How I Built The Public Records Act Tracker
The California Public Records Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and similar state-level public records laws exist for a simple reason: government agencies work for the public, and the public has a right to know what they’re doing. In practice, exercising that right involves a surprising amount of paperwork, waiting, and follow-up.
Public records requests — whether filed under California’s CPRA, the federal FOIA, or any of the dozens of state-level equivalents — follow a predictable pattern. You submit a request. An agency acknowledges it, usually with a boilerplate response and a deadline extension. You wait. You follow up. You wait some more. The agency responds with a partial disclosure, a fee estimate, or a denial citing one of several exemptions. You track all of this manually, usually in a spreadsheet, hoping you don’t miss a deadline to appeal.
That process is ripe for automation.
What the Public Records Act Tracker does
The PRA Tracker is a full-stack web platform for managing public records requests from submission through resolution. You log each request — the agency, the date filed, the statutory deadline, and the subject matter — and the platform tracks its status automatically. When a response comes in, you can upload it and have AI parse and summarize the reply: what was disclosed, what was withheld, and what exemptions the agency cited.
The platform supports requests filed under multiple legal frameworks simultaneously. CPRA requests in California have different response timelines than federal FOIA requests. State-level equivalents vary further. The tracker handles all of them, with deadline calculations built in for each framework.
Why deadlines matter
Missing a response deadline is one of the most common ways public records requests stall. Agencies are required by law to respond within specific timeframes — 10 business days under CPRA, 20 business days under FOIA — but those deadlines are frequently missed, and requesters who don’t follow up promptly often wait months for responses they could have received in weeks.
The PRA Tracker sends alerts when deadlines are approaching and flags requests that have gone past their statutory response window. This alone significantly reduces the administrative burden of managing multiple simultaneous requests.
AI-assisted response parsing
When an agency responds to a public records request, the response is often dense with legal language, exemption citations, and bureaucratic boilerplate. The AI parsing feature reads the response and returns a plain-English summary: what records are being disclosed, what is being withheld and under what exemption, whether the agency is requesting a fee, and what the next steps are.
This makes it significantly faster to understand what an agency has actually said and decide how to respond — whether that means accepting the disclosure, appealing a denial, or filing a follow-up request for additional records.
Who this is for
The PRA Tracker is useful for journalists, researchers, activists, and anyone who files public records requests regularly. It’s also useful for one-time requesters who want to make sure they don’t lose track of a request they’ve filed and forget to follow up.
Public records laws are among the most powerful tools available to ordinary people who want to hold government accountable. The PRA Tracker is designed to make those tools easier to use.
The platform is available at pra-tracker.vercel.app.