About MoCo Monitor

A free, independent civic-information digest for Montgomery County, MD.

Why this exists

Local government generates more public information than any resident can reasonably track, and most of it never reaches the people it affects.

What it does

Montgomery County generates a steady stream of public communications — council releases, committee agendas, department alerts, planning notices. Important things get buried. MoCo Monitor collects those public emails, pulls out the key details, removes duplicates, and publishes everything to a searchable site with links back to the original source.

Built with AI — and that's the point

MoCo Monitor is an experiment in AI-assisted civic infrastructure. Every item on the site is extracted by a language model reading public county communications; a separate model handles deduplication so you see one record, not five versions of the same announcement. The project is an ongoing test of what AI can do for local civic information — specifically, how fast and how well it can turn a firehose of government email into something a resident can actually use.

What this isn't

MoCo Monitor is not journalism, not legal notice, and not a substitute for official county channels. It's a faster index into public information you already have a right to see.

Found a mistake? Please tell us.

AI extraction is useful but imperfect. If a title is misleading, a date is wrong, a source link is broken, or an item is miscategorized:

Email corrections@mocomonitor.com with the item URL and what's wrong.
We review every correction. Fixes typically land within 24 hours.
If the error came from the underlying county email itself, we'll add a note pointing at the primary source rather than silently rewriting.

Principles

Every item is built from public communications and cites its primary source.
AI extracts. It does not editorialize.
The system is useful, not infallible. Every extraction is provisional until verified against source.
Corrections over cover-ups — if we get something wrong, we fix it visibly.
Free for residents.