Municipal & county websites · Accessibility · Right-to-Know compliance
Your local government's website should be readable by everyone who pays for it.
Bluenilla builds, audits, and maintains websites for Pennsylvania townships, boroughs, and counties. Meeting minutes people can actually find, ordinances and county forms that open on a phone, and a site that passes an accessibility review before anyone files a complaint about it. Published municipal pricing, no setup fee, and county engagements scoped in writing before anything is signed.
- Based in
- Lancaster County, PA
- Standard
- WCAG 2.1 AA
- Now booking
- 2027 builds
01The compliance deadline
2027 and 2028 are legal deadlines, not best practices.
Under the Department of Justice's rule implementing Title II of the ADA, state and local government web content must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The date depends on population. Counties serving 50,000 or more — most of Pennsylvania's, Lancaster County included — must comply by April 26, 2027. Townships, boroughs, and smaller counties have until April 26, 2028. The rule applies whether or not anyone has complained, and it covers the documents you post, not only the pages around them.
Apr 24 2024
DOJ publishes the final ADA Title II web rule, adopting WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard.
Apr 20 2026
DOJ publishes an Interim Final Rule extending both compliance dates by approximately one year, stating it fully anticipates enforcing at the new dates.
Apr 26 2027
Compliance date for public entities serving 50,000 or more. That includes 44 of Pennsylvania's 67 counties, Lancaster County among them, and the City of Lancaster.
Apr 26 2028
Compliance date for public entities serving fewer than 50,000, and for all special district governments. This is the date for every township and borough in Lancaster County, and for Pennsylvania's 23 smaller counties.
Sources: 28 CFR Part 35, Subpart H · Interim Final Rule, 91 Fed. Reg. 20902 (April 20, 2026).
Where most sites fail
Scanned meeting minutes saved as images. Agendas in tables that collapse on a phone. Contact information only inside a PDF. Unlabeled links that read as “click here” to a screen reader.
Why this is a 2026 decision
April 2028 sounds distant until you work backward through a local government budget. Remediation and migration take months, they have to be paid for out of a fiscal year, and your 2027 budget is adopted this December. For most townships the real decision point is this autumn. For a county on the 2027 date, it has already arrived.
02Free accessibility audit
Find out where your current site stands.
Tell us your municipality or county and we will audit the site you have now against WCAG 2.1 AA and send you the findings in writing. Whether you hire us afterward is a separate conversation.
- An automated scan of every page we can reach, with the specific rule each failure violates
- A hand review of your ten most-visited pages, because scanners miss context
- A check of your five most recent meeting minutes and agendas for readable text
- A plain-English summary you can hand to your supervisors, council, or commissioners
03What's included
Built around the work a municipal office actually does.
Every site includes all of the following. There is no tier where accessibility is an upgrade.
- 01Meeting minutes and agendas
- A dated archive your secretary can add to in under a minute, with real text in every document so residents and search engines can both read it.
- 02Ordinances and the codified code
- Searchable, linkable, and organized by chapter, so you stop answering the same phone call about the burn ban.
- 03Permits, forms, and fee schedules
- Fillable where the law allows it, printable where it does not, and never buried three clicks deep.
- 04Right-to-Know requests
- The request form, the fee schedule, and the name of your open-records officer where a requester can actually find them.
- 05Alerts and closures
- A banner you control yourself, for the snow emergency at 4 a.m. when nobody wants to call a web company.
- 06Accessibility maintenance
- Quarterly re-audits, remediation of anything that slips, and a public accessibility statement with a working contact path.
04Pricing
One price, published, scaled to the size of your municipality.
You should be able to put a number in front of your board without sitting through a sales call first. There is no setup fee and no build fee. Migration, training, and the initial accessibility remediation are included in the annual price, because a website that is compliant on launch day and unmaintained afterward is non-compliant again within a month.
| Population | Annual | Monthly equivalent | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 3,000Annual: $4,740Monthly equivalent: $395 per monthTier: Tier 1 | $4,740 | $395 | Tier 1 |
| 3,000 – 9,999Annual: $7,140Monthly equivalent: $595 per monthTier: Tier 2 | $7,140 | $595 | Tier 2 |
| 10,000 – 24,999Annual: $9,540Monthly equivalent: $795 per monthTier: Tier 3 | $9,540 | $795 | Tier 3 |
| 25,000 and aboveAnnual: $13,140Monthly equivalent: $1,095 per monthTier: Tier 4 | $13,140 | $1,095 | Tier 4 |
Included in every tier
- Site build and content migration, up to 300 documents
- Hosting, software updates, and daily backups
- WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance at launch
- Quarterly re-audits and remediation of anything that slips
- A published accessibility statement with a working contact path
- Content updates within one business day, up to eight requests a month
- Training so your office can post routine items without waiting on us
- Full content export on request, any time
Quoted separately
- Historical document remediation — $6 per page for text-based PDFs, $18 per page for scanned or image-only. Scanned minutes have to be reconstructed rather than corrected, which is why they cost more.
- Migration beyond 300 documents
- Integration with an existing permit or payment system
Invoiced annually against a single purchase order, which is how most municipal offices would rather pay. Monthly billing is available on request. Twelve-month initial term, month to month after that. No annual escalator written into the contract.
Counties are scoped separately. A county site spans courts, row offices, elections, human services, and a dozen other departments, so we start with the free audit and put a fixed written quote in front of your commissioners rather than force it into a municipal tier.
Every tier falls below $13,200 — Pennsylvania's 2026 threshold under which no formal bidding or written quotations are required. Between $13,200 and $24,500 your township needs three quotes; above $24,500, an advertised public bid. We will tell you which side of those lines a proposal falls on before you take it to your board.
05How Bluenilla works
A small practice in Lancaster County, and that is the point.
The large vendors in this market serve thousands of local governments from a call center. That works until you need something specific before a Tuesday meeting or a commissioners' session. Bluenilla is deliberately small: Lancaster County townships and boroughs, and county governments across Pennsylvania. The person who builds your site is the person who answers when you call.
- You talk to the person doing the work
- There is no account manager between you and the developer. The number on our contract reaches the person who built the site, every time.
- We take a limited number of clients
- We cap the number of municipalities and counties we maintain so that support stays fast. When the calendar is full we will tell you and give you a date, rather than taking the work and being late.
- Everything is documented in writing
- Audits, change logs, and the reasoning behind decisions. If your staff turns over, the next secretary inherits a record, not a mystery.
- We do not resell software you cannot leave
- Your content lives in a standard format we can export on request. Leaving Bluenilla should be inconvenient, not impossible.