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CivicLine · Local Government · Released 2026
AI for local government work that needs a
clear record.
CivicLine helps small and midsize local governments answer resident questions, prepare staff work, and route requests while keeping official decisions with the people responsible for them.
Built by a two-term Fredericksburg city councilmember.
Four products. One platform.
Each CivicLine product can stand alone. Together, they share the foundation local governments need before putting AI near public work: role-based permissions, human approval gates, audit logging, secure retrieval, tenant isolation, and flexible model deployment.
01 / CivicLine Clerk
CivicLine Clerk
AI for the Clerk's Office
An agent that works alongside staff on minutes, FOIA, records, compliance, and public lookups. It prepares official work but pauses before anything becomes permanent.
AI-drafted meeting minutes with speaker identification — voiceprint matching plus context inference from the agenda
FOIA from intake to signed release — search, redact with statutory citation, package, deliver
Daily compliance digest to email, Slack, or Teams — overdue items, ethics filings, upcoming meetings, pending approvals
Continuity briefing — a structured handoff packet for whoever's covering the office today
Drafting from precedent — three different draft variants of ordinances, resolutions, or letters, grounded in similar prior work
Push-to-talk voice assistant for clerks in active meetings — answers in one or two sentences
Human approval required on fourteen actions that create permanent records
02 / CivicLine Chat
CivicLine Chat
Citizen-facing, code-aware
A resident-facing assistant that answers from published records, cites its sources, and hands off anything that requires staff judgment. No account, no login, no phone tree.
Reads sixteen-plus categories of public record: meetings, ordinances, permits, FOIA status, boards, elections, property
Lets residents file a FOIA request with a tracking number that lands in the clerk's queue
Lets residents register to speak at an upcoming meeting
Cites the source document in every answer; redirects out-of-scope questions to the appropriate office
Multilingual outputs to reach as many residents as possible
Embeddable on your existing website, or runs as its own branded page
03 / CivicLine Planning
CivicLine Planning
Planning intake, before it hits a planner's desk
Pre-screens development packets for completeness, parcel constraints, and quantitative zoning checks. It drafts staff-ready findings, but the planner owns interpretation and every decision.
Seven application types: building permit, zoning variance, conditional use, subdivision, site plan, special use, demolition
Deterministic checks for completeness, setbacks, FAR, height, parking, lot coverage — every check cites its ordinance section
Surfaces ambiguity as "needs human" rather than forcing a pass or fail
Routes to the right queue automatically: planner, engineer, building official, fire marshal, environmental, historic
Optional CivicLine Clerk integration — inconsistencies route to the clerk's approval queue
04 / CivicLine Public Works
CivicLine Public Works
Resident reports, routed in seconds
Turns resident public works reports into structured handoff cards. It classifies, geocodes, prioritizes, checks duplicates, and alerts staff when configured. The dispatcher still decides the response.
Eleven categories: pothole, downed tree, traffic signal, water main, drainage, sign damage, illegal dumping, animal carcass, sidewalk, snow and ice, other
GPS-first geocoding with confidence flagging; address fallback when no GPS is present
Priority scoring (P1–P4) with life-safety escalation; P1 alerts fire SMS or PagerDuty before the dispatcher view loads
Photo analysis for hazard detection — advisory, the dispatcher can override
Integrates with Cityworks, Cartegraph, VueWorks, or equivalent — creates new tickets, never modifies existing ones
Cross-jurisdiction handoffs framed constructively — the resident is never told "that's not our problem"
Who Is It For?
Find the desk that loses the most time — and start there.
CivicLine isn't bought by "a city." It's bought by the person whose week is hostage to repeat work. Here's where each role fits.
Municipal Clerk
Also: Deputy Clerk · Records Officer
"Minutes, FOIA clocks, and records requests pile up faster than one person can clear them."
CivicLine Clerk
Drafts minutes and tracks every FOIA deadline — nothing lapses.
Public Works Director
Also: Ops · Dispatch · 311 Desk
"Reports arrive as voicemails and half-described emails, then need triage by hand."
CivicLine Public Works
Structured, prioritized handoff cards; a person still dispatches.
City / Town Manager
Also: Administrator · Mayor's Office
"Council wants AI; counsel wants control. I need both in the same sentence."
The platform
Human approval gates and an audit log on every official action.
IT Director
Also: CIO · Security Lead
"Every new vendor is another data-exposure question I have to answer for."
The platform
Tenant isolation, role-based access, swappable model provider.
Planning Director
Also: Zoning Admin · Permit Desk
"Incomplete packets eat a staff afternoon before review even starts."
CivicLine Planning
A cited completeness-and-zoning first pass; planners keep every call.
Residents
The people the office serves
"A simple question shouldn't require a phone tree or a business-hours callback."
CivicLine Chat
Plain answers from published records, with sources — no login.
Beyond the Basics
Less time on repeat work.
More time for judgment.
CivicLine is built around the work local staff repeat every week: drafting minutes, tracking FOIA deadlines, answering resident questions, checking planning packets, and preparing public works reports for review.
Continuity of operations
When the clerk is on vacation, sick, or transitioning out, ask for an office briefing and get a structured handoff in seconds — active FOIA, upcoming meetings, expiring board appointments, expiring contracts, pending motions, records due for disposition. The institutional memory doesn't walk out the door.
Precedent that surfaces
"What did we do last time someone asked about short-term rentals?" Search across ordinances, resolutions, minutes, and motions — with citations on every result. Stop starting from scratch on questions the office has already answered.
Drafting from precedent
Tell the agent what you need — a noise ordinance, a special-use resolution, a FOIA cover letter — and it produces three meaningfully different draft variants, grounded in similar prior records. Nothing touches the official record until the clerk picks one.
Voice during meetings
Push-to-talk from a clerk's phone during a live council session. "Per last month's minutes…" — answers in one or two sentences, no rambling, no formatting clutter. Audited like everything else.
Multilingual is standard
Spanish ships in every state-level policy pack. State-specific additions are layered on where the public speaks more than English and Spanish — Polish in Illinois, for instance. Translation of minutes, plain-language meeting summaries, FOIA acknowledgments. New languages added as we hear about them.
Cross-jurisdiction benchmarking
Opt in to share anonymized FOIA metrics, response times, and ordinance language with peer cities. Tenant identity is hashed; PII is scrubbed before transmission. You see how your office compares — the kind of peer data that helps justify staffing requests, points you toward what's worth borrowing from the city next door, and turns isolated work into something measurable.
Platform
How CivicLine handles the hard parts.
Three commitments that hold across every product in the family — where your data lives, who has to approve actions, and how personal information is handled.
01
Your data, your servers.
Per-tenant databases. Documents, minutes, FOIA requests, voter rolls, and audit logs live on your infrastructure.
The only outbound traffic is a single secured call per agent turn to the AI model. For deployments with strict data-residency requirements, the model itself can be swapped for a local one running inside your firewall.
02
Human in the loop, audited.
Fourteen specific actions — certifying minutes, releasing FOIA packages, disposing of records, certifying election results — always pause for explicit human approval. The approver is never the same person who initiated the action.
Every action the agent takes, approved or not, is logged: who, what, when, and why. The log is append-only.
03
PII scrubbed before it leaves.
Free-form chat messages are scanned before they reach the AI model. Social Security numbers, driver's-license numbers, bank account and routing numbers, private keys, and common token formats are blocked outright — they never leave your deployment.
A reason code is logged; the raw value is not stored.
Pilot Targets
What a focused pilot can measure in twenty-one days.
A CivicLine pilot is built around measurable operating improvements: faster first drafts, clearer queues, fewer missed deadlines, and better resident self-service. Targets are set against your actual baseline during scoping.
FOIA initial response
Pre-pilot baseline
≥30% faster
Meeting minutes first draft
2–3 hours
≤30 min
Daily compliance scan
~45 min/day
≤15 min/day
Resident inquiry resolution
Via CivicLine Chat
≥80%
Actual results vary by jurisdiction, baseline workload, source data quality, integrations, and pilot scope. Pilot metrics are confirmed with your team before kickoff.
Jurisdiction
State law, plus your code.
Every state has its own statutes — public-records timelines, exemption citations, retention schedules, election certification flow. Every city, on top of that, has its own ordinances, resolutions, board structures, and municipal code.
CivicLine layers the two. A state-level policy pack handles what every city in your state has in common. Your local code, minutes, ordinances, and resolutions get loaded in during onboarding. New state-level packs are added regularly — as soon as we hear from a locality in a new state, we build the corresponding pack.
Deployment
Three ways to run it.
A · Most common
Hosted SaaS
We run it. Per-tenant isolation. Model-API egress only. Best when you don't want to manage the servers yourselves.
B · Hybrid approach
On-prem, your firewall
Runs in your environment. Tools, data, and the audit log stay local. Only the AI model call leaves the network.
C · Air-gapped
Zero external egress
Swap the cloud model for a local one. Nothing leaves the network. For environments with the strictest data postures.
Procurement
Procurement that starts from a real vehicle.
Surava holds an active master agreement with the George Washington Regional Commission, executed under Virginia Code § 2.2-4304. For eligible public bodies, that gives procurement staff a concrete contract vehicle to review.
Depending on your state law, local policy, and purchase size, your organization may be able to use cooperative procurement authority or small-purchase rules rather than starting with a new RFP.
The contract runs through April 2029, with two one-year extensions available. We can provide the agreement, procurement summary, and supporting materials for your local review.
Where a contract path may be available
38 states + DC have a clear path to procurement.
Other jurisdictions may participate with additional procedural steps. We can provide the contract materials your procurement office needs to evaluate eligibility.
Master Agreement for On-Call Services, George Washington Regional Commission × Surava LLC, executed April 16, 2026. Authority: Virginia Code § 2.2-4304 ("Joint and Cooperative Procurement"). Contract terms govern; consult your local procurement office to confirm eligibility under your jurisdiction's piggyback statute.
Engagement
A three-week pilot, before any longer commitment.
01
Week One
Wire it up.
Connect your data sources. Seed your municipal code, recent minutes, and ordinances. Configure the state-level policy pack if yours isn't already supported.
02
Week Two
Run it alongside real work.
Train your staff. Run the workflows that match your actual office — FOIA queue, minutes draft, planning intake, public works reports — with the agent doing first-pass work and staff reviewing.
03
Week Three
Decide on the evidence.
Evaluate against metrics we agreed on at the start — turnaround time, accuracy, staff hours recovered. Go or no-go on continuing.
JG
Surava's founder, Jason Graham, sat through the council meetings that ran past 11 p.m. — two terms on Fredericksburg City Council. You'd be working with someone who has been on your side of the table, not just selling to it.