I don't understand the cost here. The number of sources should be relatively tiny - it's not a general Internet search. The amount of data scraped would seem to be relatively tiny - how much data is there on suburban-county, PA?
We as nerds have failed to create a common standard and we have voters have failed to expand FOIA to surface all of the many meetings, documents, agreements, etc that govern our life so we're left with AI scraping tools that likely do a poor job to fill the gap.
Normally there is data, meetings, events and so that you wouldn't report on in a newspaper, because it's really only relevant to maybe a few thousand people, but for those thousands it might be really important.
My city publishes a lot of stuff on their website, it's hard to find, relevant to maybe a thousand people, maybe less. The school board meetings, public utility companies, companies in general all publish massive amounts of information that's never surfaced, but is relevant to those living in the vicinity. Being able to collect all of this, sort it, assess it's relevans and produce hyper local news could be a massive boost for local grassroots movements and participation in local affairs and elections.
There is a community-run project that standardizes each election's results across states, counties, and precincts. It could be a template for local info releases.