About

About this site

What this is

Vienna VA Data collects public records about the Town of Vienna, Virginia in one place: recorded votes of the Town Council going back to October 2013, precinct-level election results, planning and zoning dockets, property sales and timelines, crash records, and population figures. These records already exist on government websites, but they are spread across hundreds of meeting pages, PDFs, and databases. This site puts them in one place and links back to the originals.

Where the data comes from

Council data comes from the town’s public records system (Legistar) through its public API. Election results come from the Virginia Department of Elections. The raw files are archived in the site’s public repository, so anyone can check that what is shown here matches what was published. Meeting pages link to the town’s official meeting record and, where published, the official minutes PDF.

What this site does not do

No scores and no rankings. Council members are never given percentages or graded on their votes. Vote values are shown exactly as recorded: Aye, Nay, Absent, and Abstain are different things, and they stay different here. A few records have no vote value entered in the town’s system, and those are shown that way too.

Every recorded vote appears on this site, not a selection. One correction is applied to the raw data: Legistar holds duplicate person records for two members, and their votes are merged onto one page each. The merge is noted on those pages and documented in the repository.

Topic categories are unofficial

The Town of Vienna does not tag its records by topic, so this site adds its own categories (Budget, Land Use, Parks, and so on) to make browsing easier. They are labeled “unofficial” wherever they appear, and the complete mapping is public and can be corrected.

Corrections

If anything here does not match the official record, that is a bug. Please open an issue on GitHub with a link to the page and the official source, and it will be fixed.

Who runs this

Vienna VA Data is independently maintained. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced by the Town of Vienna. The data refreshes automatically every Tuesday, and the date of the last refresh appears at the bottom of every page.

The site counts visits with GoatCounter, which uses no cookies and collects no personal data.

Downloads

The record is also available as plain files for anyone who wants to work with the data directly: council-items.csv (one row per agenda item), council-votes.csv (one row per recorded vote), planning-cases.csv (one row per planning board case), and council-record.md (the whole council record as a single text file).

The text file is meant for AI tools. Load it into NotebookLM, ChatGPT, or Claude and ask questions in plain English, like “what has the council discussed about sidewalks this year?” AI tools can make mistakes, so check the linked meeting pages before relying on an answer.