Common Council District Lookup

This is the lookup tool on syr.gov where residents can type their address and find out who their Common Councilor is.

Live site: https://syr-common-councilor-lookup.netlify.app/

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Getting started

ex

First time:

git clone https://github.com/CityofSyracuse/common-council-searchable.git
cd common-council-searchable

To preview: double-click index.html.

If the lookup isn't matching anything when you preview locally, your browser is blocking the JS files. Run a quick local server from the folder:

python -m http.server 8000

Then open http://localhost:8000.

Always hard-refresh after a change — Ctrl+F5 on Windows, Cmd+Shift+R on Mac. Otherwise the browser caches scripts.js and you'll swear nothing changed.

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Making a change and pushing it live

Netlify is hooked up to GitHub. Whatever you push to main is live in about a minute.

1. Edit the file (see "When you need to change something" below)
2. Open index.html, hard-refresh, confirm it works
3. Commit and push:

   git add <file>
   git commit -m "what you changed and why"
   git push

4. Wait ~1 minute, check https://syr-common-councilor-lookup.netlify.app/

If something looks off after deploy, revert the commit and push — Netlify redeploys the previous version.

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The files

It's a plain HTML/CSS/JS site.

• index.html — the page itself
• styles.css — all the styling
• scripts.js — the search logic
• data.js — residential street ranges
• data2.js — residential exact addresses (the exceptions)
• parcel_lookup_data.js — every parcel in the city. This is what makes commercial addresses work — Destiny USA, City Hall, hotels, hospitals, all of it.
• Syracuse_Common_Council_Boundaries_(2023).geojson — the district boundaries.
• council_data.py — the Python script to build the JS data files.

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How it actually works

When someone types an address, scripts.js checks three datasets in this order:

1. parcel_lookup_data.js first. This catches commercial and government buildings.
2. data.js next. Residential street ranges (covers the bulk of homes).
3. data2.js as a backup for residential exceptions.

It stops at the first hit.

The search updates live as you type:

• Just a number → list of streets where that number exists
• Number + part of a street → narrows down
• Full address → the spotlight card pops up with district, ward, councilor, and a contact link
• Just a street name → asks for a house number

The parser handles the stuff people actually type — uppercase, lowercase, "St" vs "Street", "Ave" vs "Avenue", "1st" vs "first", "N Salina" vs "Salina N". All gets normalized to the same thing before matching.

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When you need to change something

A councilor changed? Edit COUNCILOR_META_BY_DISTRICT at the top of scripts.js. Name and link for each district. That's it.

Need to refresh the data?

• Residential ranges → rebuild data.js from the City's street range source
• Exact addresses → data2.js
• Parcel data (commercial, etc.) → rebuild parcel_lookup_data.js from the City Parcels dataset: https://data.syr.gov/datasets/6dabdd6add9443128c2adc9bd6609051_0
• council_data.py is a starting point for the regeneration

If you rebuild parcel_lookup_data.js yourself, the rows have to stay in this order:

[houseNumber, streetName, fullAddress, CC_DIST, CITY_WARD, LAT, LONG, landUse]

Owner info is left out on purpose — this file is public.

Visual change? Everything's in styles.css. No framework.

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What still doesn't work

The code is fine. These are data gaps — they'd need to be fixed at the GIS source by NBD or the data team:

• 109 S Warren St (State Tower) — not in the parcel feed at that number
• 401 Harrison St (Everson Museum)
• 201 E Washington St (City Hall Commons) — that block is filed under Salina St in the feed
• Anything outside city limits — OCC, Hancock, anywhere in DeWitt/Salina/Onondaga town. These won't show up and shouldn't, since they're not in a council district.

if you type a single letter after a space (like 233 E W), you'll see "no matches" for a second because S/N/E/W get read as directionals. Type the next letter and it comes back. Annoying but minor.

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Changelog

Date	What changed
Feb 2026	First release
Feb 2026	UX + branding cleanup
May 2026	Added the parcel lookup layer + suffix stripping.