I spent fourteen years in four planning departments.
Spoonbill is the tool I wish we had — plain-language answers from your city’s adopted code, with the section or table they came from.
Four states, four code regimes, four sets of quirks that only the people who’d been there twenty years fully understood.
The work I signed up for was helping shape how those cities grew. A lot of the work I actually did was looking things up.
A question would come in. An accessory dwelling on a corner lot inside an overlay. The fee for a minor subdivision. A setback two people read two different ways. The answer was never in one place.
The people who could answer fastest were the ones who’d been there longest.
When they retired, the answers left with them.
What it does
Spoonbill is what I wanted in those years. You ask a question in plain language, and it answers from your jurisdiction’s adopted code — and shows you the section, or the table, it came from.
Dimensional standards and fee schedules live in tables. Tables are where most tools fall apart. Spoonbill returns the table. See it answer a question →
It does not matter how your city publishes. Hosted code platform, a PDF posted after each adoption, a fee schedule that lives somewhere else entirely — Spoonbill indexes what you actually publish, in whatever shape you publish it. Nothing to migrate, nothing to standardize first.
It is in testing now with planning staff in North Carolina and California, each on their own adopted documents. Two states, two code regimes, two entirely different ways of publishing.
It does not interpret the code. Interpretation is your job, and your certification. It ends the search, not the judgment.
Your documents are public records; your team’s questions are not, and are never used to train shared models. How we handle data.
The work behind it
I wrote the documents on the other end of those searches — Charlotte’s Green Streets Toolkit, urban design guidelines for a historic coastal downtown, and a zoning code rewrite I helped review before it was adopted. I know what it takes to move something through Planning, Engineering, Public Works, Parks and an outside regulator: the hardest was the technical case that won Army Corps approval to plant shade trees into a primary French Quarter levee.
I also know how much of that time gets spent on research that should have taken two minutes.
LEED AP ND·SITES AP·M.Arch — Tulane·B.Arch — Tulane
I’m not a software company that discovered planning. I’m a designer who got tired of the search.
See it answer a question from your own code.
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