Methodology & data notes

Everything on the analysis pages is parsed automatically from official public records, nightly. Parsing is heuristic — it reads what the documents literally say, and it makes mistakes. This page explains how each dataset is built and the specific ways it can mislead you. The linked official document always outranks anything shown here.

Rezonings

• Source: the published planning/commission agendas of the six county governments, scraped nightly and parsed with pattern-matching (no AI extraction — a rule of this project, so nothing can be hallucinated into the record).
• What "applicant" means: the name the agenda lists, which is often the engineer or agent who filed, not the owner or developer. No separate owner/developer field exists in the agendas we parse. Applicant is captured for well under half of items, and the same person may appear under several spellings.
• The development-vs-reclassification split: a rezoning is labeled "development" when it moves land out of an agricultural zone (codes A1/A2/AG/AR and variants) into a residential, commercial, industrial, or mixed category — and "ag reclassification" when it moves between agricultural categories (common in Madison County). It's a heuristic over county zoning codes, reviewed against each county's usage, but county code meanings vary: check the linked agenda.
• Geocoding: agenda addresses are approximate and about a third of rezonings can't be placed on the map at all — map counts will differ from list counts.

Construction permits

• Source: land-disturbance Notices of Intent under Georgia's construction stormwater permit, from the Georgia EPD's online system (GEOS). Every row links to the actual submitted permit form.
• What a permit means: paperwork was filed to disturb land — planned or active construction, not a finished (or even guaranteed) building. Sites stay permitted through multi-year builds; dates shown are filing dates.
• Coverage: begins January 2026 (shown live on the view) — earlier construction isn't in the data. Permits cover disturbances of roughly an acre and up, plus smaller per-lot filings inside subdivisions; most road-department and agricultural work is out of scope. "Completed" counts are an undercount: we only see termination notices filed after coverage began.
• Locations come from GPS coordinates the applicant entered on the permit, sanity-checked against county boundaries; a handful of mis-filed permits are deliberately shown without a map location rather than pinned wrong.

Inspections

• Source: the Georgia Department of Public Health's public inspection portal. Each facility's row reflects its latest inspection; short score history is shown where the portal provides it.
• Interpretation limits: one score is one visit on one day. Low scores are often followed by corrected re-inspections, and inspection types differ (routine vs follow-up), so a score change between visits is not by itself a trend. The official DPH report — linked on every row — is the authoritative record.

The rezoning ↔ construction matching

• No public source connects a rezoning to the construction permit that follows it. The lifecycle view generates candidates by distance between map pins, optionally corroborated by a name overlap — the only high-confidence signal (a shared parcel number) doesn't exist in the permit data. Candidates will sometimes be wrong; both documents are linked so you can verify the parcel yourself, and no pairing is ever presented as fact.

Criteria for using this data

• Verify every figure against the linked official document before publishing.
• Treat name-level patterns (applicants, owners, operators) as leads to report out, never as findings.
• Counts of parsed records are floors, not totals — parsing misses items.
• If something looks wrong, it may well be — tell us and we'll check the source.

⚠️ Figures are parsed from public agendas / the GA DPH portal and may contain errors. Verify against the linked source before publishing.