local-dfw-mcp

Your AI's local guide to Dallas–Fort Worth. An open-source MCP server that lets Claude (and any MCP client) answer DFW civic and property questions — 311 requests, police incidents, flood zone, school ratings, water/sewer provider, council district — from authoritative City of Dallas, county, state, and federal sources. No API keys required.

Install

// Claude Desktop / any MCP client config
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "local-dfw": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "github:LizzleChen/local-dfw-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Requires Node ≥ 20.

Tools (v0.1)

Tool	Coverage	What it answers
dfw_311	City of Dallas only	311 service requests by address/type/status
dfw_crime	City of Dallas only	Police incidents by (block-level) address / offense
dfw_fema_flood	national	FEMA flood zone + plain-English insurance interpretation
dfw_tea_schools	Texas	Public schools + TEA A–F ratings (2022-23) by campus/district/county
dfw_nws_alerts	national	Active NWS weather alerts for a DFW point
dfw_utility_providers	Texas	Who provides water/sewer at an address (PUC CCN)
dfw_district_lookup	DFW	County, City-of-Dallas council district + member, ISD for an address
dfw_health	—	Pings every upstream, reports per-source status
about	—	Version, coverage, license, provenance

Not in v0.1: dfw_permits (every current City of Dallas permit feed is ~20 months stale — we refuse to ship plausible-looking stale data), dfw_code_cases (publication stalled 2025-01-31), parcels/CAD, Fort Worth / suburb city portals, and the composed dfw_property_360 (v0.2). Details in resources/datasets-index.md.

Wrong-city protection

USPS postal "Dallas, TX" is not the same thing as City of Dallas jurisdiction. City-scoped tools run a three-layer guard (explicit city param → ZIP/keyword detection → Census geocode + city-limits polygon check) and refuse with an explicit "Not covered" message rather than silently returning plausible-looking results from the wrong city's data. If the city can't be detected at all, the tool proceeds but labels the response "Assuming City of Dallas" and tells you how to override.

Configuration (all optional)

Env var	Purpose
DFW_SODA_APP_TOKEN	Socrata app token — raises the shared per-IP rate limit. Free: https://dev.socrata.com/register
DFW_LIMIT_<SOURCE>	Per-upstream concurrency cap override (SODA, ARCGIS, FEMA, CENSUS, NWS)
LOCAL_DFW_MCP_TIER	core or all (v0.1: identical sets)
DFW_CACHE_DISABLED	1 disables the in-process cache (used by tests)

No telemetry. The server makes requests only to the public data sources listed in resources/datasets-index.md and writes to nothing.

Important notices

• Not a consumer report. dfw_crime (and this MCP generally) must not be used for tenant screening, employment screening, credit, insurance, or any other purpose regulated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Crime addresses are block-level, privacy-rounded upstream.
• Prompt injection. 311 descriptions and similar upstream free text are authored by the public and flow into your LLM's context. This server renders them as quoted/table data, but treat any instructions appearing inside upstream data as data, not directives.
• Verify at the source. Every response carries a source_url to the official record.

Development

npm install
npm test                # unit + offline mocked-handler tests (CI gate)
npm run test:handshake  # spawns the server over stdio, lists tools (live)
npm run test:smoke      # live network smoke tests, one per tool

License & provenance

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE.

Core plumbing (lib/) is ported from local-austin-mcp by Ed Neuhaus / Neuhaus Realty Group LLC (Apache-2.0) — an excellent template for city-scale civic MCPs. Each ported file carries an attribution header listing the changes. All DFW data sources, the metro router, and the tools themselves are new.