Charlotte Mecklenburg Server

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that exposes Charlotte, NC and Mecklenburg County open data as tools for an LLM agent. Ask about trash pickup, parcels and zoning, crime and 311 requests, planning areas and rezonings, bike lanes and ADA infrastructure, or environmental data (watersheds, tree canopy, brownfields) at any address in the city/county, and the server geocodes the address and queries the relevant live ArcGIS layer for you.

Core motion behind almost every tool: geocode an address → spatial or attribute query against an ArcGIS REST layer → structured result + a human-readable summary.

Data sources

Everything is queried live, at call time, from public ArcGIS REST endpoints — there is no local copy of the underlying data (a small local registry of endpoint metadata, not the data itself, lives in data/registry.json; see "Endpoint discovery" below). Four backends are in play:

Source	What it is	Base URL
City of Charlotte on-prem ArcGIS Server	City departmental data (CMPD, sanitation, 311, zoning)	https://gis.charlottenc.gov/arcgis/rest/services
Mecklenburg County on-prem ArcGIS Server	County data (parcels, tax foreclosures)	https://meckags.mecklenburgcountync.gov/server/rest/services
City of Charlotte ArcGIS Online (AGOL) org	Solid waste routes, bike lanes, ADA infrastructure, CATS transit, watersheds, tree canopy	https://services.arcgis.com/9Nl857LBlQVyzq54/arcgis/rest/services
Mecklenburg County ArcGIS Online (AGOL) org	Capital Improvement Projects, brownfields, battery/HHW recycling sites	https://services.arcgis.com/BWD3gDuaqc7SQmy7/arcgis/rest/services

All endpoints are public and require no authentication/token. Geocoding uses Esri's public World geocoder (https://geocode.arcgis.com/...), also token-free for non-stored results.

An offline registry of ~1,875 discovered service/layer entries across all four sources (crawled via scripts/build_registry.py) backs the list_datasets tool, so an agent can search for "what layer has X" before calling a specific tool.

Install

git clone <this repo> charlotte-mcp
cd charlotte-mcp
uv sync

Register with Claude Code:

claude mcp add charlotte -- uv --directory /Users/dwlavoie/charlotte-mcp run charlotte-mcp

(Substitute your actual clone path for /Users/dwlavoie/charlotte-mcp.) The server runs over stdio — no ports, no API keys, no config needed.

You can also run it directly for local testing:

uv run charlotte-mcp

Use from ChatGPT (remote connector)

ChatGPT cannot run local MCP servers — it only supports remote custom connectors (a public HTTPS endpoint, added in Developer Mode). A hosted instance of this server runs at:

https://pcygic2am3.us-east-1.awsapprunner.com/mcp

To connect it (requires ChatGPT Plus/Pro; custom connectors are read-only on those plans, which is all this server needs):

1. On chatgpt.com, open Settings → Apps & Connectors → Advanced settings and enable Developer mode.
2. Add a custom connector: name Charlotte City Data, MCP server URL https://pcygic2am3.us-east-1.awsapprunner.com/mcp, authentication none.
3. Start a new chat, enable the connector from the tools menu, and test with "When is trash pickup at 2437 Remount Rd?" (expected answer: Thursday).

Non-technical users: paste the block below into a new ChatGPT chat and it will walk you through the steps above interactively.

You're going to help me connect a custom connector called "Charlotte City Data" — a read-only tool that answers questions about Charlotte, NC using the city's official open data. Source: https://github.com/Lavoiedavidw/Charlotte-City-MCP Please walk me through, one step at a time, waiting for my confirmation between each: (1) confirm I'm signed in to ChatGPT Plus or Pro on chatgpt.com in a web browser; (2) guide me to Settings → Apps & Connectors → Advanced settings and help me turn on Developer mode; (3) guide me to add a custom connector named "Charlotte City Data" with MCP server URL https://pcygic2am3.us-east-1.awsapprunner.com/mcp and no authentication; (4) have me start a new chat, enable the connector from the tools menu, and test it with "When is trash pickup at 2437 Remount Rd?" — the answer should be Thursday. Afterward, give me five examples of useful things I can ask it about any Charlotte address.

Remote hosting (AWS)

The same server serves streamable HTTP for remote MCP clients:

uv run charlotte-mcp --transport http --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8080

The hosted instance is defined as two CloudFormation stacks in infra/:

• infra/build.yaml — ECR repository + a CodeBuild project that builds the Dockerfile directly from this public GitHub repo (no GitHub↔AWS OAuth connection needed) and pushes :latest.
• infra/service.yaml — an App Runner service (0.25 vCPU / 0.5 GB, ≈$3–5/mo at light usage) serving the image with auto-deploy on new pushes. Deploy it after the first CodeBuild run, since App Runner requires the image to exist.

One transport gotcha, fixed in server.py: FastMCP enables localhost-only DNS rebinding protection at construction time, which makes a public deployment reject its own hostname with HTTP 421. The entrypoint disables that protection when binding to a non-loopback --host.

Tools

21 tools total: 1 geocoder, 1 dataset-discovery tool, and 19 domain tools across six tool packs. Every location-based tool accepts either address: str or lat: float, lon: float and returns a dict with a summary field.

Tool	Pack	Description
geocode	core	Geocode a free-form address to lat/lon via the Esri World geocoder
list_datasets	datasets	Search the ~1,875-entry endpoint registry by keyword/source
lookup_parcel	property	Look up a parcel by address, point, PID, or NC-PIN (ParcelStatus)
get_zoning	property	Get zoning code and rezone date for a parcel (Parcel_Zoning_Lookup)
search_tax_foreclosures	property	Search county tax foreclosures by neighborhood/zip/status (TaxForeclosures)
get_trash_schedule	sanitation	Garbage/recycling/yard-waste day, provider, route, and GREEN/ORANGE recycling week
crime_near	safety	CMPD patrol + domestic-violence calls-for-service near a point (NPA-aggregate)
violent_crime_near	safety	CMPD violent-offense counts (homicide/rape/robbery/assault) near a point (NPA-aggregate)
homicides_near	safety	Point-level homicide incidents near a point, with weapon/clearance detail
service_requests_near	safety	311 service requests near a point
get_planning_area	planning	Named community planning area containing a location
rezonings_near	planning	Approved rezonings (since 2016) near a point
area_plans_at	planning	Area plan(s) covering a location
bike_lanes_near	transport	Bike lane segments near a point (street, lane type, width, year built)
ada_features_near	transport	ADA curb ramps, accessible parking, and pedestrian signals near a point
cip_projects_near	transport	County Capital Improvement (stormwater) projects near a point
cats_projects_near	transport	CATS transit capital projects (stations + corridors) near a point
brownfields_near	environment	Recorded NC Brownfields Program sites near a point
watershed_at	environment	Named watershed/basin containing a location
tree_canopy_at	environment	Tree canopy / vegetation / impervious-surface stats for a location
battery_recycling_sites_near	environment	Household hazardous waste / battery recycling drop-off sites near a point

Example prompts

• "When is trash pickup at 2437 Remount Rd?"
• "What's the zoning for 2437 Remount Rd, and has it been rezoned recently?"
• "Are there any tax foreclosures in zip code 28208?"
• "What watershed is 2437 Remount Rd in, and what's the tree canopy like there?"
• "Any 311 requests or CMPD calls for service near 600 E 4th St in the last 90 days?"
• "Find bike lanes and ADA curb ramps within 400 meters of 600 E 4th St."
• "What capital improvement or CATS transit projects are planned near uptown?"
• "Search the dataset registry for anything related to 'waste'."

See docs/demo.md for a full worked transcript of the trash-pickup question.

Known data quirks

• City SWS/AddressLocator geocoder is broken — it returns roughly (0, 0) in its native spatial reference (wkid 2264) instead of a real match. The server does not use it; geocode and every tool's address resolution go through Esri's World geocoder instead.
• ParcelStatus (county on-prem) rejects outFields=* — the layer's query operation returns an HTTP 200 with an ArcGIS {"error": {"code": 400, ...}} body whenever outFields=* or resultRecordCount is present, regardless of the where/point/envelope filter. lookup_parcel always passes an explicit field list and never a page-size hint to work around it. This is isolated to this layer.
• TaxForeclosures.status is null on every row in the current dataset (629 total rows checked). The status filter is still exposed by search_tax_foreclosures as documented — it just won't match anything until the county populates that column. cde_symbology_val and bpo_status are the actually-populated status-like fields.
• CMPD_Calls_for_Service and ViolentCrimeData are aggregate-only tables, not incident-level data — no geometry, no per-incident rows, just monthly counts by Neighborhood Profile Area (NPA). crime_near and violent_crime_near proxy "near this point" by sampling nearby NPAs from the spatial ServiceRequests311 layer, then filtering the aggregate tables to those NPAs — a best-effort approximation, not a true point-in-polygon match. homicides_near and service_requests_near, by contrast, query real point-level layers directly.
• ArcGIS distance + units=esriSRUnit_Meter buffer overshoot, on some AGOL layers. During development the environment tool pack found Brownfields and Battery_Recycling_Sites (both hosted on layers with a native NC State Plane feet spatial reference) returning features far outside the requested meter radius — consistent with the server silently treating the requested distance as the layer's native unit (feet) instead of converting from meters, a roughly 3.28x overshoot. environment.py's brownfields_near and battery_recycling_sites_near work around this by fetching the full (small: 170 and 5 records respectively) layer once and filtering with a client-side haversine calculation instead of relying on the server-side buffer. A follow-up audit of every other radius-based tool (all of safety.py and transport.py, plus a re-probe of the two originally-flagged layers) found the meter buffer behaving correctly everywhere else, including on a fresh re-test of Brownfields/Battery_Recycling_Sites — see the "Task 8 distance-buffer regression check" note in PLAN.md for the full methodology and a caution for future maintainers about re-verifying before trusting (or removing a workaround for) the buffer on any new layer.

Development

uv run pytest -m live   # live smoke tests against real endpoints, one file per tool pack

Tests are marked live because they hit real network services; expect occasional transient failures from upstream ArcGIS endpoints rather than code bugs.