Hi, I’m Tony Grollo. I’ve always believed that local government matters more than anything happening at the state or national level. These are the decisions that directly affect your street, your kids’ school, your property taxes, and your neighborhood. And unlike federal politics, you can actually show up and have a voice.

The problem is that staying informed is unreasonably hard. Government websites are scattered, clunky, and built for compliance rather than residents. Meeting minutes are buried in PDFs. Financial data is locked in portals nobody knows about. I spent years digging through this stuff on my own just to understand what was happening in my own town.

I’ve lived in Villa Park since I was three. It’s the only hometown I’ve ever known, and I care deeply about what happens here. That’s what made it the testing ground for all of this. Scraping meeting agendas, pulling permit records, tracking crime stats, piecing together a picture of what local government is actually doing. At some point I realized other people might want this too, and GrolloTown was born.