Changelog
A date stamp is a claim; a changelog is evidence. Every verification pass, every ordinance we catch, and every correction we make — including our own mistakes — is logged here. If an entry doesn’t exist, we haven’t verified it. That’s the standard we’d want from anyone else publishing rules.
Statewide question pages and parcel lookups: 24 state-level answers, 68 official viewer links
Two additions. First: state-level question pages — 12 for Washington, 12 for Colorado — answering the questions people actually ask at the state level (How many ADUs can I build? Can cities require owner-occupancy? What does a permit cost?), each cited to the statute or explicitly marked 'varies by city' with the divergent cities named. Every city-specific number in every answer was traced back to the verified city record before publication, and a sampled adversarial pass re-checked four load-bearing claims against primary sources. Second: every city page now carries a 'Check your parcel' block linking the official county parcel viewer, assessor search, and city zoning map — official domains only, each link verified live. The rules are citywide; what you can build depends on your lot, and now the path from our pages to your parcel is one click.
Verification catch: Aurora's June 2025 vote tally is contested — we've removed the number
Our adversarial re-check of the Aurora record found a genuine source conflict on the June 9, 2025 council vote that rejected the staff-drafted ADU compliance ordinance: press coverage reported 6–2 while acknowledging the clerk never announced the tally, and a meeting-video-derived summary reports 7–2. No primary roll-call record was reachable. The rejection itself is not in doubt — but the number is, so we no longer print one. The same pass confirmed the state's October 2025 non-compliance review swept wider than the three cities we cover in depth: roughly a dozen jurisdictions were named, per Colorado DOLA's director on record. Our pages now say so explicitly.
Versioned rules, anchored facts, and open data
Three structural upgrades. First: rules now carry their history in the data itself — where we've verified a superseded rule, the city page shows 'Previously: … changed by [ordinance, date]' right under the current rule (nine facts to start: Seattle's FAR change, Bellevue's DADU legalization, Everett's and Boulder's owner-occupancy removals, Denver's rezoning-era end and parking repeal, Tacoma's 2019 parking elimination, Colorado Springs' height cut, Lakewood's 2024 size increase). Second: every rule row is now individually addressable (aduledger.com/wa/seattle#coverage). Third: the full corpus is downloadable at /data as JSON and CSV under CC BY 4.0 — use it, cite us.
aduledger.com goes live; compliance scorecard and change-analysis pages published
The site moved to its permanent domain (aduledger.com; old URLs redirect). New: the Colorado ADU Compliance Scorecard — a city-by-city grading of HB24-1152 compliance including the three cities the state lists as non-complying — and two 'what changed' analyses: Seattle's January 2026 FAR change (which most published guides and AI answers still get wrong) and Lakewood's twelve-day zoning code. City pages also now carry Legislation and Dataset structured data alongside the existing FAQ and Article markup. Our day-zero baseline measurement is on record: this site is absent from all tracked search results, and 50% of the top-ranking answers to our sampled questions are stale or incorrect against the verified corpus. That is the gap this ledger exists to close — watch this changelog.
Colorado joins the ledger: eleven Front Range cities, cited to code
Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Thornton, Westminster, Arvada, Boulder, Longmont, Fort Collins, and Greeley — the HB24-1152 (C.R.S. 29-35-401–405) landscape, verified against adopted ordinances and codified text, with an adversarial fact-check of a load-bearing claim per city before publication (7 confirmed, 4 corrected). The compliance picture is messier than Washington's: the state formally listed Aurora, Thornton, and Arvada as non-complying in October 2025; Colorado Springs adopted on time while asserting home-rule authority to be stricter; Pueblo adopted under a state extension; Greeley's code appears to conflict with the statute yet escaped the state's list. Lakewood follows shortly — see its own entry.
Verification catch: Lakewood's new zoning code was repealed by voters
Our Colorado research initially profiled Lakewood's fall-2025 zoning rewrite (operative January 1, 2026) as current law. The adversarial pass caught what nearly every published source misses: certified referendum petitions suspended the new code on January 12, 2026 — after just twelve days in force — and voters repealed all four rewrite ordinances at an April 7, 2026 special election (~62.5%). We held the page, re-verified the restored pre-rewrite Title 17 against charter text, ordinance attestations, and official election results, and published it with the saga documented. The 1,400 sq ft size cap survives — it came from the June 2024 state-compliance amendment, not the repealed rewrite. Also caught before publication: Westminster codified its 750 sq ft small-home guarantee in March 2026 (Ord 4335), Longmont's 800 sq ft is not a hard cap, and Fort Collins' ADU ordinance is 009-2025 alone.
Eight more cities: every 2025 Puget Sound transition suburb now covered
Shoreline, Edmonds, Bothell, Lynnwood, Kent, Burien, Sammamish, and Issaquah join the ledger — the cities whose brand-new ADU ordinances (June 2024 through August 2025) had the least accurate coverage anywhere. Each went through the same pipeline: primary-source research against adopted ordinance text, then an independent adversarial fact-check of a load-bearing claim per city. Six confirmed outright; two corrections were caught and applied before publication (see the Edmonds and Burien entries).
Edmonds ADU park impact fee: the flat rate everyone quotes was superseded in January
Our adversarial pass caught that the widely-cited $1,367.03-per-ADU park impact fee (half the single-family rate) was replaced by the 2026 Fee Guide effective January 1, 2026, which assesses $1.35 per square foot of residential space instead. The Edmonds page now reflects the per-square-foot structure.
Burien parking cite re-lettered by Ordinance 881
Burien's unconditional zero-parking rule for ADUs was enacted at BMC 19.20.045(1)(D) by Ordinance 868, but a later 2025 ordinance (881) re-lettered the section — the provision now lives at (1)(C), and (1)(D) holds different, conditioned exemptions. Caught in verification; our citation now tracks the current lettering. Burien is amending Title 19 actively.
Olympia Ordinances 7470, 7471, and 7472 verified — no regulatory changes, new fee math
We chased down Olympia's June 23, 2026 ordinance batch against the signed ordinance PDFs (the codifier hasn't published them yet). Verdict: none of the eight core ADU rules changed. What did change: park impact fees are now $3.92/sq ft of habitable space (min $3,187.93), capped at 50% of the principal unit's fee, with ADUs still exempt from school impact fees (Ord 7470, effective July 1, 2026) — and Ord 7471 added residential lot splitting under HB 1096, a new path to selling an ADU on its own lot. Both are now reflected on the Olympia page.
ADU Ledger launches with eight verified Washington cities
Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma, Everett, Kirkland, Redmond, Renton, and Olympia — every fact cited to the current municipal code section or adopted ordinance, verified against primary sources, with eight load-bearing claims independently re-verified by an adversarial fact-check pass (six confirmed, two corrected before publication).
Everett DADU height marked contested after adversarial review
Our verification pass found the 2023 ordinance's 24/28-ft DADU height allowance was not carried into the Everett 2044 NR zones: current Table 22-2 caps detached accessory buildings at 18 ft on non-alley lots, with 24/28 surviving only in UR4/UR7 — in tension with state-law minimums. We publish the conflict rather than picking a side, and re-check each pass.
Olympia zero-parking rule correctly dated to 2019
Our adversarial pass caught an attribution error before publication: Olympia's zero ADU parking dates to Ordinance 7187 (July 2019), not the 2025 state-compliance package (Ord 7444), which merely re-amended the section. Ordinances 7470 and 7472 (June 2026) are under verification.
Seattle FAR change confirmed — most sources still wrong
Ordinance 127376 (effective January 21, 2026) struck the interim rule exempting ADU floor area from FAR. As of August 2026, both leading AI answers and most published guides — including some updated after the change — still describe the repealed exemption. If you're planning two units on a Seattle lot, model FAR first.