Not a criticism — an arithmetic problem. Forty years of planned developments, each amended by the next, each recorded somewhere slightly different, and the people who approved the early ones retired a long time ago. We read them, all of them, against what your GIS currently publishes, and hand you the places where the two disagree.
No data from you to start. Your zoning layer and your recorded documents are already public — that is the whole point of the exercise.
A Front Range town of about 9,000 addresses, over two weeks of reading. We are not naming it: it had just done us a favor, and none of this is unusual. We would expect to find something comparable almost anywhere with legacy PUD zoning.
Every legacy parcel carried a link we — and presumably residents — read as the governing development plan. Opened one by one: 424 recorded plats, 6 annexation maps, and not a single development plan. A plat shows lots and easements. It sets no setback, height or coverage.
The overlay is mapped, the ordinance number is on the parcel, the document link resolves. There is no adopted PUD. The Town confirmed it in writing when we asked. For an owner there, a development application does not get measured against a standard — it triggers a rezoning-shaped process first.
Not withheld — not found. These are the filings where the institutional memory went with the person who had it.
One plan supplied under a subdivision’s name turned out, on its own title block, to be a medical campus development plan. Another filing has no final development plan in existence — which is worth knowing before someone applies under it.
ⓘ Every one of those is checkable. We cite the sheet, the reception number and the date for each, and we will show our working before you pay us anything.
By address, not by filing name — because the person asking never knows the filing name.
Which recorded plan governs this parcel, which sheet carries its standards, and whether an amendment replaced part of it. That lookup is the one that currently costs a planner twenty minutes and a walk to a filing cabinet.
Where your published layer and the recorded document do not match — a link that points at a plat, an overlay with no instrument, a filing indexed under the wrong name. With citations, so it can be corrected rather than argued about.
We publish the gaps as plainly as the answers, with the reason for each. Several of them are questions only your department can settle — and knowing which ones those are is worth something on its own.
Ask a chat assistant what your setbacks are and it will answer by blending many sources into one plausible paragraph. That is a reasonable method when no authority exists, and the wrong one when a recorded instrument is sitting in your own files. What comes back is an average of several towns and several districts — possibly none of them the parcel in question — and it reads exactly as confident either way.
Every setback, height, coverage figure and citation is produced by a rules engine reading standards a person transcribed off the recorded sheet. There is one optional summary that a user can ask for, it may only restate what the engine already produced, and it is checked against the report at runtime — if it introduces a code section that is not in the underlying data, it is rejected rather than shown.
A figure names the sheet, the section and the date it was read. For a casual reader that is reassurance; for a designer or an attorney it is the ability to go and check us in one click, which is the only kind of trust worth having in this material.
Adopted codes get republished when an ordinance is folded in, and we watch that stamp weekly per jurisdiction rather than assuming last year’s read still holds. Zoning services are health-checked too. Note: when a check cannot complete, it is recorded as not checked — never as fresh. Silently aging data that still looks current is the failure mode we care most about avoiding.
Watching from the outside is second best. A jurisdiction that tells us when a code is amended, a plan is recorded, or a district is redrawn keeps its own residents from reading a stale answer with our name on it — and costs the department nothing but a note. That is the partnership we are actually asking for.
“What can I build?” — and for a parcel inside a planned development, answering it properly means finding a recorded instrument, reading a sheet that was drawn before the resident was born, and knowing which of three datums the setback is measured from.
Every figure we publish names the sheet it came from and links the document. An owner who wants to check us can, and so can your staff when they are handed a printout across the counter.
We would rather return “this plan sets no height” than a number that came from somewhere else. A confident wrong answer is the thing that generates the phone call, not the absence of one.
Colorado’s 2024 housing legislation preempts some local ADU restrictions in subject jurisdictions. Where a recorded plan or an older code section conflicts, we show both and name the statute — so an owner is not designing to a rule that no longer binds.
Most incomplete submittals are not carelessness. They are someone designing against the published base district when a recorded plan replaced it, or against the wrong code edition because the adopted one changed last year.
Planning says what may go on the lot; building safety says what it costs to build it there. A project can clear one and be wrecked by the other. Both are in the same report, for the same parcel.
Which I-Codes and which energy code are actually in force, plus the amendments the jurisdiction made to them — the detail that most often surprises a designer from the next town over.
Where the governing standards are numeric and their datum is the lot line, we draw what fits. Where the plan measures from something we cannot locate — the edge of a future right-of-way, say — we draw nothing and explain why.
Note: we make no claim about your review cycles. We have no before-and-after data from any jurisdiction, and we are not going to invent a percentage.
The record check is where it starts, not what it is. What we actually want is a jurisdiction that has been read properly, checked by the people who wrote the rules, and left switched on for everyone who asks.
Not a trial that expires into a bill for your residents. For a partnered jurisdiction the base property report — district, governing plan, envelope, adopted editions, amendments — is free to anyone asking about an address in your boundary, whether or not they live there. It costs a resident nothing to get the answer your counter would have given them.
You are the only people who can settle some of what we find, and you should be able to correct us. Where you tell us we have read something wrongly, we fix it and the fix ships — not as a note in your file, as the answer everyone gets.
Your GIS stays your GIS, your permitting system stays your permitting system, and your code is still the authority — every figure we publish points back at your document. This is an index over records you already own and publish, sitting in front of them. Nothing here is a system of record, and nothing here does a planner’s job.
One address box, your name and colors on it, answering for your jurisdiction only — no pricing, no upsell, nothing else of ours on the page beyond a “powered by” line. You host it by dropping in one line; we run and update it, so there is no software for your IT department to take on.
We are deliberately not writing a different tool for every town. What we will do is shape the shared one around what departments actually need, so improvements asked for by one jurisdiction reach all of them. It is why this stays affordable and why it keeps getting better after you have signed.
How many times a week does someone ask your counter what they can build on a parcel? How long does one take when it is inside a planned development and the instrument has to be found first? We deliberately do not publish a figure for what this saves a department, because no town has given us before-and-after numbers yet and we are not going to invent one. You already know your number.
Nothing we publish is an approval, a determination, or a substitute for your review. It is a cited read of the adopted rules, and it says so on every page.
If a recorded plan has no document behind it, the report says so — whether or not the town is a customer. That is the entire value of the thing. We will correct any error you can show us, in either direction, and we will not soften a finding because of who is paying.
Being a customer is not an endorsement, and we will not describe it as one in marketing or in a report.
Tell us your jurisdiction. We will read your published zoning layer against the documents it points at and send you what we find — the disagreements, the gaps, and the questions only your department can answer. If we find nothing, that is a fair result and it costs you nothing. If it is useful, the conversation worth having next is the beta: your jurisdiction read properly, checked by you, and free to everyone who asks about an address in it.
We currently hold 21 Colorado jurisdictions in the library, at varying depth — we will tell you exactly where yours stands before you commit to anything.