One page per dataset: what it is, where it comes from, the legal basis for republishing it, how often it refreshes, when it was last fetched, and what is known to be broken about it.
Every endpoint below was probed live on 29 August 2026. reachable was set by tools/probe-sources.mjs against the live endpoint on the verifiedDate. It records whether the endpoint answered, not whether the licence permits any particular use. Run npm run probe after any agency site redesign — two of these entries were corrected by it.
Every ingest run writes a row whether it succeeded or not, and the badge below reads from that log. If a source went dark this morning, this page says so. Data that quietly stops updating while still looking current is the failure mode that would destroy the point of this site.
Public record. No registration, no login, no stated terms of use.
Gotcha. The page is an ASP.NET WebForms grid. Files are NOT fetchable by their date-stamped filename — a direct GET returns 404. A download is a POST carrying __VIEWSTATE, __EVENTVALIDATION and the grid control id. Verified 29 Aug 2026.
Public record under Fla. Stat. ch. 28 and ch. 119.
Gotcha. The build spec describes a dated directory tree at /YYYY/MM/DD/. That path 404s. It is one flat IIS listing, and each business day is three files named by a stamp: D2026062301id.29 (documents), P2026062301id.29 (parties) and M2026062301d.29 (code map — note it ends "d.29", without the i). Verified 29 Aug 2026: 135 files, 45 business days retained, 23 Jun to 25 Aug. A day not fetched is gone permanently, which is why this job runs first in the schedule.
Published open data portal.
Gotcha. The best permit feed in the region, and it has to be — Hillsborough County has no bulk permit export for anything after 19 January 2021 because HillsGovHub is search-only. That is the largest open-data gap in Tampa Bay and the subject of our first Chapter 119 request.
Published public feed. No key.
Gotcha. A rolling 7-day window with a 24-hour delay, by stated officer-safety policy. Because the window rolls, history not captured is gone permanently. Verified 29 Aug 2026: 6,149 records over 22–28 Aug, every Report number unique.
Public API. No key, no authentication.
Gotcha. There is no `tampa` client — webapi.legistar.com/v1/tampa returns 500. The City of Tampa uses an OnBase portal with no API and no export, so city agendas are out of scope. The Legistar RSS feeds are also dead; use the API. The bare client root (/v1/hillsboroughcounty/) returns 404 — probe an actual endpoint such as /matters or /bodies.
Public record. Direct file URLs, no portal, no key.
Gotcha. Filter on the Location County column; the district files are not county files. Districts 4 and 7 cover Tampa Bay.
Published data downloads with column definitions.
RP_PERMITS matters disproportionately: it is the only machine-readable permit source in Pinellas, because no Pinellas city runs an open permit dataset. The download page returns 403 to automated requests (verified 29 Aug 2026) even though it loads in a browser, so the fetcher will need a browser-equivalent request or a Chapter 119 request for the same extract.
Open, unauthenticated REST directory.
47 service folders, several not surfaced in the Hub portal at all. Verified 29 Aug 2026.
Evacuation Zones, Flood Zones, USNG and Cities carry an explicit CC BY 4.0 licence — a genuine open grant, rare in this region.
That ugly hostname is the real canonical one. data-hcfl.hub.arcgis.com and gis-hillsborough.opendata.arcgis.com render but 404 on their DCAT endpoints — they are stubs. Evacuation zones were expanded for the 2026 hurricane season, so many residents are in a different zone than they think.
Public SFTP with openly published credentials. The Data Usage Guide is purely technical — no commercial-use, redistribution or attribution restriction is stated.
SFTP, not HTTPS, so it cannot run inside a Worker — this job needs a scheduled runner with an SFTP client. Files are offered "as is and may be changed, replaced or deleted at any time."
Federal work, public domain. NWS states the API is "intended to be open data, free to use for any purpose." The cleanest licence in the build.
No key, but a User-Agent identifying the application is required. Tampa Bay office code is TBW. Retry after ~5s on 429.
A source being technically reachable is not a reason to use it. These are excluded on legal, licensing or ethical grounds, and saying so is part of the point.
| Source | Why not |
|---|---|
| Signal Four Analytics | Full crash records are restricted to agencies, consultants and universities under FLHSMV approval. Only a summary dashboard is public. The most over-promised source in Florida data journalism. |
| TECO / Duke outage maps | Undocumented private-utility JSON endpoints. Private companies, site terms apply, no Chapter 119 coverage. Use Florida PSC reliability filings and county EOC situation reports instead. |
| Reddit, X, Meta, Citizen | Reddit requires a commercial contract and is litigating; X's archive starts at $42K/mo and it issued scraping cease-and-desists on 24 Aug 2026; Meta won on terms-of-service and CFAA grounds in 2022; Citizen bars editorial use outright. |
| Local news outlets | Copyrighted. Facts may be independently reported and cited; text may not be reused. |
| FL511 | No public data API — the About page offers only a map embed. |
| Mugshots and booking photos | Excluded by policy, not availability. Florida restricts commercial use of booking photographs, and a mugshot gallery is the fastest way to turn a civic tool into a liability. See the guardrails page. |