Municipal & county websites · Accessibility · Right-to-Know compliance

Your local government's website should be readable by everyone who pays for it.

Bluenilla redesigns and maintains websites for Pennsylvania townships, boroughs, and counties, and becomes your web developer. Meeting minutes people can actually find, ordinances and county forms that open on a phone, and the job of keeping it all WCAG 2.1 AA, PDFs included, moves off your desk and onto ours. Published municipal pricing with no setup or build fee. County projects receive a written scope, a fixed implementation price, and a separate ongoing support option.

Not ready to redesign? The audit is still free. Hand it to whoever maintains your site now and let them fix what it finds. A site residents can use is the point, whoever does the work.

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Already planning a redesign? Skip the audit and book a call with Josh Smith, founder. Or see pricing first.

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.

Read the Pennsylvania Title II guide

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. It's free and it's yours to keep, with no obligation to hire us.

The report is written for your current web developer or site manager, so they can work through it item by item. If they fix everything on it, good. That was the goal.

What we don't do is fix-only or PDF-only work. Bluenilla's remediation comes with a full redesign, where we take over as your web developer and carry the responsibility for WCAG 2.1 AA from then on.

Already know you want a new site? You don't need the audit first. Schedule a redesign and accessibility consultation with Josh Smith, founder.

An automated scan of every page we can find from your sitemap or by following your links, with the specific WCAG rule each failure violates
A check of the PDFs linked from those pages for readable text, tagging, and a document title
A list of any pages your server failed to load during the scan, with links, so they can be fixed and checked
A plain-English summary you can hand to your supervisors, council, or commissioners, and to your current web developer

This complimentary review is a starting point: an automated scan of the public pages we can reach and a check of the PDFs linked from them. It identifies initial findings and next steps; it is not a comprehensive WCAG conformance assessment. For counties, the review covers one agreed public website. Additional departmental sites, applications, and a detailed document assessment can be scoped separately.

03What's included

Built around the work a municipal office actually does.

Every site we redesign includes all of the following. There is no tier where accessibility is an upgrade, and none of it is sold separately from a Bluenilla build.

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, pages and PDFs alike, an annual VPAT/ACR from an independent accessibility vendor, and a public accessibility statement with a working contact path.

04Pricing

Published pricing for townships and boroughs.

You should be able to put a number in front of your board without sitting through a sales call first. These municipal packages have no setup fee and no build fee. Migration, training, and the initial accessibility remediation are included in the annual price. Accessibility requires ongoing attention as pages, documents, and software change.

Every price here is for a full redesign with Bluenilla as your web developer. We don't sell remediation, PDF work, or one-off fixes on their own. If you're keeping your current site, the free audit is the best thing we can give you.

Bluenilla annual pricing by municipal population, with the monthly equivalent and tier name for each band
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

Full site redesign and content migration of up to 300 documents (counted by file moved, not by PDF page)
Hosting, software updates, and daily backups
WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance at launch, and our responsibility after it
An annual VPAT/ACR from an independent third-party accessibility vendor
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

Added to a redesign, quoted separately

These are only available as part of a Bluenilla redesign, never on their own.

Historical PDF remediation, priced per PDF page — $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. Rates apply to standard documents after sample review. Complex tables, fillable forms, and documents requiring substantial reconstruction are quoted separately. County document projects receive a written estimate based on page count, complexity, and testing requirements.
Migration beyond 300 documents, counted by file
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.

Our published municipal packages are priced below Pennsylvania's 2026 quotation threshold. Procurement requirements depend on the entity, contract scope, total value, and applicable exceptions. Your purchasing officer or solicitor should confirm the required process. Bluenilla provides clear pricing and scope documentation to support that review.

Counties are scoped separately. See how county engagements are priced.

Ready to talk about a redesign?

Book a consultation with Josh Smith, founder. Bring your population, your current site, and your timeline, and leave with a tier or a written county scope. No audit required.

Schedule a consultation Or start with a free audit

05County engagements

County websites, scoped around the work.

County websites serve multiple departments, elected offices, and public services. We price each engagement around the websites, content, documents, and workflows involved, with clear deliverables and responsibilities.

Discovery and assessment
Start with the complimentary accessibility review. When a deeper assessment is needed, we separately scope content inventories, department interviews, representative manual testing, document sampling, and an implementation plan.
Website implementation
A fixed project price for the agreed redesign, content migration, staff workflows, training, accessibility testing, and launch. Included websites, departments, templates, and page counts are documented before work begins.
Ongoing maintenance and accessibility support
A separate recurring agreement for hosting, software updates, accessibility reviews, and staff support. Included work, response times, and additional-work rates are defined in writing.
Documents and additional systems
PDF remediation is scoped by page count and complexity. Additional departmental websites and integrations with payment, permit, GIS, court, or other systems are identified and quoted separately.

For county engagements, the proposal identifies the primary county contact, participating departments, approval responsibilities, and support allowance. You still work directly with the person doing the work.

You receive a written proposal showing implementation costs, recurring costs, and separately scoped work before making a commitment.

Request a free audit Book an initial consultation

06How 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.