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How tech can help localities solve weather gaps

Chris Teale — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 13:00:00 -0400

When a tornado touched down in Lee County, Florida several years ago and moved through a populated area, local officials thought the National Weather Service would have warned them beforehand.

But neither the assigned NWS forecast office in Tampa Bay nor the other closest in Miami issued a tornado warning to Lee County. Ben Abes, the county’s director of public safety, explained that, upon contacting the NWS, officials there said they had not seen the tornado approaching on their radar.

When it hit around 6:30 a.m., the county received multiple 911 calls and had first responders in the middle of a shift change, but formal warnings needed to come from weather forecasters, so Lee County was caught flat-footed in its response.

“There was this really significant disconnect that unfortunately we understood in great detail,” Abes said. “Thankfully, no fatalities, but we had some injuries and we had a tremendous amount of damage we had to clean up from.”

The incident stemmed from a phenomenon known as radar gaps, where weather or other climate activity is too low to be seen by the radars controlled by the NWS and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather stations, but it still has real-world impacts. Partly, that is due to aging technology that lawmakers have sought to upgrade and replace, and it is estimated to impact millions of people and leave them vulnerable to tornadoes, floods and more.

Job cuts and other turmoil at NOAA and NWS wrought by the Department of Government Efficiency have worsened the predicament, and led many state and local governments to turn to technology to try and stay ahead of the problem themselves and supplement federal forecasting tools.

Lee County, for example, has been hit by Hurricanes Irma and Ian in recent years, and since then has invested in its own tools to provide localized weather forecasting and data. Abes said that has included tidal gauges from Hohonu and the weather intelligence platform Weatherstem, as a lack of localized data before had left the county “fairly blind,” he said.

The county also just installed an enhanced radar system from Climavision, which not only tracks major weather events like thunderstorms and hurricanes, but also air quality and other metrics. Having a localized radar can pick up on events that NWS may miss, and it can then be used to supplement their existing infrastructure and radars to build a fuller picture of what is happening.

“There's a lot of things that happen at the lower levels of the atmosphere that are not visible, and so they don't get a special weather statement, they don't get a severe thunderstorm warning because, from their vantage point, they don't have the same visibility as they would storms that are directly adjacent to the Tampa Bay region,” Abes said. “We're a solid hour-and-a-half drive from the Weather Service office. If you're 15 or 30 minutes away from the Weather Service office, they could tell you the moment it starts raining, but they can't necessarily see that until some of the storms really explode here in Southwest Florida.”

Cities, counties and state governments are on the forefront of dealing with more extreme weather, especially as the nation and the world reckon with the effects of climate change and a rapidly warming planet creating more instability in the atmosphere. And perhaps the biggest issue for governments at all levels is finding the money to make themselves more resilient and better prepared for extreme weather.

“There will never be enough public dollars,” Melissa Hoffer, Massachusetts’ climate chief, said during a webinar last month hosted by Clark University. “What we had previously in the [Inflation Reduction Act] was a good accelerator, which we don't have anymore. But now without that, we have to figure it out. People at the local government level are the ones that are dealing with this issue, no matter if the federal government is there or not.”

The constraints on public dollars have led to greater calls for public-private partnerships, like the kind underway in Lee County, where private industry helps governments better track local weather using high-end tools. Providers, then, need to show that they are not trying to privatize weather but are supplementing what already exists and doing so to help the public good.

“The technology that we bring to the table is not here to replace the National Weather Service,” said Tara Goode, Climavision’s vice president of strategic partnerships and radar operations. “The number one thing we need to do is prove that we work with the National Weather Service, which is an easy thing to do. Our data is operationalized in their environment. That provides a lot of confidence and credibility. Any technological provider or potential P3 partner needs to ensure they are being respectful and responsible when they enter that conversation, because it's a non-starter if you try to replace the really great work that's already being done at the federal level.”

For local leaders, such partnerships need a “great deal of scrutiny” to ensure they’re a good fit, Abes said. Lee County has engaged with P3s since 2013, he said, and given how the relationship with NWS has evolved, governments can try something new.

“These are complex problems, and sometimes we get stuck in this rut of trying to solve them the same way,” Abes said. “We’ve tried to take down every possible barrier and find ways to fix those gaps.”

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NYC’s new school AI ban explained: What’s changing? What’s still murky?

Alex Zimmerman and Michael Elsen-Rooney, Chalkbeat — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Chalkbeat.

After months of waiting, Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday released the outlines of New York City’s approach to dealing with artificial intelligence and screen time in schools next year.

But just eight days before the start of the school year, there are still many details to be worked out.

The city will ban student-facing generative AI tools, like chatbots and tutors that respond to prompts, in preschool- through eighth-grade classrooms, while allowing limited AI use in high school. It will also limit screen time for younger kids.

Officials said they’re “disabling” AI features on 38 software programs already in use in city schools, but haven’t shared what those products are. Officials posted the written guidance online Wednesday evening.

The policy opens up a host of thorny new questions, including how the city will determine what level of AI is acceptable in tech products, what happens to existing programs that violate the policy, and how the guidelines will be enforced.

And city officials have admitted they have little hard data on how much AI is currently in use across the 1,600 schools. They declined to release the results of a survey asking schools about AI use, despite repeated requests.

The new policy, which Mamdani described as the “broadest generative AI moratorium in the nation,” has already drawn a mix of reactions.

A coalition of advocates pushing for a two-year moratorium on AI use said the new policy is a “step in the right direction,” but raised concerns about pilot programs that will allow tens of thousands of high school students to use tools involving generative AI.

Others said the new policy will be disruptive for schools. Richard Buery, a former deputy mayor and CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, said educators are already using tech tools to quickly generate lessons that parents can use for their children at home or get faster feedback on their students’ classroom assignments.

“While well-intentioned, a blanket one-year AI ban, without exceptions, on all uses through middle school is not the right call,” he said in a statement.

Here’s what we know so far, and what we’re still waiting to learn.

How Long Will the AI Moratorium Last?

The prohibition on student-facing AI tools from preschool through eighth grade will run for at least this coming school year. City officials vowed to convene a coalition of educators, students, parents, union officials, and experts to help assess the policy and whether to change it in the future.

Which Specific Products are Being Banned, and Who Decides?

New York City principals can buy education technology in two basic ways: For smaller purchases, they can contract directly with a vendor. For larger ones, they generally have to use a vendor that already has a citywide contract with the Education Department.

Mamdani said Wednesday that the Education Department is “disabling” AI features in 38 existing citywide ed tech contracts. Officials haven’t provided a list of those companies. But Mamdani’s education adviser Ailish Brady said that the widely used digital tutor Amira and the digital version of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reading curriculum — the most popular of the three mandated NYC Reads literacy programs — will both “turn off” their AI components.

A spokesperson for HMH said “there is no student-facing AI in Into Reading,” the company’s elementary school reading curriculum.

An Amira spokesperson said the product is currently used in 222 schools, and that the company has reached out to the Education Department for clarity on what the new AI policy will mean for the product.

Brady didn’t directly respond to a question about whether Google’s AI chatbot Gemini, which comes pre-loaded on many students’ Chromebook laptops, would be disabled. But advocates who met with city officials said they were told that Gemini would be shut off.

In cases where a company can’t simply turn off the AI features of a product, the city will no longer use that product, Brady added.

How city officials will determine whether AI has been sufficiently scrubbed from a product isn’t clear.

After freezing all new education purchases for nearly two months, officials gave principals the green light Wednesday to resume buying software, with a big caveat. Any new request for ed tech under $25,000 will now undergo an extra layer of review from the Education Department’s IT, legal, and contracts teams, Deputy Chancellor Lindsey Oates told principals in a Monday webinar. Oates warned the reviews will “take some time,” potentially creating an additional bottleneck in a contracting process that can already be slow.

Who Will be Exempt From the Ban?

Technology that supports students with disabilities and English language learners with specific educational needs will be exempt, officials said. Brady offered examples: an eye-tracking technology that helps students with cerebral palsy type and an Education Department-created program called Hello App that helps students learning English communicate with teachers.

There will also be exceptions for required reading and math assessments that students take on computers to track their progress throughout the year.

How is AI Being Used in High Schools?

High schools have the most leeway with AI tools and are allowed to use them in career and technical education programs. There are also five AI pilot programs involving generative tools that city officials have already approved, ranging from platforms that help students conduct close analysis of texts to a math program that prompts students to explain their thinking. The five programs are: Quill, Edia, Brisk Teaching, Playlab, and Intel AI-Ready Schools.

Officials said a maximum of 50,000 high school students would participate in those pilot programs, or roughly 17% of all high school students.

How Will Students Learn AI Literacy?

All high school students across the city will be required to complete two 45-minute AI literacy modules every year that cover the basics of AI, as well as issues related to bias and misinformation.

Which Students do the New Screen Time Recommendations Apply to?

The city’s youngest students — from preschool to second grade — are not supposed to use individual laptops and other devices under the new policy. In grades 3-5, students are allowed to use individual devices but for no more than 30 minutes a day, officials recommend. In middle school, the recommended limit is 45 minutes. There are no screen time guidelines for high school.

As school districts across the nation are moving to limit screens, one reason some are allowing devices beginning in third grade: It’s the year state testing begins, and exams are increasingly administered digitally, including in New York.

How Will Teachers be Allowed to Use AI?

Teachers are allowed to use AI tools to help plan lessons, translate materials, or draft communications, according to an Education Department summary of the policy. They may not use AI tools to grade student work, monitor behavior, develop special education plans, or assist with student mental health challenges.

How Will This be Enforced?

Officials didn’t spell out any clear enforcement mechanism for ensuring schools adhere to the AI policy.

Mamdani conceded much of the enforcement will have to happen at the classroom and school level. “Whenever there’s been a shift, teachers have had to be at the forefront,” he said during the press conference. “And so we trust that teachers, principals, superintendents will be there.”

He added that central Education Department officials will subject all new ed tech purchase requests to a “rigorous” review process.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew, who has recently clashed with Mamdani on several major policy priorities, expressed concern that it will largely fall on “school communities or individual educators to figure out after the fact if what their school uses fits the new policy.”

What About Students Using AI Outside of School?

One of the big critiques of the Education Department’s first draft of the AI guidance from March was that it completely dodged the biggest question on many teachers’ minds: how to respond to students using AI outside of school, including to cheat on writing assignments.

So far, the new guidance doesn’t seem to offer any more specifics on that front. Samuels noted that teachers have been dealing with the AI cheating issue for years (many schools developed their own AI policies while waiting for citywide guidance) and emphasized that schools will need to enlist parents for support.

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Nevada lawmakers propose oversight for state, local agencies using AI

Michael Lyle, Nevada Current — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Nevada Current.

Concerned that Nevada agencies have relied on artificial intelligence without much oversight, state lawmakers are proposing legislation to establish basic standards on how the technology is used by state and local government entities.

Proposed legislation that would require transparency around AI and prevent bias in automated decision making was among the nine bill draft requests approved at the Aug. 27 the interim Government Affairs Committee meeting.

Democratic state Sen. Dina Neal, who recommended the committee pursue the AI legislation, said a variety of government departments integrated AI systems into their agencies “without statutory action.”

“I think that it’s high time that although folks see that there is a benefit to make work more efficient, there is also some risk that I think we need to evaluate,” Neal said.

The proposal will be taken up in the 2027 Legislative Session, which begins Feb. 1.

Agencies, including the Nevada Department of Employment, Training, and Rehabilitation and the Department of Motor Vehicles, have implemented AI to aid with the work flow. DETR began using the technology to help with the appeals process for unemployment benefits.

There are questions around its use, said Democratic state Sen. Edgar Flores, who chairs the committee.

“We want to make sure that there is a human that ultimately is making these decisions,” Flores said. He added that lawmakers have heard of situations where people were denied benefits, sought to speak to an actual person during the appeals process, but couldn’t.

“It shuts you down,” he said.

There hasn’t been a review of instances where the system has failed or automation bias may have occurred, and the state needs to determine “how many errors occurred where there was a need for a human response, but the human response did not occur,” Neal said.

Lawmakers anticipate a robust response from state and local agencies when the bill comes up for the discussion.

“When they say ‘everything’s fine,’ then I’m going to say there needs to be an audit to make sure that what you said is fine,” Neal said.

In 2025, 38 states adopted some type of artificial intelligence related policy, according to a National Conference of State Legislatures database.

Neal introduced legislation in 2025 that sought to establish broad guardrails around artificial intelligence companies that sought to set up shop in Nevada as well as the use of the technology in various sectors.

Senate Bill 199 sought to prohibit law enforcement from using AI to generate police reports and teachers from using software to create lesson plans.

It received a wide range of opposition from business industry, law enforcement, and school district employees. The bill didn’t make it out of committee.

President Donald Trump has sought to limit states from regulating AI.

The massive tax and spending legislation passed in July 2025, called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” originally included a provision preventing states from pursuing AI regulations for a decade.

The provision was stripped out of the legislation before its final passage.

Trump signed an executive order in December 2025 seeking, again, to limit states from taking regulatory actions.

Republican Assemblymember Lisa Cole was worried about the state running afoul of Trump’s order.

“I’m just a little concerned that inside of the recommendations language, we’ve got protections against bias in automated decision making,” she said.

However, Neal said she has already looked into “how far the state needed to usurp its own position under 10th Amendment,” which protects states from federal overreach.

“An executive order, although it may state its suggestions, might not necessarily tie the hands specifically of a state,” Neal said.

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The floor, not the ceiling: Moving beyond California’s SB 707 to build real public trust

Alexandra Albert — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Earlier this summer, key provisions of California's Senate Bill 707, known as the Brown Act, came into effect.

Local public agencies across California are understandably now focused on implementing the new mandates of two-way remote participation, accessible web pages and expanded language translations.

Meeting these new legal stipulations is a significant effort. For stretched city clerks, IT departments and public engagement teams, simply checking these boxes by the deadline is a major achievement. However, while meeting the provisions of the law is now a legal necessity, focusing solely on the legal baseline of the legislation risks missing the opportunity to build real public trust.

The Trust Gap

Opening the digital door is a necessary first step to increasing access, but a portal is not a relationship with residents and stakeholders. Recent research reveals a gap between the efforts of public agencies and the lived experience of the communities they serve.

Across North America, fewer than two in five community members believe their views actually influence local decisions. Even more concerning, 60% believe decisions are already made before a public consultation even begins.

Public appetite for participation remains strong, but while people are showing up, filling out forms and logging into remote meetings, many often leave feeling unheard. This disconnect does not stem from a lack of skill or willingness among public sector engagement experts. Instead, it happens when the connection between public participation and the final outcome remains invisible.

True trust is not built by the technology that lets a resident participate, it’s built by what happens after. When community input disappears into a black box, public skepticism grows. To narrow the trust gap, public bodies must shift their focus from managing the logistics of input to fully engaging people in the process, which includes communicating how their input impacted decisions. Participants need to know their time was respected, their input was weighed and the engagement was meaningful.

Closing the Loop

This is where public agencies can build on their workflows by using engagement data to close the feedback loop. When a public comment is received, whether via a remote stream, an email, an online platform, or an in-person workshop, it shouldn’t exist in isolation. By capturing and analyzing participation data at scale, agencies can transform hundreds of scattered comments into clear, actionable insights.

Instead of spending weeks manually sorting through spreadsheets and notebooks, modern AI-driven data tools allow teams to quickly identify key community themes and geographic trends across large sets of qualitative data.

This efficiency returns valuable time to staff, who can focus on strategic questions: What matters most to this neighborhood? Who is missing from the conversation? How can this feedback directly improve the project layout or budget?

More importantly, a structured approach to engagement data enables true traceability. It allows an agency to provide the community with a clear line of sight from input to outcome.

When the public can see a direct summary of what was heard, what changed because of their feedback, and, just as importantly, what could not change and why, the entire process becomes defensible and transparent–and builds trust with members of the community.

Moving to Visible Impact

Far from being hesitant about modern tools, 93% of engagement practitioners see genuine potential in AI to analyze feedback at scale, identify patterns across complex datasets, and improve accessibility and coordination across complex engagement programs.

The willingness to embrace modern technology is already there, agencies simply need the connected systems to support it, which hopefully legislation like that in California prompts.

Strengthening accessibility and translation requirements ensures that a more representative mix of voices can join the conversation. But the ultimate goal of public engagement is to make better decisions and deliver projects with confidence and trust. So, when implementing new requirements, we must ask ourselves a critical question: are we treating compliance as the ceiling of community engagement or the floor?

By using data to close the loop, public institutions can show residents that their participation is meaningful, not just a legal formality. This legislative action is a great reminder that officials are making legislative changes not just to comply with the law, but to transform community consultation into the trust-building mechanism it’s meant to be.

Alexandra Albert is community engagement practice lead at Open Point.

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New AI center announced for St. Louis

Chris Teale — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:00:00 -0400

A new center for artificial intelligence supported by several large tech companies was announced last week in St. Louis, Missouri, in a bid to position the region as a leader on AI technology.

The Spirit of St. Louis Innovation Center will have access to high-performance computing and AI resources, which can be accessed by researchers, governments, startups and others in the industry. The center also has committed to using AI for the public good: 20% of its resources and capacity will be dedicated to civic projects that benefit St. Louis and its surrounding region.

Amazon Web Services, Google, NVIDIA, Overture Maps Foundation, WEKA and World Wide Technology will be founding members for the center, which will be administered by GeoSTL, a local nonprofit geospatial and AI economic development entity.

“The creation of the Spirit of St. Louis AI Innovation Center marks a pivotal moment for our region and the broader tech community,” Mark Munsell, executive director of GeoSTL, said in a statement. “With the combined expertise and resources of these extraordinary partners, we are laying the foundation for a transformative collaborative space that will drive the next generation of AI solutions that benefit humanity.”

Once it is fully operational, the center intends to hold what it calls "The Spirit of St. Louis AI Innovation Competitions," a series of challenges in which academia, nonprofits and businesses will look to use AI and tech to solve some of the area’s biggest challenges. Officials said that could include agriculture technology; advanced manufacturing; bio and health sciences; national security; transportation; and supply chain logistics.

The center takes inspiration from St. Louis’ history of aviation, including Charles Lindbergh’s historic “Spirit of St. Louis” flight, which celebrates its centennial next year.

“As pioneering long-distance aviators, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh relied on maps — the original geospatial databases, to explore our planet,” Erik Lindbergh, chairman of the nonprofit Lindbergh Foundation that is a partner in this effort and others, said in a statement. “The Lindbergh Foundation is proud to be part of the history of ongoing evolution of geospatial information technologies and the future that connects St. Louisans to the many opportunities in this exciting field.”

Regions across the United States have been striving to stand out as leaders on AI, with many looking to do so while investing in local businesses and their workforce. Earlier this year, experts said economic development and encouraging new technologies should move beyond the “incentive wars” where states and localities try to outdo each other on tax breaks and other attempts to woo businesses, often large tech companies.

Meanwhile, a study last year from the Brookings Institution found that there are a number of cities all with the potential to be leaders on AI adoption and use, beyond the usual suspects of Silicon Valley in California; New York City; Austin, Texas; and Washington, D.C. St. Louis could be looking to capitalize on this move away from the traditional technology power centers with this AI center, which officials said “will help advance cutting-edge research, industry application, and workforce development in St. Louis innovation clusters, creating a global ‘digital utility’ that will drive economic growth across the region and beyond.”

The center is expected to formally launch its programming and innovation challenges in the coming months.

“St. Louis has a long history of pioneering the future, and the Spirit of St. Louis AI Innovation Center is no exception,” Ron Kitchens, managing partner of the regional economic development organization Greater St. Louis, Inc., said in a statement. “This groundbreaking partnership will further establish our region as the center for geospatial and artificial intelligence innovation, catalyze economic growth, and attract the nation’s top talent to St. Louis to address humanity’s most pressing challenges. We commend GeoSTL for its leadership and look forward to our continued partnership as the Center expands its programming.”

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Mamdani ends Adams’s Chromebook spending spree

Nick Garber, New York Focus — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by New York Focus.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is canceling a contract with T-Mobile to hook up New York City public school students’ laptops with cell service. The contract would have cost well over $100 million over the next three years, making the move one of the most significant single cost-cutting measures of Mamdani’s young mayoralty.

New York Focus spotlighted the questionable contract last year, after it was inked by then-Mayor Eric Adams’s administration in the final months of his tenure. The city agreed to pay more than $320 million for 350,000 Chromebook laptops equipped with T-Mobile LTE service, along with up to one million lines of cell service for those computers and other school-issued devices. The T-Mobile portion of the contract cost the city about $3.5 million per month and just under $200 million in total.

Adams signed the contract despite data indicating that the large majority of public school students already have internet at home. City officials had also raised internal concerns about the contract, complaining that it required the city to pay T-Mobile a flat fee regardless of how many lines of cell service were active. The city had approached T-Mobile without soliciting competing offers from fellow city vendors Verizon and AT&T, the critics noted, and it was unclear whether the Department of Education even wanted the internet-connected laptops.

Eight months into his tenure, Mamdani is now terminating the T-Mobile part of the contract, a move first reported by Chalkbeat. Department of Education spokesperson Nicole Brownstein said that the administration views the contract as unnecessary because it replicates an existing program that allows schools to pay $10 a month per child to provide LTE service through Verizon to any student who needs it.

“We know reliable technology access is critical for our students, and our schools are ready to support any family who needs help accessing LTE at home through established internet programs already available to every student through their school,” Brownstein said.

“We appreciate T-Mobile for their support of our students and educators. Ultimately this program, launched under the prior administration, duplicated existing resources at an unnecessary cost. By discontinuing this component of this contract, we are saving taxpayer dollars while continuing to deliver the internet connectivity we know our school communities rely on.”

Brownstein said last week that the administration had instructed school principals to identify families without internet access and give them LTE service before the first day of school on Sept. 10. Although the 350,000 laptops have already been distributed to schools, city officials also told principals that the T-Mobile student plans would end on Aug. 31, Chalkbeat reported.

The move comes amid a broader backlash against education technology, including a state bill introduced this month that would sharply limit the use of screens in classrooms and the distribution of school-issued devices. Mamdani is set to announce new technology rules including a ban on individual screens until third grade, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.

Naveed Hasan, an elected member of the city’s school board, commended Mamdani for canceling the T-Mobile contract and urged him to go further in curbing waste in school technology spending and in reviving plans for city-owned tech infrastructure. The school board had grown increasingly skeptical of tech vendors and recently rejected a contract for Oracle software.

The city did not provide an official estimate for how much money would be saved by cutting the contract, which has already been in effect for about a year. The savings may be partially offset by more students receiving LTE service through the Verizon program. But at nearly $50 million per year, the contract was costlier than many of the other programs that Mamdani decided to slash as part of cost-cutting efforts in his first budget earlier this year — like a $9.9 million Department of Social Services consulting contract with McKinsey.

That initial effort helped the city find $1.77 billion in savings over two years, which represents less than one percent of the city’s spending over that period. Mamdani wants to double down on that work, announcing in July that he will ask city agencies to find more savings worth 2.5 percent of their budgets.

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States urge schools to use AI, but leave teachers on their own to stop cheating

Lily Altavena, Chalkbeat — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Chalkbeat.

Paige Wyatt heard plenty from administrators about using AI to generate lesson plans at the school where she taught high school English.

Her students used AI to cheat so frequently she resorted to spending her own money on detection tools. Yet she never got help with what she really wanted: how to effectively catch and stop the cheaters, some of whom were very clearly just copying and pasting from Google’s AI summaries.

Teachers like Wyatt consistently identify cheating as a major concern in the AI era, and 70% of teens report using AI for schoolwork, a Common Sense Media survey published last month found. But that concern is getting little recognition from states. While at least 13 states have passed laws about AI in education, the laws most often direct state agencies and districts to create their own AI guidance, meaning lawmakers have frequently absolved themselves from making tough decisions.

Meanwhile, roughly three out of four states have published information to help guide AI use in education. But a Chalkbeat review found these documents tend to skirt the issue of cheating, offering little in the way of concrete steps to halt or deter students from offloading work to AI. Instead, they dedicate more real estate to AI literacy and ways teachers can use AI for efficiency.

All of that beating around the bush has left educators and districts to their own devices to come up with ways to deter and catch AI-enabled cheaters. It’s become an exhausting endeavor that hasn’t turned up any definitive solutions, educators and researchers said.

There’s no surefire way to detect AI-generated content. Nor is there an agreed-upon definition for cheating: Can students use AI to outline an essay but not write it? Can they use it to copy edit? Some states have crafted acceptable use policies which make some, but not all, of these distinctions.

Wyatt quit her teaching job last year. She didn’t leave solely due to AI, but its impact on her work was a factor.

“We really need real consequences,” she said. “We need workshops for teachers to detect cheating. We need workshops for kids.”

Most of the nation’s 10 largest school districts are developing or have developed more specific policies to try to prevent using generative AI to cheat. But it hasn’t always been easy: New York City delayed the rollout of its AI guidance for months amid fierce backlash, before announcing a new policy this week. Half of those districts explicitly discourage using AI detection tools.

Many of the official responses might underscore the urgency of the problem without helping to address it, which could only increase teachers’ anxiety.

“I think the situation teachers are in feels bad, and feels like they ought to have a solution now that they don’t have,” said Justin Reich, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the host of a podcast about how AI is shaping K-12 education.

Letting AI ‘Run Amok’ Could Ruin Student Learning

Historically, state policymakers haven’t rushed to create laws governing new technology and education.

States didn’t really start to adopt computer science requirements until the 2010s. And while the iPhone launched a smartphone revolution in 2007, the first state restrictions on cell phone use in schools didn’t come until 16 years later, in 2023.

States may be moving faster when it comes to mainstream generative AI, which took off with the advent of ChatGPT in late 2022.

“Folks can’t just hope this will pass. This is a major change, and students are already using it,” said John King, former U.S. education secretary and current chancellor of the State University of New York system. “This isn’t tomorrow’s problem. This is today’s problem.”

The District of Columbia and at least 37 states have issued recommendations for public schools about AI. Their documents range from short webpages to Illinois’ 400-page behemoth. Many define different types of AI, stress that any AI use should still be led by humans, and link to outside resources — some of which have been developed with the support of big AI companies.

But they often devote just a page or a few paragraphs to academic integrity.The documents also seem light on actual guidance and don’t include many citations, Reich said. That’s because there’s little evidence to show how effective AI tools are in the classroom, or what policies would effectively stop cheating.

“If you just let this run amok in secondary schools, all kinds of learning activities will stop,” he said. “We do not know what to do. There’s no evidence-based policy. There’s no basis for development and professional development. Like we’re just making stuff up.”

More than a third of states urge schools not to rely solely on tools that promise to detect the use of AI, citing studies showing they are not effective and incorrectly flag genuine student writing as AI.

But many states then offer little else other than acceptable use policies. In California’s case, the state offers a list of questions for districts to mull when making policies around integrity in addition to an acceptable use policy.

In the absence of hard and fast rules, teachers have reported requiring students to complete more graded work in class, using pencil and paper.

Christopher Harris, the director of the school library system for the Genesee Valley BOCES, a regional district in western New York, wants educators to go further than that and reconsider how they measure learning. Writing may be less of a valid tool to assess if students are learning, now that AI “can suddenly write anything.”

He said students could submit an oral assignment, or teachers could focus on the learning process more than the product by asking students to explain how they respond to feedback when developing a project or presentation.

New York is one of the 13 states that hasn’t published AI resources for educators. Harris’ library system has been developing resources about AI for the state’s educators using grant money.

“I really wanted to help teachers understand they can’t control what kids do with AI,” he said. “The only control they have is their agency in developing assignments.”

Adopting AI Policies Not Straightforward For School Districts

Sara Brescia thought she had a no-brainer policy proposal for her fellow Manassas City Public Schools board members: adding AI misuse to the district’s code of student conduct.

The policy she proposed for the district in northern Virginia — a hotbed for the data centers AI relies on — would prohibit students from trying to pass off AI-generated content as their own. It specified that AI could only be used with a teacher’s permission, and required students to cite AI use. Students would be punished, up to and including with expulsion, for violating any of those provisions.

But other board members voted her idea down in late July. Lisa Stevens, another school board member who is also a teacher according to her LinkedIn page, worried the policy would add a burden onto teachers without giving them any tools to identify AI-generated work.

Brescia is skeptical about the value of those tools.

“We do not have a comprehensive approach,’’ she said. “We have the student code of conduct that says nothing.”

Wyatt said when she left the classroom, students were only becoming more fluent in methods to cheat. They were finding tools like QuillBot to disguise AI-generated writing and make it sound more like student writing.

She’s open to going back to the classroom, if she gets more administrative support to help detect the kind of AI misconduct that felt out of control when she left.

“As a community, we need a support network,” she said.

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Why ‘mundane’ uses are most effective for AI

Jake Segal — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Until recently, one analyst supporting San Jose, California’s 311 system spent nearly a quarter of the workday reading requests filed under “Other Issues.” Residents use this catch-all field to report everything from potholes to broken streetlights. Each submission had to be read, interpreted and sorted so the city could understand what people needed.

So the city gave the sorting to a large language model. The analyst now spends that recovered time identifying patterns, improving service insights and helping departments make better decisions about future services. The backlog shrank and the work got better, and a public servant got back a meaningful part of the day, focusing their judgement where it was most useful.

This is what artificial intelligence in government should mostly look like right now: not the chatbot that finally fixes the Department of Motor Vehicles, not the algorithm that ends homelessness, but the unglamorous tool that gives a caseworker their afternoon back to get real work done.

There’s reason for caution, certainly. Governments have a painful history of using automation for the wrong jobs. Michigan’s MiDAS system, a rules-based fraud-detection program, falsely accused tens of thousands of residents of unemployment fraud, then garnished wages and seized tax refunds. In Arkansas an algorithm used to allocate Medicaid home-care hours left some people with severe disabilities facing sudden cuts they couldn’t meaningfully understand or appeal.

Adjudicating who deserves benefits, who counts as a fraudster, who gets care requires human judgment.

The mundane use cases are different. Case managers, housing staff, workforce navigators, benefits administrators, police officers and analysts spend huge portions of their day on the administrative scaffolding: copying information between systems, filling forms with data they’ve already collected, tracking down missing documentation, wading through eligibility guidelines written in legalese.

About 69% of social workers cite administrative burden as a key driver of burnout, and a majority of police officers report spending more than three hours of every shift on paperwork. The work that actually requires their humanity — building trust with clients, understanding complex circumstances, exercising judgment — gets squeezed into whatever time remains.

There are clear opportunities. Natural language processing can pull structured information out of unstructured documents; smart forms can walk users through complex applications and catch errors before they cascade; chatbots can answer the routine staff questions that might eat up a senior colleague’s afternoon.

None of this requires a technological breakthrough. And critically, none of them touches the question of who is eligible, who is committing fraud, or who deserves care. They sit underneath those decisions, doing work that ideally should never have been a person’s job to begin with.

Our partners have gravitated toward these kinds of projects: a chatbot to help Alexandria, Virginia staff navigate building codes; a real-time document checker for benefits eligibility in New Mexico; a data cleaning and automation tool in San Antonio. None of these will make a magazine cover, they’re not moonshots, but they will give thousands of public servants their time back to focus on what’s most important.

There are hundreds of organic examples like these. Since 2023, San Jose has helped organize a national group of public servants to share what’s working, and the GovAI Coalition now includes more than 900 jurisdictions helping tune the right level of scrutiny to the right problem and train governments to do the work well.

To accelerate these efforts, we have to change the systems around them. Governments should adopt risk-tiered AI governance that moves quickly on low-stakes administrative automation, requires human review wherever errors really matter, and reserves the heaviest privacy, bias and security controls for systems that touch rights, eligibility, or enforcement. In other words, automate the paperwork, not the judgment: use AI to summarize, sort, translate, flag, draft and check; require people to decide, approve, deny, sanction and enforce.

Six months from now, AI will be more capable than it is today. Governments that wait for the technology to settle will be waiting forever, and the people they serve will keep paying the cost of paperwork that should have been automated a decade ago.

The question for public-sector leaders isn’t whether to bet on the frontier of what AI can do, it’s whether to use the tools that already work to give their people back the parts of the job that actually require a person. The real promise of AI in government isn’t replacing public servants, it’s giving them more time to be public servants.

Jake Segal is managing director for the public sector practice of Social Finance, a nonprofit that mobilizes capital toward measurable impact by building and enabling outcomes-focused approaches.

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Data centers are Americans’ least favored development, poll finds

Chris Teale — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:00:00 -0400

Data centers are Americans’ least favored development project, behind power plants, office complexes and shopping malls, according to a survey released last week.

The joint survey by the nonprofit Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and consulting group Public First found that just 26% of Americans would support a new data center being built in their communities, compared to 46% that would oppose it.

That makes a new data center the least supported of 10 potential development projects respondents were presented with, far behind the support for new housing (58%), a road or highway (48%) and a solar farm (47%). Even the prospect of a new power plant or electrical infrastructure received more support at 35%.

Opposition to a new data center is so strong, in fact, that the survey found that 49% said they would rather nearby land be left undeveloped, even if it had no other viable uses than a data center.

The poll comes as data centers have become a major flashpoint politically and in local communities all over the U.S. Residents have consistently fought back against higher electricity and water prices, noise and other drawbacks. It’s prompted a response from many policymakers at the state and local level, including moratoriums, legislation and development agreements. But those behind the survey said it also suggests an unease about the growth of artificial intelligence, which data centers help support.

“We’ve seen opposition to data centers grow fast since the start of the year, but this is not just because of concerns about water and energy use,” Seb Wride, head of research and insights at Public First, said in a statement. “It is reflecting growing concern about AI in general. Data center developers are therefore not up against ordinary local resistance to a large building, but on the front lines of an otherwise intangible argument about how fast to move on AI.”

The survey notes that the depth of opposition to data centers on these shores is a “uniquely American phenomenon at the moment,” as a number of other countries are massively in favor of building more themselves. Nigeria, Vietnam, India and Indonesia are among the most supportive of building new data centers, according to the survey.

And the results suggest that concerns about electricity and water usage have broken through among the general public. ITIF and Public First found an increase in the number of people who believe that data centers raise electricity bills, deplete the water supply and are bad for the planet have all jumped significantly between January and July of this year.

Experts said during a webinar hosted by ITIF to coincide with the poll’s release that the data center sector needs to do a better job building relationships with communities to try and allay some of those concerns.

“This is something where industry, particularly all the biggest players, they want to be good citizens; they have those commitments around power, around water, and they want to do that,” said Jarrett Catlin, a policy advisor at trade group TechNet. “I think what we need to see and what we need to figure out is: what does it take to create the public trust between these developers, government institutions, and the public, so that people believe that that is what will happen, and that promises made are going to be promises kept?”

Data centers have proven to be potent politically, too, especially as campaigning for this year’s midterm elections ramp up. Governor candidates in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have already released television ads attacking their opponents for being too supportive of new data centers, and more may likely follow.

The ITIF and Public First poll found support for plenty of potential statewide policies towards data centers, which may give candidates plenty to think about. Requiring data centers to pay their full electricity costs and for any new infrastructure, as well as giving local residents a binding vote on whether a data center can be built in their local area both received overwhelming support as potential policies.

Meanwhile, a temporary pause or moratorium also received strong support, as did repealing any state-level tax breaks currently on offer and requiring minimum distances between data centers and schools and houses. A permanent ban on data centers in a state received a net approval of +20, which was not as high as some other suggested policies.

“This isn't just a case of people becoming more familiar with what data centers are,” Wride said during the webinar. “This is a case of people's center of gravity about what the impact data centers have on local areas is changing. And that's quite a stark shift to happen in just six months. It's not often that you see attitudes move that fast.”

Supporters of data centers remain adamant they must be built to ensure that the U.S. does not fall behind China in the race for AI supremacy.

“America will not succeed in AI if Americans oppose the basic infrastructure needed to build and run it,” ITIF President Daniel Castro said in a statement. “Data centers are to AI what highways were to the automobile: essential infrastructure that makes a transformative technology useful at scale. A country cannot lead the world in AI while opposing the infrastructure that makes that leadership possible. Blocking data centers may preserve some land in the short term, but over time it would leave America with less investment, fewer opportunities, and less ability to compete in the technologies that will shape the economy and national security.”

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White House launches water cybersecurity pilot in Texas

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:00:00 -0400

The Trump administration is formally launching a new water sector cybersecurity program Monday in San Antonio that will bring together the Office of the National Cyber Director, Texas Cyber Command, the office of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and private industry partners, according to two people familiar with the efforts.

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plans.

The initiative, dubbed Project Watershed 250, will use Texas as the testing ground for a six-month pilot aimed at finding vulnerabilities in water systems and helping utilities address them with private sector cybersecurity and artificial intelligence tools. The administration ultimately plans to expand the model nationwide.

Fox News first disclosed the program’s details Monday after receiving advance materials from the Trump administration and participating companies. The rollout follows Politico and Nextgov/FCW reporting on the plans last week.

“President Trump has cemented America’s leadership in AI security and innovation and is now bringing those exquisite tools to local communities and utilities in Texas and ultimately, across the nation,” National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said in a statement to Fox.

The EPA and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will serve as federal partners for the program. Firms including Microsoft, Reflection AI, Palo Alto Networks and industrial cybersecurity company Dragos will participate alongside ONCD and Texas Cyber Command. The utilities will receive the assistance at no cost, according to Abbott’s office.

The program was already under development before recent cyberattacks that officials suspect may be tied to Iran targeted community water systems in Minnesota and several other states. State officials have said affected water systems continued operating safely and experienced no known effects on public health. The FBI and CISA have been assisting with the response.

Water providers are widely considered among the country’s most vulnerable critical infrastructure sectors because many have limited cybersecurity personnel, funding and technical expertise. Current and former officials have also warned that poorly secured remote-access systems can give hackers a pathway into the equipment used to manage water treatment and distribution.

Texas Cyber Command, headquartered in San Antonio, was created last year with $135 million in state funding to protect state and local government systems and coordinate responses to cyberattacks. The organization is led by retired Navy Vice Adm. TJ White, a former commander of U.S. Fleet Cyber Command and the Cyber National Mission Force.

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State audit finds room for improvement in NYC’s AI governance

Annie McDonough — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 11:00:00 -0400

The capabilities of artificial intelligence have grown leaps and bounds in three years. But in the three years since state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli found “incomplete and ad hoc approaches” to AI governance in New York City agencies, progress on filling in the gaps has been comparatively modest.

In a new follow-up report to his office’s 2023 audit on AI governance in New York City agencies – such as guardrails for use and systems to assess risks – DiNapoli found the city has “made progress on AI oversight efforts” but that work remains on some important oversight and accountability measures. “The city still does not maintain a complete inventory of AI tools used across agencies, lacks consistent citywide standards and has not established a formal process for public concerns related to AI systems,” he said in a statement to City & State.

The initial audit, which spanned January 2019 to November 2022, surveyed AI governance systems at a sample of city agencies including the Administration for Children’s Services, the New York City Police Department, the Department of Education and the Department of Buildings.

Recommendations that DiNapoli issued to the city in 2023 have only been partially implemented as of this April, his office found in the new report. The city has made progress on steps like developing definitions for AI, publishing preliminary use guidance on generative AI, convening a citywide steering committee and starting a risk-assessment process for AI tools. But one recurring concern raised in the report is the voluntary and self-reported nature of some of the city’s policies, from risk assessments conducted on a “consultative or voluntary basis” to relying on city agencies to self-report what AI tools and systems they use.

“We appreciate the state Comptroller’s partnership and focus on this important topic and are reviewing the report and its recommendations,” Ray Legendre, a spokesperson for the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation said in a statement. “This March, our annual Local Law 35 report featured a record number of algorithmic tools documented. Under the leadership of Chief Technology Officer Lisa Gelobter, we look forward to building on this foundation and advancing the responsible use of AI tools in city government.”

New York City isn’t alone here. DiNapoli released a report last year finding that New York state does not have an effective AI governance framework in place for its agencies.

New York City has pursued multiple strategies for how to use and control AI tools, from then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s creation of an algorithms management and policy officer and publishing of an AI Strategy document, to then-Mayor Eric Adams’ AI Action Plan. As City & State previously reported, Mayor Zohran Mamdani hasn’t brought about any kind of sea change in agencies’ use of AI, though he’s expressed some skepticism about AI.

But the city’s use of AI has been highly scrutinized – nowhere more than in New York City Public Schools, which has delayed its release of guidance on how students and teachers can use AI. Some advocates have pushed for a moratorium on generative AI use in schools until appropriate guidance can be worked out. With classes set to start on Sept. 10, that guidance has yet to be released. Mamdani told City & State last week that news on that is coming “soon.”

Under Mamdani, the Office of Technology and Innovation hasn’t produced its own vision or new guidance for how city agencies should use or engage with AI tools, though existing uses appear to largely continue. Thanks to laws passed by the City Council last year, the administration is required to create a new Office of Algorithmic Accountability that will be tasked with analyzing algorithmic tools used by city agencies (which will include AI), evaluating their risks and creating a process for public complaints. That office was due to be created by June.

City Hall told City & State last month that the office was moving ahead and that six positions have been allocated in the budget, but no further announcements on the office’s work or plans have been made.

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The irony of scarcity: When risk and opportunity reside between agencies

Matt Weisner — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Conventional wisdom assumes scarcity discourages development. In reality, scarcity often does the opposite. As water, land, transmission capacity and other critical resources become more constrained, the rights associated with those resources often become more valuable. The same conditions creating concern in government offices may be creating opportunity in investment offices.

This is the irony of scarcity.

For planners, water managers and local governments, scarcity is usually understood as a constraint. For investors, scarcity can be the asset itself. One actor's constraint is another's opportunity. As the saying goes, don't invest in the gold miners. Invest in the picks and shovels.

What originally caught my attention was not artificial intelligence itself. It was the investment logic behind it. Spend enough time reading about hyperscale data centers and AI infrastructure and you eventually encounter a remarkably consistent thesis: don't bet on the technology, control the resources the technology needs.

Investors do not need to understand every possible future. They need to identify which resources are likely to retain value across multiple futures. Farmland with power, fiber and transmission access remains valuable regardless of which technology wins. Water rights remain water rights. Mineral rights have survived multiple energy booms. Pore space may become an important asset in the carbon management era.

AI expansion is accelerating demand for electricity, transmission capacity, water, and supporting infrastructure. Carbon capture is creating demand for pore space, pipeline networks, and other forms of resource infrastructure. Different technologies are competing for many of the same scarce resources.

Local governments do not have the same optionality as investors. A water allocation, zoning approval, transmission corridor, or subsurface storage permit represents a commitment made in one place at one moment in time. If a project underperforms, relocates, or evolves in unexpected ways, the investor's asset often retains value. The community's commitment remains.

Yet the challenge is not simply scarcity. The challenge is how scarcity is governed. Colorado governs water, land, energy and emerging technology through separate agencies, permits and definitions. Each institution manages its piece competently, yet many of the most important risks emerge between them. Water, land use, energy and economic development are deeply interconnected, yet the institutions responsible for them are organized around increasingly specialized responsibilities. Specialization produces expertise, but it can also make it harder to see how decisions in one domain affect another. The result is fragmentation.

Every generation introduces new technologies, but those technologies still depend on the same underlying resources: water, land, energy, and infrastructure. This dynamic is what originally drew me into researching carbon capture, utilization, and storage. Ask five different Colorado agencies what CCUS means and you may receive five different answers, some of them contradictory.

That observation became the basis of research I recently published in Risk Analysis, applying a novel adaptation of the bow-tie framework to CCUS development in Colorado. The framework itself is derived from the oil and gas industry's Shell HEMP risk-management model, underscoring how lessons from one resource era often reappear in the next.

One of the central findings of that research was that many of the most important risks associated with CCUS did not reside within a single agency or resource system. They emerged between them. The term CCUS often groups together technologies with very different implications for water, land use, energy demand and long-term stewardship.

When those distinctions blur, so do the impacts being measured and discussed. Colorado tracks water through a consumptive and non-consumptive framework largely developed around irrigation, municipal supply, and traditional industrial uses. Water injected underground for carbon dioxide storage does not fit neatly into either category, and current governance lacks a consistent way to define, measure, and account for it.

The larger lesson is what happens when new technologies interact with governance systems built around older assumptions. Emerging technologies often create new forms of resource use that do not fit neatly within existing categories. Governments are then forced to evaluate novel demands using frameworks originally designed for very different circumstances.

Data centers reveal a similar pattern. Data centers increasingly compete for water, power, transmission capacity, and land, yet the governance systems responsible for those resources are often separate from one another. Similar projects may face very different standards across neighboring jurisdictions. Competent local decisions are being made, but there is often no mechanism connecting them across jurisdictions.

A community that declines a project may simply watch the investment move elsewhere because the underlying resource remains valuable. Scarcity does not disappear when one jurisdiction says no. In many cases it makes the opportunity more attractive to the next jurisdiction in line, creating competition not only for the resource itself but also for suitable sites. Responsible stewardship does not eliminate competition. In many cases, it intensifies it.

Communities may compete for development while depending on many of the same underlying resource systems. A county that says no may simply watch a neighboring jurisdiction say yes. The project may move, but the competition does not. The water system often does not move. Neither does the electric grid, the labor market, or much of the infrastructure supporting growth. The investment opportunity may be local, but the consequences of scarcity often are not.

Communities can conserve water, invest in efficiency, and carefully manage growth, yet still find themselves constrained by decisions made elsewhere. Similar tensions appear throughout the American West, where scarcity is increasingly managed across interconnected systems rather than individual jurisdictions. The Colorado River illustrates this challenge well. States, municipalities, utilities, agricultural interests, and water users operate under different authorities yet remain connected through the same physical system.

Understanding those interactions begins with seeing the system as a whole. Counties, municipalities, regulators, utilities, and resource managers each see a different part of the system. No single institution naturally sees the whole picture. The challenge is not necessarily a lack of information. It is that information is often organized across agencies, disciplines, and governance systems designed to manage individual resources rather than interconnected ones.

Climate change is often discussed as a failure of political will or rationality. I tend to see it as a visibility problem. People and institutions generally make decisions based on the information available to them. The challenge is that climate and resource risks often emerge across agencies, disciplines, jurisdictions, and time horizons. No single actor naturally sees the entire system.

Improving governance often means making those interactions visible. The challenge facing governments is not simply managing scarcity, but seeing the system clearly enough to understand how scarcity, opportunity, and risk interact.

Climate change is a systems problem. Universities are organized around disciplines. Governments are organized around agencies. Climate change ignores both.

Ultimately, the challenge is governing interactions that no single institution is designed to see in full.

Matt Weisner is an independent researcher at Colorado State University.

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States are mostly compliant with website accessibility rule, report finds

Chris Teale — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:00:00 -0400

State governments are well on their way to complying with a federal rule on making their websites accessible to disabled people ahead of next year’s deadline, according to a new report.

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers found last week that most states report they are either partially or mostly compliant with the Department of Justice rule to ensure websites comply with various internationally recognized standards from the World Wide Web Consortium under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

NASCIO found that just two states reported they are minimally compliant or non-compliant at this stage. Implementation of that rule was pushed back by a year in April, meaning states and localities with populations above 50,000 people now have until April 26, 2027 to comply, while those with populations under 50,000 have until April 26, 2028.

But the group found that states remain worried about their ability to investigate complaints about non-compliance and remedy them. NASCIO reported that only half of states have a formal complaint investigation process at the state or agency level, while 17% have an informal or ad hoc process. And 51% of states said they have limited capacity for remediation, with 69% noting they do not have the resources or staff to remediate all their websites and applications. Conducting that remediation once an issue is discovered also takes between 30 and 90 days for 64% of respondents.

Despite those remaining challenges, NASCIO said state governments appear to be happy about the DOJ’s extension.

“Generally, states view the DOJ Final Rule extension announced earlier this year positively, noting that it will allow states to continue executing and refining current plans while reinforcing expectations that priorities and urgency remain unchanged,” the report says. “The consensus is that the extra year provides more time to continue momentum, develop program maturity, formalize structures and operationalize accessibility at scale.”

This latest push for accessibility began under former President Joe Biden’s administration in 2024, when the DOJ opened the rulemaking process. Since then, advocacy groups have sounded the alarm repeatedly about numerous accessibility issues in government websites, but President Donald Trump’s administration placed the rule under review just as the deadline was approaching, before pushing it off for another 12 months. That delay prompted a lawsuit from the National Federation of the Blind.

The rule required that government websites comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, known as WCAG. Those standards include that websites be easily navigable; provide services like text captions for audio and video; add alternative text for images; and not be designed to provoke seizures or physical reactions. But disability groups said it means continued unequal access to government services.

Local governments must also comply with the DOJ’s rule, which NASCIO notes have struggled as much or more than state governments with a lack of resources and staff. Forty-seven percent of states said they are working with their localities to help implement this rule, mostly with information and education, shared resources and outreach. NASCIO said states are “willing partners” on digital accessibility with their local governments, but only when those programs are mature enough to expand.

However, that leaves 53% of states that say they are unable to provide support to their local governments, NASCIO found, with operational capacity and resources as the main barriers preventing it. That separation between states and their local governments on this issue has been described as “non-collaborative and without formal communication channels,” the report found.

And it’s not clear that the one-year extension will be enough, as 51% of respondents said they are unsure if the extension will allow more local collaboration, while 26% said they do not expect to collaborate more with their localities. It may be a victim of different expectations, NASCIO said.

“Respondents mentioned that local governments tend to expect hands-on remediation; however, when these localities rely on outdated systems, the amount of hands-on support needed to remediate increases due to the system’s age,” the report says. “Even the most operational and resourceful digital accessibility programs may struggle to provide that type of support on a consistent basis.”

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Arkansas expects millions from Meta settlement. Here’s where other social media cases stand.

Andrew DeMillo, Arkansas Advocate — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Arkansas Advocate.

Arkansas is on track to receive at least $172 million in a landmark multistate settlement over online child safety. But the state’s other cases against social media platforms are still winding through the courts.

Attorney General Tim Griffin and Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders have been pushing for more scrutiny on social media firms through lawsuits and legislation. The Republicans hailed the settlement with the parent company of Facebook and Instagram as a win for that effort.

Meta’s $17.1 billion settlement with 51 attorneys general requires the company to enact new safety measures. The agreement requires court approval.

Here’s a look at where the state’s other cases involving social media stand:

TikTok

Griffin in 2023 filed lawsuits against TikTok in Cleburne and Union counties, accusing the social media platform of misleading parents about the availability of mature content.

The lawsuits accused TikTok of violating the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

TikTok argued that the lawsuit was barred by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects Internet companies from being sued because of users’ posts.

But a Cleburne County judge rejected TikTok’s motion to dismiss the case, and a trial is scheduled in March 2027. The Union County case is also pending but a trial date has not been set.

Google/YouTube

A 2024 lawsuit Griffin filed in Phillips County against YouTube, Google and their parent companies accuse them of intentionally targeting children with addictive and harmful content.

A judge rejected the companies’ argument that the case should be dismissed because of the Communications Decency Act’s protections. That decision has been appealed and is pending before the Arkansas Court of Appeals.

Snapchat

Griffin in June filed a lawsuit against Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, claiming that the California-based company’s social media platform was deceptively designed to addict minors who used it.

Snap has sought to move the case, which was originally filed in Phillips County, to federal court. The attorney general has filed a motion to move the case back to Phillips County.

Discord/Roblox

A June lawsuit Griffin filed in a Los Angeles court accuses the social gaming platforms Discord and Roblox of putting children at risk of sexual predation.

The lawsuit accuses the platforms of violating the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act and Public Nuisance Law.

A hearing in the case has been scheduled for November.

Social Media Restrictions

The lawsuits are progressing as Arkansas is defending its reworked law that would have required age verification to create new social media accounts.

A 2023 version of the law was struck down as unconstitutional. A federal judge in April temporarily blocked enforcement of a new version approved in 2025.

The state has appealed that decision to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is expected to hear arguments in the case next month.

The blocked law also includes other restrictions, including a requirement for social media platforms to maintain certain default settings for minors.

Another appeal pending before the 8th Circuit concerns a 2025 law that makes it easier for parents to sue social media platforms.

A federal judge in December blocked the law, which allows parents to sue social media platforms if exposure to content on their sites results in their child developing eating disorders, committing or attempting suicide, or becoming addicted to the platform’s feeds. The state appealed that ruling.

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Flock blockers: 5 proposals seeking to regulate Flock cameras and ALPRs in Pennsylvania

Justin Sweitzer — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0400

The use of Flock cameras and automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, has quickly become one of the most divisive issues in American politics. What started as a useful tool for law enforcement has become a national political flashpoint over privacy and surveillance concerns that have united Democrats and Republicans alike.

With more than 120,000 Flock cameras installed across the country, and an estimated 1,700 ALPRs in Pennsylvania, the technology has deeply unsettled Americans amid reports of law enforcement officers and others using the technology to stalk and surveil everyday people. According to an August survey by YouGov, Americans are largely split over whether they would support the installation of license plate cameras in their community: When asked about whether they would want an ALPR on the street where they live, 44% said they would oppose an ALPR on their street, compared to 40% who would support such an installation.

While Flock Safety, the company behind one of the most widely used ALPR brands, has made internal changes to curb misuse of its cameras, Pennsylvania state lawmakers believe new laws are needed to prevent ALPR abuse.

In recent weeks, state lawmakers have signaled a desire to regulate ALPRs in a variety of ways, from banning their use entirely to setting parameters for how and when they can be used. Below, City & State examines some of the latest proposals introduced by members of the General Assembly seeking to regulate Flock cameras and ALPRs.

Prohibiting Flock cameras and ALPRs in Pennsylvania

Republican state Sen. Dan Laughlin recently sent a co-sponsorship memo to colleagues outlining his plan to introduce legislation prohibiting the use of ALPRs connected to a network that automatically identifies and stores vehicle information. His bill would not prohibit the use of ordinary security cameras or vehicle-mounted license plate readers.

“The concern is not simply the camera. It is the creation of a searchable network capable of tracking and reconstructing a person’s movements over time,” Laughlin’s memo reads. “The overwhelming majority of individuals captured by these systems are not suspected of any crime. Yet their movements can still be recorded and stored, potentially revealing where they work, worship, seek medical care, spend their time and who they associate with,” Laughlin wrote. “That is a level of surveillance that should concern everyone.”

Moratoriums and safeguards for ALPRs

State Reps. David Rowe and Josh Bashline, both Republican lawmakers in the state House, plan to introduce a two-bill package aiming to protect Fourth Amendment rights from ALPRs, facial recognition systems and other new technologies. “Without clear guardrails, these emerging technologies could transform limited investigative tools into an Orwellian system of mass surveillance,” their co-sponsorship memo reads.

The first bill in the package would require government entities to obtain a warrant before using ALPRs to search for or track a specific person or license plate, while also limiting the retention of ALPR data to the “shortest period reasonably necessary.” The bill would also require ALPRs to be clearly identified via signage similar to existing automated speed-enforcement systems. The second bill in the package would allow local governments to adopt moratoriums on the installation and use of ALPRs within municipal boundaries.

Prohibiting the use of ALPRs for ‘routine, suspicionless collection’ of motorists’ movements

Doug Mastriano is another GOP state senator who plans to introduce a bill to regulate ALPRs and Flock cameras. According to a memo he sent to his Senate colleagues, Mastriano’s forthcoming legislation would “prohibit the mass, suspicionless collection and retention of Pennsylvanians’ movements” by ALPR systems. Mastriano’s proposal would prohibit using ALPR technology as a “general purpose system” for continuously collecting information about a motorist’s movements or travels, and establish penalties for intentionally using ALPR technology to stalk, harass, intimidate or improperly monitor another person.

According to the co-sponsorship memo, Mastriano’s bill will give law enforcement the ability to use ALPRs for specific public safety-related uses, including for investigations into stolen vehicles; AMBER Alert and missing person cases; investigations into a wanted or dangerous individual; and to find and identify vehicles related to a criminal investigation. “Police should investigate people when there is a legitimate reason to suspect wrongdoing,” Mastriano wrote. “Government should not surveil everyone in hopes of finding wrongdoing. That distinction will be at the heart of my legislation.”

Setting parameters on the use of ALPRs and ALPR data

Democratic state Rep. Tarik Khan introduced a proposal to regulate ALPRs by setting parameters on who can use ALPR data and how long it can be stored, along with establishing transparency requirements. The legislation would also create civil penalties for those who misuse data from Flock cameras and other ALPRs, and give the Pennsylvania attorney general and local district attorneys the ability to investigate violations and bring civil enforcement actions.

“We have to make sure that there are clear guardrails in place so that people’s rights are not being violated – that people are not being spied on and surveilled,” Khan told City & State in an interview. Khan’s bill has bipartisan support – one cosponsor is GOP state Rep. Robert Leadbeter, the chair of the Pennsylvania Freedom Caucus. Khan said that concern around the misuse of ALPRs is adding fuel to the public’s existing concerns about a “rapid expansion of tech without clear guardrails.”

Banning the unauthorized use of ALPRs and automated surveillance systems

In the Senate, Democratic state Sen. Lisa Boscola has also circulated a co-sponsorship memo for legislation that would ban knowingly using an ALPR or Flock camera for personal, unauthorized and unlawful purposes. Boscola cited a recent Washington Post report that found that, across the nation, at least 50 law enforcement officers have been charged or accused of misusing ALPRs to stalk or surveil people. “The same capabilities that make these systems valuable to law enforcement also create opportunities for serious individual misuse,” Boscola wrote. Under Boscola’s proposal, use of ALPRs for criminal investigations, missing-person cases, court-authorized uses and other legitimate public-safety purposes would not be prohibited.

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The mobile driver's license is hitting its tipping point — states just need to give it a shove

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

The driver's license became America's identity card by accident. It was meant to prove you could drive; it ended up proving you're who you say you are at the bank, the bar, the airport and more.

Now, the plastic card is getting a digital upgrade. It's the same license, issued by the state, but in an unfakeable digital format, finally fit to really prove identity in the online age.

So far, mobile driver's licenses have mostly been trapped on our phones, useful only for hustling through a TSA line or buying a Coors Light at a small handful of venues able to read them. The future of the mDL is remote verification: sharing your identity credential securely straight from your phone to open a bank account, prove your age, or onboard onto a gig work app.

In a demo during a California Department of Motor Vehicles showcase, a would-be Grubhub delivery driver signing up on their phone consents in their phone's wallet to share three DMV-attested fields (name, date of birth, license number) and is verified in seconds. This is faster, easier and more secure.

Blurry photos of plastic cards full of sensitive information don't multiply across servers. Only necessary data is shared. And because it's all signed by the state's cryptographic key, there's no way to fake any of it. AI can now create flawless images of fake licenses for pennies, but it can't fake a state's signature.

That capability is now live, and it's one reason I think the mDL is nearing a tipping point.

A few years ago you could count the issuing states on one hand. Today, 21 states and Puerto Rico issue mDLs, more than 8 million credentials are active, and roughly 45% of Americans live somewhere they could get one this afternoon. The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators projects that crossing the halfway mark will kick adoption into a higher gear.

Use cases are multiplying just as fast. Fans are buying beer at Camden Yards and Wrigley Field with a tap. TSA accepts mDLs at a growing list of airports, police departments are piloting patrol-car readers, and Georgia's will require every law enforcement agency to accept mDLs by mid-2027. Each tap builds the habit, and the habit builds demand.

But the in-person tap was never where digital ID would earn its keep. The verifications that matter most happen remotely, when someone opens a bank account, claims a benefit, or onboards to a gig platform. The current system leans on a photo of a plastic card, precisely the thing generative artificial intelligence has learned to counterfeit. In 2023, the IRS's identity-theft filters flagged nearly 1.1 million tax returns claiming $6.3 billion in refunds. You're checking a picture of a card, not confirming that the DMV stands behind it.

This is what the Grubhub demo was really about. mDLs can now be presented and verified remotely, over the internet, with the same assurance as an in-person tap. California and Georgia were among the first states to switch this on. California went further than most: it built an open ecosystem that any relying party can integrate with directly, rather than routing everything through the wallet providers' gates.

When anyone, anywhere, can onboard to any service with the mDL on their phone, digital identity stops being a demo-day curiosity and becomes boring infrastructure, like the power grid: invisible, essential, interesting only when it fails.

We're getting closer every day, but we're not there yet. So what's holding us back? Four things.

First, more states need to follow California's lead and make remote presentation of their mDLs easy for verifiers to access. Remote acceptance creates use cases; use cases make an mDL worth having; adoption justifies the state's investment and attracts still more use cases. It's a flywheel, but somebody has to get it spinning, and only a small handful of states have added momentum.

Second, the OEM wallets — Apple, Google, Samsung — need to streamline the process through which verifiers like Persona can access mDLs on behalf of relying parties. The credential's authority comes from the DMV's signing key. The wallet shouldn't be a bottleneck throttling the utility of the state's own credential.

Third, it's time for the rest of the states to get moving. An mDL is most useful when it's universal; a platform onboarding drivers in 50 states can't build around a credential that exists in 21 states and Puerto Rico. Most of the Northeast and big states like Texas and Florida are conspicuously absent from the adoption map. Every state that waits on issuing an mDL is deferring fraud savings for its own agencies, businesses, and residents.

Fourth, states need to answer the privacy question head-on. Done right, digital credentials protect privacy far better than photos of plastic cards: a bar can see that you're over 21 without seeing your address, and a delivery platform can capture three verified fields rather than a picture of your entire ID.

But the benefit holds only if verifiers can't quietly ask for more than a transaction requires. States should require data minimization, prohibit tracking, and keep the plastic card working for anyone who prefers it. Adoption will be broader and sturdier if worries about privacy and data security are answered directly by lawmakers.

Nothing here requires a breakthrough. It requires, well, meetings, and a dash of political will. The meetings are already happening: at showcases like the California DMV's, in AAMVA's working groups, in the standards bodies.

States that move now will spend the next few years watching their credentials verify unemployment claims, bank accounts, and gig workers. States that issue but don't enable remote verification will have spent millions on the equivalent of a passport to a country nobody can visit. States that haven't issued at all will be stuck in the plastic past.

The identity system we inherited is an accident of the automobile age. We can build a better one with intention: infrastructure for the internet age, made by states that decided not to wait.

Will Wilkinson is director of government affairs at Persona.

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Many localities have tried data center moratoriums, tracker finds

Chris Teale — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:00:00 -0400

State governments have made the splashiest moves on restricting data centers, including through stringent rules, audits, removal of tax breaks or outright moratoriums. But a new tool found that local governments have taken significant action of their own too.

The National League of Cities found that at least 76 local governments — cities, counties or towns — have at least attempted to adopt moratoriums or permanent bans on building data centers, with the majority of those efforts succeeding. NLC released a tool last week designed to track local governments’ policy moves on data centers, which have been welcomed by some but have been a source of major opposition elsewhere.

Of those, NLC found that three — Marshall County, Indiana; Monterey Park, California; and St. Charles, Missouri — have enacted permanent bans. And while the list is by no means exhaustive given how quickly things can move at the local level, it shows how jurisdictions large and small are approaching data centers.

“Data center development is advancing quickly, and local leaders need practical information to make decisions that reflect the needs and priorities of their communities,” Clarence Anthony, NLC’s CEO and executive director, said in a statement. “The NLC Data Center Local Action Tracker showcases local actions together in one place, helping cities and towns learn from their peers and approach these complex decisions with greater context.”

A leading state for data center moratoriums is Georgia, where a number of local governments started implementing them last year, and that trend has continued in 2026. Indeed, another tracker from Georgia Tech’s Energy Policy and Innovation Center found that almost 40 local governments in that state alone have approved some form of moratorium. Some of those moratoriums do not expire until next year.

NLC also found that data center moratoriums are popular among localities in Illinois and North Carolina, where at least 10 jurisdictions in each state have at the very least proposed one. That includes large cities like Charlotte, North Carolina, where in June the city council voted unanimously for a 150-day moratorium on new data centers amid worries over rising electricity and water prices. Existing projects would not be affected, however.

Proposed moratoriums have only been unsuccessful in very few localities, NLC found. They have failed to pass in Cheyenne, Wyoming; Gardner, Kansas; and Pulaski County, Alaska, according to the group’s tracker. More may follow, especially with several localities set to vote on whether to allow data centers, as well as the zoning requirements or tax breaks associated with them, later this year, according to the NLC tracker.

Local leaders have expressed concerns for some time about data centers’ impact on residents’ electricity and water bills, as well as neighborhoods and the environment. And this NLC tracker shows the other ways that localities are trying to deal with data centers, beyond just imposing a moratorium.

NLC found that at least 28 city and county governments have passed ordinances on data centers, including tweaks to their zoning and development laws. Others have faced varying types of community opposition, including resident-led petitions looking to force a public vote, while some local leaders have faced recall elections over their support for data centers.

The tracker also found that four cities — Festus, Missouri; Joliet, Illinois; Memphis, Tennessee; and St. Louis, Missouri — have implemented comprehensive development agreements. For example, St. Louis negotiated approximately $15 million in community benefits in return for a proposed data center project, including support for digital inclusion initiatives, environmental justice programs, transportation improvements and more. The developer also agreed to meet various targets around hiring, wages, job creation and transparency as part of that agreement.

While many have raised concerns about data centers’ impact on electricity and water, proponents said it should be up to localities to decide what is best for them.

“There are conversations to have more broadly around energy policy, but policymakers should not single out data centers rather than have those serious policy conversations about how to improve the growing demands on the grid,” Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute, said in an email. “Decisions around data centers are best handled by local communities who can have the most specific conversations around tradeoffs and benefits.”

Political leaders are still pushing to have communities accept data centers. During a White House event last week, President Donald Trump urged elected officials to agree to developers’ demands.

"If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big data center, I would absolutely want it,” Trump said, according to a pool report. “Many of them are designed in a very beautiful way."

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DeSantis administration moving to regulate AI from pre-K to Ph.D.

Jay Waagmeester, Florida Phoenix — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Florida Phoenix.

In concert, state bodies governing public pre-K through Ph.D. students are implementing policies addressing safety and classroom use of artificial intelligence.

Next week, the Florida Board of Governors, which controls Florida’s 12 state universities, will review language directing each campus to “establish policies requiring all course syllabi to include a disclosure of faculty use and permitted student use of artificial intelligence.”

The decision starts with the Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity, which the Board of Governors created earlier this year to address the emerging technology’s permeation into higher education.

Policy proposals extend to Florida’s youngest students, too.

The Florida Board of Education, which oversees preK-12 and the Florida College System, has a vote scheduled to direct K-12 public and charter schools and colleges to regulate AI use.

The Board of Education will vote Sept. 16 during its meeting at Polk State College whether to require public school districts and charter school governing boards to amend their internet safety policy to include AI.

The rule is not expected to require legislative ratification and would have to be adopted by school boards by July 1, 2027.

Districts and charter schools would, at a minimum, make policies to “protect students, parents, and instructional personnel from unlawful, deceptive, unsafe, or unauthorized uses of artificial intelligence systems, services, applications, and tools used in connection with educational programs and operations in Florida public schools,” according to a draft copy of the rule.

The idea is to “ensure that any approved use of artificial intelligence protects education records and student information, while supporting student achievement, civic literacy, academic excellence, and workforce preparedness.”

More specifically, schools would notify parents when teachers approve an AI instructional tool for use, including the name of the platform and classes in which it would be used and the nature of student interaction.

Parental Protection

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration did not return a request for comment.

The Florida Education Association supports guidelines for protecting children.

“Every parent and guardian wants their child to succeed in their public schools. In today’s world, technology is a key part of what and how our students learn, and, like with all new technology, there must be rules and guidelines that center on protecting our children,” FEA President Andrew Spar wrote in an emailed statement to the Phoenix.

The policy must require a process for parents to object to AI use and provide alternatives to the tool.

Schools would be required to conduct additional reviews for AI tools used in PreK-5 to ensure it is age appropriate.

The measure includes language aiming to protect the teaching profession from being replaced by computers. It would “ensure that the use of AI instructional tools is limited to supplementing, and not replacing, the professional judgment of teachers and the primary right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”

Further, the policy must ensure AI is “accurate, transparent, viewpoint neutral, accessible to students and educators with disabilities.”

Schools must make publicly available approved AI instructional tools and policies. Also, the tools must maintain student interaction for at least 30 days in the interest of accessibility to parents and district administrators.

However, the data collected on students must not be used for profit or to profile students to train commercial AI models.

The state is proposing, the regulation draft says, that schools not deploy AI to:

Meet a student’s social or emotional needs, including Social Emotional Learning.
Simulate friendship, companionship, or an emotional relationship with a student.
Employ relationship-building or anthropomorphic design features for the purpose of encouraging a student to continue interacting with the system or tool.

The rule would impose training for teachers and administrators on the safety, risks, and compliance regarding AI.

The policy must address plagiarism, permissible classroom use, verifying student work, and demonstrating mastery without use of AI.

“At the Florida Education Association, we believe that any policy the state of Florida enacts must ensure parents and guardians are advised of all potential uses of AI in a public school, that student data is protected, that the use of AI and new technologies is safe, that use of technology in the classroom is age and need appropriate, and that educators are protected and that additional work is not placed on them without additional support,” Spar said.

College System

The 28 state colleges have AI rules on the Board of Education docket, too.

Those rules would place responsibility to create AI policies with college system boards of trustees

The Board of Education expects the 28 boards of trustees to create policies “that provide for the use and limitations of use of artificial intelligence tools in order to ensure quality of education for students, efficiency of operations, and a safe learning environment for the whole college community.”

As with the pre-K-12 policy, the college policy would distinguish between instructional AI tools and other technologies.

AI instructional tools could not “meet a student’s social needs; simulate friendship, companionship, or an emotional relationship with a student; or employ relationship-building or anthropomorphic design features for the purpose of encouraging a student to continue interacting with the system.”

The policy calls on colleges to protect student privacy with AI, allow notification of parents of minors taking college classes whether their courses involve AI, and factor for academic integrity and dishonesty.

The policy calls, too, for building a framework to helps students understand what AI is and how it incorporates into their education and building AI skills.

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New York politicians are using AI to write their op-eds

Nick Garber, New York Focus — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by New York Focus.

If you’ve read an op-ed attributed to a New York politician in the last few months, there’s a good chance that not all of it was written by a human being.

To track the rising use of artificial intelligence in political communications, New York Focus analyzed 54 opinion articles attributed to New York elected officials that have been published since May 1 by three prominent news outlets: City & State, the Albany Times Union, and the New York Daily News. We ran each of those op-eds through the AI-detection tool Pangram and contacted the officials whose pieces were flagged as containing AI content.

Nine politicians — including the governor’s running mate, the mayor of Albany, and the chair of the Senate technology committee — acknowledged that they or a co-author used AI in producing 10 different articles. Another five said they could not be sure whether AI was used, four denied using AI, and nine did not respond to requests for comment. Twenty-six of the articles were classified by Pangram as fully human-written.

Just over half of the pieces — 28 in total — included text that Pangram identified as AI-generated.

None of the pieces disclosed the use of AI — even though lawmakers passed a bill this year that, if signed by the governor, would require news outlets to disclose substantial AI content. (One outlet, City & State, added disclosures to some articles after receiving New York Focus’s questions.)

The findings show how AI is already shaping a critical part of politicians’ jobs: the way they communicate with the public. These instances of AI writing are harder to track than some previous cases, like the uncanny fake videos released by Andrew Cuomo in last year’s New York City mayoral race and by Bruce Blakeman in this year’s contest for governor.

Elected officials have long relied on staff to ghostwrite their op-eds, a practice that many of the officials reached by New York Focus were quick to note. Relying on AI tools could be viewed as just another form of outsourcing. And about half of U.S. adults now say they use AI chatbots, according to a June survey by Pew Research Center.

But the public has reacted with outrage to even minor uses of AI in politics. Cuomo’s mayoral campaign faced an uproar last year over a single citation in his housing plan that revealed the use of ChatGPT for research, even as his aides insisted that AI was not used as a writing tool.

Adrienne Adams, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor and former New York City Council speaker, acknowledged through a spokesperson that AI was used to compose her Daily News op-ed from May touting her record on child care. The spokesperson said that after Adams joined Hochul’s re-election ticket, Adams’s team used AI to compile and summarize her public comments and transcripts from internal interviews about child care and family issues.

Albany Mayor Dorcey Applyrs acknowledged that her office used AI to help write her July op-ed in the Times Union about the city’s fiscal crisis. Her spokesperson Zipporah Hommel did not give details about how AI was used, but said the mayor’s office used “a host of digital tools, including generative AI, to support synthesizing, editing, and proofreading content.”

“All content is vetted and fact-checked by members of the team for accuracy and cohesiveness before being distributed,” Hommel said.

Frank Morano, a Republican City Council member from Staten Island, confirmed that he used ChatGPT to compose a City & State op-ed published in May about legalizing bodega cats, co-bylined with State Assemblymember Keith Powers. Morano said he used AI to “organize and refine” his ideas, but emphasized that he and his staff edited the piece.

“I don’t view AI as fundamentally different from other technologies that have changed how people work,” Morano said in an interview. “The question is, are you representing someone else’s views as your own? These are 100 percent my positions and AI helps me organize my ideas and communicate more efficiently sometimes.”

But the stakes of publishing AI-generated content could soon get higher. In June, the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill that would require news outlets to add disclaimers to any published content “substantially composed, authored or otherwise created” through the use of generative AI. If an outlet publishes AI content without that disclosure, the attorney general would be empowered to investigate and seek penalties starting at $1,000.

The so-called FAIR News Act would likely apply to op-eds submitted by outside contributors like elected officials, according to both its supporters and critics.

“The public needs to understand that something was largely generated,” said state Senator Patricia Fahy, the bill’s prime sponsor. “I just think we’re at the beginning of trying to regulate this.”

Hochul has not taken a position on the bill, and her office said only that she would review it. The FAIR News Act was supported by labor unions but opposed by news industry groups like the New York News Publishers Association, which argues that the bill would violate the First Amendment, risk politicized investigations against news outlets, and create too much uncertainty about what constitutes “substantially” AI-generated content. (New York Focus is a member of the News Publishers Association.)

Most of the officials contacted by New York Focus said their AI use was limited; none admitted to fully AI-generating any piece of writing, although some were identified by Pangram as extensively AI-written.

City Councilmember Harvey Epstein’s office suggested its staff would reevaluate their use of AI after acknowledging to New York Focus that the technology was used in a pair of City & State op-eds on horse-drawn carriages and after-school programming that he co-authored with colleagues in the City Council and state legislature. Epstein spokesperson Jackson Fischer-Ward said both pieces were “conceived and written by our communications team.”

“As part of the editing and proofreading process, AI tools were used in a supplemental way. We’re evaluating if AI tools will be part of the editing and proofreading process in future written communications,” Fischer-Ward added.

Some officials said AI made its way into their op-eds through co-authors and group writing efforts. Councilmember Julie Won acknowledged using AI in a Daily News op-ed from June about her campaign for Congress, telling New York Focus that a three-person team used AI “to help refine and suggest edits for our final draft,” but adding that “the ideas and substance are our own.”

“And as the op-ed reads, my voice and my opinions are captured by my team from multiple sessions of brainstorming, reviews, and edits, and as our final step we had AI suggest edits,” Won said. “As an immigrant and second language speaker, the tools help refine the final product but it does not have the capability to replace myself and my team for my identity and our campaign’s mission.”

AI was also used in a City & State op-ed about the city’s waterways co-authored by Councilmember Virginia Maloney and Julie Raskin, leader of the nonprofit Waterfront Alliance, according to Raskin.

“The op-ed was written by staff and AI was used to edit for clarity, in accordance with the Waterfront Alliance’s generative AI policy,” Raskin said in a statement. She added that the piece was then edited by staff of the Waterfront Alliance and Maloney’s office.

And state Senator Kristen Gonzalez, a leading advocate for AI regulation and chair of the chamber’s technology committee, confirmed that AI was used in an op-ed she bylined in City & State calling for data-center regulation. Gonzalez’s spokesperson, Kat Deus Veloso, said Gonzalez’s office did not use AI, but that one of several “stakeholders” that contributed to the article acknowledged “using AI to assist them.” (Veloso declined to name that person. The Pangram analysis identified only one paragraph as AI-generated, a much smaller share than in most of the other pieces.)

Other officials called their use of AI a legitimate writing tool, in moderation. Councilmember Shahana Hanif said her office used AI to help write her City & State op-ed about mass surveillance at Madison Square Garden, co-bylined with a surveillance oversight advocate.

“My team and I have used AI tools to perform office functions, including limited writing and editing, and to make our work more efficient,” Hanif said in a statement, adding that the technology should be used responsibly and regulated to prevent abuse.

And a staffer for Assemblymember Landon Dais said his office used AI to edit his Daily News op-ed about deed theft after the newspaper asked them to shorten the piece by more than 800 words to fit in the print edition. Dais’s chief of staff, Quintin Maidment, said it was not the first time his office had used the technology.

“In general, we use AI to make content clearer, to analyze research, to provide translation and to design flyers,” Maidment said in an email. “This allows our staff to do their jobs more effectively and helps a small office handle a very large volume of work.”

Five other officials said they did not know whether AI was used because so many people had a hand in writing a given op-ed.

Reached for comment, editors for the three publications expressed varying levels of concern.

Peter Sterne, news and opinion editor for City & State, said the use of AI violated the publication’s policies. Following New York Focus’s inquiry, the publication added disclaimers to the five articles whose authors acknowledged AI use.

“In the past, we have relied on the honor system, but going forward, we plan to run every op-ed submission through AI detection tools,” Sterne said in an email. (Sterne previously worked at New York Focus.)

Andrew Julien, executive editor of the Daily News, said in an email: “We appreciate the information provided by New York Focus. We will review the op-eds in question along with our processes regarding disclosure of AI use to assure compliance with internal policies and best practices.”

Akum Norder, senior editor for opinion at the Times Union, said in an email that the newspaper expects all submitted content to be “original.” The publication is “not OK” with contributors using AI to do their writing for them, but finds it acceptable to use AI for editing and proofreading.

Norder said she had not suspected AI authorship in Albany Mayor Applyrs’s op-ed because an initial draft contained punctuation errors and because the piece resembled the writing style of four previous pieces that Applyrs had submitted to the newspaper.

“AI is only going to get better at writing and harder to detect,” Norder said. “As technology evolves, our procedures will evolve with them, as best they can.”

Camille Rivera, a progressive Democratic strategist, said she recently rejected a client’s suggestion to use AI to compose a written piece as part of a political campaign, worrying it would compromise the candidate’s integrity.

“We’re not going to run an AI campaign. That’s not what voters want,” she recalled saying. “They want to see what your real thoughts are.”

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Whole-of-state cyber defense: The pathway for addressing today’s AI-fueled threats

Jared Pane — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Nation-state actors, ransomware groups and cyber criminals have outpaced the traditional, siloed approach to government cybersecurity. Today’s sophisticated threat actors are exploiting that fragmentation faster than governments can respond.

State and local agencies sit on the front lines of defense while operating with varied resources and talent across teams. This requires these jurisdictions to lean on creative, integrated solutions that can raise the baseline of protection across the full government ecosystem.

The March 2026 Cyber Strategy for America makes collective defense a federal priority. It calls for “unprecedented coordination across government” and a “new level of relationship between the public and private sectors,” while reframing local and state security as a matter of national economic and social prosperity.

A whole-of-state cyber approach built on open, distributed architectures and artificial intelligence-driven security analytics is now an operational necessity. It enables shared visibility, stronger coordination and greater resilience while preserving data sovereignty — all of which are necessary to address the modern threat environment.

Adversaries Don’t Respect Jurisdictions

Cyber defense is only as strong as its most vulnerable endpoint. Threat actors don’t distinguish between a state agency, utilities, or critical infrastructure. Instead of targeting hardened state systems directly, they often compromise the least-defended point of entry, such as a small municipality, K-12 district or local utility, and move laterally from there.

Deloitte’s 2026 whole-of-state analysis confirms the pattern nationally. Cybercriminals are increasingly bypassing hardened state data centers to target cyber-underserved local entities, which often serve as the front doors to a state’s digital ecosystem.

They lack the budget for elite defense while remaining connected to vital networks, creating one of the greatest challenges to statewide resilience. A breach in any one of these organizations can halt 911 dispatch, disrupt emergency services, expose citizens’ personal information or shut down critical infrastructure. Stronger protection for one organization strengthens the broader ecosystem.

As a result, states face a great responsibility to build resilient, self-sufficient defensive postures. The question is how to act collectively and at scale.

Breaking Down Silos to Build Collective Resilience

A whole-of-state cybersecurity model is increasingly supported by federal frameworks. For instance, the CISA State Cybersecurity Governance Case Studies highlight how states like Georgia and Virginia have successfully used formal governance structures to manage cyber risk as a collective strategic priority. By establishing clear policies and shared resources, states can protect the most vulnerable local entities without infringing on their operational independence.

This model also treats the entire government ecosystem as a shared defensive perimeter, spanning state agencies, counties, cities, education, public safety organizations and more. Breaking down the traditional “islands” of security enables shared threat intelligence, unified tooling and coordinated incident response.

Larger state teams can then extend expertise to smaller, under-resourced entities and raise the starting point of protection for everyone. This shifts states from fragmented defense toward collective resilience.

These silos can be dismantled through a distributed data mesh approach, which:

Delivers statewide visibility: It enables teams to search and analyze security data where it already resides. Because sensitive data cannot always be centralized, this avoids the massive costs, egress fees and compliance risks of moving log data into a single central repository.
Preserves data sovereignty: By keeping citizen and student information within its originating department, it supports policy-aware access controls aligned to jurisdictional boundaries and enables affordable long-term retention rather than expensive cold storage.

Because whole-of-state cyber defense requires integration across agencies without forcing uniform tools or vendor lock-in, open security models are critical too.

State and local organizations operate with different budgets, policies and legacy systems, so an open security model enables collaboration by allowing agencies to participate without abandoning existing investments. Openness reduces long-term risk, preserves agency autonomy and makes sustained statewide collaboration achievable.

With the data context layer in place and searchable, analysts can then build AI-driven security practices right on top.

AI Isn't the Future of State Cybersecurity, It’s the Present

For the first time in over a decade, AI has overtaken cybersecurity as the number-one policy priority for state chief information officers, signaling a transition from AI as a future trend to AI as the primary operational tool for managing risk.

AI-powered security has become the force multiplier that makes whole-of-state cyber defense achievable.

States can extend elite, AI-powered protection across the entire state ecosystem, including under-resourced entities that could never hire dedicated security teams.
AI-driven analytics augment security analysts’ operations. Automated alert triage collapses hundreds of alerts into a handful of high-confidence incidents, guided investigation cuts noise and analyst fatigue, and faster response lets teams act before threats escalate. AI enables smaller teams to operate at the scale of much larger ones.
It strengthens collective resilience too, helping to identify attack patterns across the whole ecosystem to stop multi-pronged campaigns before they spread laterally through connected networks.

The Arizona Department of Homeland Security offers a concrete example: facing more than 12 terabytes of daily logs from disparate sources, its small team adopted AI-driven security analytics to automate the detection of anomalies and malicious activity across billions of data events. Through pre-built detection rules, AZDOHS reduced false positives and alert fatigue, shifting away from reactive posture to a proactive one.

Texas A&M University System, a public, land-grant research institution with the second-largest student body in the U.S., did something similar. Handling tens of thousands of endpoints and billions of telemetry events every month, TAMUS saves over 100 analyst hours per month by automating documentation and security processes. AI-powered security also helps reduce the time to resolve from months to just two hours, a reduction of 99%.

AI-driven security is essential to maintain pace with today’s adversaries. It allows states to truly move from reactive firefighting to proactive, coordinated defense. This approach can extend AI-powered protection to every entity in the ecosystem regardless of size or budget.

The whole-of-state model can feel like a multi-year transformation, but the first step is smaller and more immediate. Map where your entities’ security data actually lives, bring your analytics to it rather than forcing a costly migration and layer AI-driven detection on top so your existing security team can properly cover.

Collective defense is now a matter of public safety, economic stability and national security. It improves resilience against adversary campaigns and helps government security teams operate efficiently despite staffing constraints.

The path forward requires states and their technology partners to operate as a unified, integrated force. When every link in the chain is protected, the entire state is stronger.

Jared Pane is senior director for field engineering of global public sector at Elastic.

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States, feds scramble to prevent more water cyberattacks

Chris Teale — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:00:00 -0400

Water operators are still reeling from Iran-linked cyberattacks on water systems in at least seven states, and governments are already trying to help avoid a repeat.

Hackers linked to the Iranian regime were blamed for compromising operational technology in water and wastewater utilities in Michigan, Georgia and other states, prompting the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to urge utilities to take their exposed systems down in the immediate aftermath.

Since then, governments at all levels have been searching for ways to provide more cybersecurity support to stretched critical infrastructure systems, including financially, as their ability to pay for tech upgrades is limited.

U.S. Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., unveiled legislation earlier this month that would provide greater funding for local utilities and protect water and wastewater utilities from cyberattacks, as well as strengthen oversight by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The bill would authorize an additional $300 million each year for the Drinking Water and Clean Water State Revolving Funds to be dedicated to cybersecurity improvements and require large drinking water and wastewater systems to assess cybersecurity risks as part of their existing risk and resilience planning. It also would extend federal cyber incident reporting requirements to state- and locally owned water and wastewater systems that were previously exempt, among other requirements.

Smaller water systems and those with fewer resources would get greater flexibility and receive priority for federal funding, the pair said.

“The recent cyberattacks on Minnesota have highlighted the urgent need to improve the security of our water systems and critical infrastructure,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “Our legislation will direct the EPA to assess water infrastructure cybersecurity and identify vulnerabilities, and help municipal water systems defend against cyber threats. Protecting our critical infrastructure and the safety of Minnesotans is a top priority.”

Smaller utilities also received help earlier this month with the Water Watch Center, a joint effort between the National Rural Water Association and DEF CON Franklin, a project of the Cyber Policy Initiative at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. The center will provide direct cyber mitigation support to utilities that serve less than 10,000 people, which is most of the community water systems in the U.S.

Outside experts said those governmental efforts should go even further, however.

James Turgal, a former agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and current vice president of global cyber risk and board relations at cybersecurity company Optiv, said that if such attacks are left unaddressed, they could expand into the healthcare, transportation, and energy sectors, where he warned “the operational, economic, and public safety consequences would be far more severe.”

"The recent Iranian-linked cyber intrusions targeting U.S. water treatment facilities should be a turning point for critical infrastructure security,” Turgal said in an email. “Congress should establish mandatory baseline cybersecurity requirements for the water sector and create either an independent non-governmental oversight authority or strengthen EPA oversight to ensure consistent operational technology and programmable logic controller security standards across the nation's water utilities.”

Meanwhile, Tatyana Bolton, executive director of the Operational Technology Cyber Coalition, said last month the attacks should serve as a “wake up call” and called on Congress to, among other things, reauthorize and fund the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program.

Beyond that, Mike Searight, a former chief information officer of Waco, Texas who is now a senior advisor for software company Elisity, called on critical infrastructure operators and governments to have better asset management, including making sure OT is not connected to the internet. He also pointed to new initiatives like the state-level Texas Cyber Command as a better way to respond, especially in areas with fewer resources.

“I think that the states need to lean in on this as well, to support these smaller cities so they have a number to call and they have people to call when they have issues like this,” he said. “I think that's a critical piece that's missing here.”

Other threats are already on the horizon. A joint bulletin from the FBI, National Security Agency, CISA and other federal agencies warned of an active cyber threat to certain PLCs, where bad actors use exploitation scripts generated by artificial intelligence that are disguised as legitimate monitoring tools. Among the most targeted sectors are water and wastewater, energy and critical manufacturing.

“Using AI gave attackers faster discovery and exploitation of the attack surface,” Dan Moore, senior director for customer identity and access management strategy at software company FusionAuth, said in an email. “The suggested defenses are what we’ve heard over and over again: apply patches, don’t put systems on the internet, use strong access controls, monitor important systems, and don’t leave authentication in the default state. Hackers don’t need AI to discover new vulnerabilities. All they need to do is exploit weaknesses that we know we should have patched long ago.”

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Meta to pay 47 states up to $17.1B in landmark child safety settlement

Anna Claire Vollers, Stateline — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Stateline.

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, on Wednesday agreed to pay 47 states, the District of Columbia, and a handful of U.S. territories, up to $17.1 billion in penalties over claims that its social media platforms are addictive and a danger to children.

As part of the settlement, Meta also pledged to make changes to Instagram and Facebook that are designed to reduce young people’s use of the platforms.

“Meta intentionally exploited kids for profit and then lied about it, claiming its products were safe when its own internal research confirmed the platforms were addictive and harmful,” said Washington, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb, a Democrat, in a statement announcing the settlement.

“The physical, mental and emotional harms that intentionally addictive social media inflict on youth — and particularly teenage girls — are widespread across the tech industry, and this successful, coordinated multistage litigation has resulted in Meta being the first platform to come to the table and agree to such comprehensive reforms,” he said.

“It will not be the last.”

The settlement ended a high-stakes, landmark case, filed in 2023, in which states said Meta purposely designed its social media platforms with addictive features, that Meta knew it was exposing children to serious mental harms, and that it intentionally misled the public about the safety of those platforms.

Meta has not admitted wrongdoing.

The federal trial began last week in Oakland, California, led by a bipartisan group of attorneys general from California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey.

State officials are calling the settlement the biggest consumer protection win since the Big Tobacco settlements of the 1990s.

Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, a Republican, said in a statement Wednesday that the lawsuit was “never just about the money.”

“Kids deserve a childhood that isn’t measured in likes and followers,” he said. “The online protections delivered by this settlement will bring a generational change that will make social media platforms safer for Kentucky families.”

In addition to the financial settlement, Meta agreed to make major changes to its Instagram and Facebook features for young users, including a daily time limit, automatic pauses, nighttime blocks that restrict access from midnight to 6 a.m., and stronger safeguards against bullying and harmful content. Most of the updates must be in place for at least a decade.

Meta is trying to drag its competitors along with it. The company agreed to further restrict daily time limits for teens only if TikTok and YouTube agree to adopt comparable measures.

Under the settlement terms, Meta will pay out just 70% (about $12.7 billion) to states unless TikTok and Alphabet-owned YouTube also agree to set one-hour daily time limits for young users, as well as night mode and age assurance measures.

Meta will pay the remaining 30% — $5.3 billion — if the other two companies agree to the new measures and each agrees to pay states about $5.3 billion.

C.J. Mahoney, chief legal officer at Meta, said in a statement that the changes needed to be made across the social media landscape to have an impact.

“Our new Time Limit commitments, Night Mode features and usage limits during school hours set the right path forward for our whole industry, but this framework will only work if all our peers join us,” Mahoney said.

“Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution.”

Settlement money will be paid out to the participating states and territories annually over a decade, based on their populations.

Just three states, Florida, New Mexico and Texas, aren’t part of the settlement. New Mexico won its own lawsuit against Meta earlier this year, when a jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in damages for violating the state’s consumer protection laws. Texas negotiated its own settlement with Meta that includes a $1 billion payout and a promise of more safety features for children.

While state officials lauded the changes coming to Instagram and Facebook as wins for child safety, some free speech advocates expressed concern over broader implications of the new restrictions.

Kate Ruane, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a civil rights organization said in a statement that safe and age-appropriate online experiences for children are critical.

“But we also see the potential for significant risks to everyone’s privacy and free expression rights online, especially in the ways this settlement will subject all users to invasive age assurance and limit all kids’ access to content and services regardless of their individual needs,” Ruane said.

Meta and other social media platforms still face thousands of ongoing lawsuits from individuals and school districts across the nation that accuse them of targeting young users with addictive algorithms and inadequate safety measures.

One of those is a lawsuit against Instagram filed by South Carolina state Rep. Brandon Guffey, whose 17-year-old son Gavin died by suicide in 2022. His family said they later learned he was a victim of sexual extortion after being targeted by a scammer on Instagram.

“Scammers put immense pressure and sometimes even a countdown on these teens,” Guffey said in an emailed statement after the settlement announcement. “Gavin didn’t deserve to have less than two hours before he took his life. He deserved to have a parent that was aware of this.”

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White House to soon launch water provider cyber protection program

David DiMolfetta — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0400

The White House will soon unveil a program designed to help protect water infrastructure providers from cyberattacks, which comes as multiple states face hacking attempts on their water systems that some officials suspect may be tied to Iran, according to a person with knowledge of the plans.

The program, led by the Office of the National Cyber Director, would enlist a slew of private firms to help states with few cyber resources bolster their defenses against digital attacks on platforms that manage areas like water and wastewater transmission, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to communicate the plans.

The program could be announced next week and may begin in Texas to serve as a testbed for other states that request services. Politico first reported the White House’s plans.

Since around May, the White House has been discussing a slew of pilot programs for various critical infrastructure domains with the private sector, according to a second person with knowledge of those discussions, who said that it made sense for the water sector to be among those categories that would get assistance.

An ONCD spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment. It’s not clear how many companies, or which companies specifically, would be involved in the efforts.

More than 30 community water systems in Minnesota were targeted late last month, according to state officials. Around 12 states have reported similar activity, though state officials said they continued operating safely and experienced no known effects on public health. The FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are working on incident response.

Water systems are often the most underresourced forms of critical infrastructure in the cyberdefense landscape. Some industry groups have stepped up to provide assistance.

“When policymakers used to ask what systems I was most concerned about, my answer was always water,” Cynthia Kaiser, the FBI’s former cyber deputy director, told Nextgov/FCW. “The incidents from this summer have shown how much the water industry needs the assistance,” she added.

“I think this is a great step; however, we need to ensure that systems integrators for rural water utilities are looped in on deployments,” she advised, referring to providers that install equipment allowing utilities to manage their systems remotely. Several current and former officials have decried lax management of remote systems as a pathway that has let hackers get inside water infrastructure over the last several weeks.

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Counties are where government has to show its work

Robert J Choi — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

In recent weeks, the Aspen Acres Fire has made the work of county government visible in Pueblo County, Colorado.

The response has required evacuation and reentry decisions, traffic-control points, public mapping, a Joint Information Center, a Disaster Assistance Center and a system for residents to report property damage and recovery needs. Each function requires people, equipment, facilities, information systems and funding, and each must operate under immediate public scrutiny.

Emergencies make this machinery visible, but they do not create it. County government performs the same basic function every day: converting laws, appropriations and policy decisions into services residents can see and use.

Every level of American government taxes and spends, but they do not all do the same kind of work with the money. Federal and state governments often work through transfers, subsidies, grants and matching formulas. Much of what counties do is production: turning tax dollars into roads, water, courts, jails, records and emergency response — the goods a private market underprovides. That difference is easy to overlook, and it is the reason counties hold an advantage almost no one credits them for. Counties are the part of the system where the real cost of a choice cannot be hidden.

Start with the constraint that shapes every county decision. Most state and local governments are required to adopt balanced budgets, and sound financial practice requires recurring revenues to cover recurring expenditures. A dollar committed to one purpose is visibly unavailable for another.

Federal, state and county governments operate at different scales and possess different fiscal tools. Counties must translate policy into an adopted budget, available staffing, physical assets and existing service commitments. When a county funds one priority, the opportunity cost is immediate, local and owned.

Programs funded across multiple levels of government can make their full cost difficult to see. The benefits, financing, administration and operational responsibility may appear on different ledgers. Production runs the other way. When a county commits to a new ambulance bay, a jail expansion, or a records system, it forgoes something else its residents can name and the choice plays out in public budget hearings on the record.

The machinery of a county forces the question that can become blurred across multiple levels of government: What are we giving up to get this? Rather than being a marginal slice of government, the nation’s 3,069 counties operate 91% of local jails, run more than 1,900 local health departments, operate 911 centers and administer the elections every other level depends on. They do not merely fund these services; they staff and run them, which ties their decisions to operational reality in a way appropriations from a distance never are — as critical and fundamental as those appropriations remain.

Executing what you decide is the precondition for honest accountability. A resident can inspect a repaved road, a cleared emergency call, or a recorded deed and judge whether the money bought something worth having. That judgment is far harder to render on a transfer payment routed through bureaucracy and a dozen program rules. It is also why professional county management matters so much: the constraints bind, the tradeoffs are real and someone has to weigh them on the merits rather than in slogans.

Counties also sit at the point where federal and state policy becomes local administration. That arrangement works best when authority, funding, operational responsibility and reporting expectations are aligned. When one changes without the others, counties must identify the resulting staffing, technology, facilities, procurement and service consequences. Making those implementation costs visible is not criticism of another level of government. It is necessary for effective intergovernmental partnership and honest public budgeting.

Three practical rules follow:

Define the productive benefit, not just the policy intent. Every policy should state the tangible result citizens are expected to receive, how it will be measured and when it should be evident. The level of government responsible for delivery should retain the discretion and authority to determine how best to achieve that result for its citizens.
Match expectations with capacity. Funding, staffing, technology, legal authority, facilities and procurement timelines must support the assigned work coming from the policy choice.
Report the tradeoffs and outcomes, not just outputs. Residents should be able to see what was delivered, what it cost, what was deferred and what decision is needed next.

When responsibilities are shared across levels of government, the value of county execution is worth naming. Counties do a different kind of work: the productive, countable, improvable work of turning revenue into services people can use, under a budget that forbids pretending the tradeoffs away. Limited government is easiest to defend when it can show, line by line and service by service, exactly what the public receives for its money. Counties are where it can.

Robert J Choi is the Chief Administrative Officer for Pueblo County. He previously worked as a public-sector strategy consultant, was Deputy Chief People Officer at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — the nation’s busiest transit system — and served in the Central Intelligence Agency.

The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent Pueblo County or the Pueblo County Board of County Commissioners.

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