Eight design review boards. One place to see what they're up to.
Every project that goes before a Santa Barbara-area design review board passes through a public hearing first. This tracks all of them, so you don't have to.
The Tracker watches the agendas, minutes, plans, and meeting videos published by every design review board across the City of Santa Barbara, the County, and the cities of Goleta and Carpinteria. It reads each new agenda as it's posted, pulls out the projects, addresses, review stages, and design teams, and lays them out in one weekly view, with each project's full hearing history attached where we have it.
In plain terms: instead of checking eight separate government websites, each with its own quirks, PDFs, and posting schedule, you get one page that answers "what's before the boards this week, and where has it been before?"
This week's agendas are free for everyone. Pro adds the deeper layer, the full record behind each item and the tools to work across the whole archive.
Keeping up with the design review boards is a genuinely tedious job. Eight bodies, three jurisdictions, and no two of them publish the same way, some post PDFs to a city portal, some hide agendas inside a shared cloud folder, some stream to one video platform and some to another. If your work depends on knowing what's coming up, or on tracking a project through six months of continuances, you either build a spreadsheet and babysit it, or you miss things.
So this got built to do the babysitting. The unglamorous parts, refreshing portals, opening PDFs, cross-referencing which "continued" item is the same project from three months ago, are exactly the parts a computer is happy to do at 4 a.m. What's left for you is the interesting part: the projects themselves.
It's made in Santa Barbara, by people who sit in these hearings too.
Records start in January 2024, so "history" reaches back that far and no further. Everything is drawn from the boards' own published documents, and those documents aren't always complete or promptly posted, so a "New Item" flag means only that we have no earlier hearing on record, not necessarily that the project is new. Summaries and extracted details are a convenience, not a substitute for the official agenda and minutes; when it matters, check the source, which is always one click away.
Questions, corrections, a board we've missed, or a feature you wish existed: hello@ladidone.com. Real people read it.
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