trend, federal awards, permits, campaign-finance summary, and per-decision EPA/nonprofit context

Whole-dataset (cross-city — every table, no download; backed by HuggingFace's hosted dataset-viewer API):

tool	what it does
dataset_tables()	the 17 tables, their columns, and join keys — so you know what to search/filter
search_dataset(query, table, limit)	full-text search across all cities in a table (e.g. every decisions row mentioning "rent control")
filter_dataset(table, where, order_by, descending, limit)	structured SQL-style filter (e.g. federal_awards where "amount" > 5000000, sorted)
dataset_info()	coverage counts + pointers to bulk Parquet / full SQLite for heavy analysis

Typical flows: list_cities("palo alto") → get_city_context(slug) for one place; or dataset_tables() → search_dataset("police budget", "decisions") to sweep the whole country.

Install & configure

Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json (Settings → Developer → Edit Config):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mytown": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["mytown-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Or run from a local checkout (no publish needed):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mytown": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/mcp-server/.venv/bin/python",
      "args": ["-m", "mytown_mcp.server"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Code

# from a local checkout:
claude mcp add mytown -- /absolute/path/to/mcp-server/.venv/bin/python -m mytown_mcp.server
# or, once published:
claude mcp add mytown -- uvx mytown-mcp

From source

python -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install mcp httpx
.venv/bin/python -m mytown_mcp.server   # speaks MCP over stdio

Example questions it can answer

• "What's the Palo Alto city council deciding this month?"
• "Show recent school-board meetings for the Palo Alto Unified School District."
• "For Lake Forest, CA — pull demographics, home-value trend, and any federal awards."
• "Across the whole country, which towns passed rent-control decisions this year?" (search_dataset)
• "Show the largest federal awards in the dataset, over $1B." (filter_dataset)
• "Find meetings tied to EPA facilities with an identified violation." (filter_dataset on decision_echo)

Notes

• Meeting/decision summaries are AI-generated from official documents — always verify against the linked primary source before relying on a detail.
• License: CC BY 4.0 (attribution: mytown.theboringparts.com).
• For research spanning many cities (training, full-text search, bulk stats), use the open dataset rather than looping these tools.