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Nonprofit puts up $10M to help agencies test AI tools for benefits modernization

Kaitlyn Levinson — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:50:14 -0400

Before any tech solution can be implemented in government, it should be tested. That’s the motivation behind a nonprofit’s funding initiative that aims to help public sector agencies and other organizations test their artificial intelligence-based public benefit improvement projects.

Up to $10 million in funding is up for grabs for organizations looking to explore and experiment with emerging technologies for enhancing the delivery of public benefits, the Center for Civic Futures, a nonprofit dedicated to assisting governments adopt AI responsibly, announced this week.

The funds, administered through CCF’s Public Benefits Innovation Fund, will be divided among awards ranging from $150,000 to $2 million to support benefit modernization projects that leverage AI to improve backend processes. Government agencies, startups, nonprofits, academic institutions and other organizations are encouraged to apply.

The Public Benefits Innovation Fund announcement comes as benefit agencies scramble to comply with federal rule changes to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The new rules, established by President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” will pressure agencies to revamp their enrollment and eligibility systems in order to comply with new work requirements and cost-sharing rates.

“We're at this truly transformative moment, and what really matters is that government leaders have safe, candid spaces where they can talk to each other about what's going on, and that they're not having to learn things on their own in silos,” said Cass Madison, executive director of CCF.

While improving constituents’ frontend experiences of a benefit system through tools like chatbots or eligibility screeners has been popular across benefit agencies, Madison pointed to a growing implementation gap facing those agencies.

“You can make it easier for people to understand that they’re eligible for SNAP and fill out an application, but if, once their application is submitted, and it gets caught in backend, administrative backlogs [like] verification processes, I think there’s a really strong argument that we actually haven’t made people’s lives better,” she explained.

That’s why the PBIF prioritizes three focus areas: improving backend processes, using data effectively and modernizing tech infrastructure. Proposed projects can, for instance, entail an organization's use of generative AI to review SNAP case files and flag errors for remediation, according to CCF’s request for proposals.

Other acceptable project examples include tools that anonymize or otherwise prepare sensitive datasets used for training AI models for benefit determination and administration, leverage AI to enable system modularization or code modernization, offer sandbox environments to test and train AI models, and others.

“We believe the goal of experimentation is to learn what works and what doesn’t in a safe and contained way, so that the broader field can adapt and improve,” the request for proposals reads.

The PBIF also entails two tracks for applicants to pursue, based on their project status. One track is designed for agencies that have “shovel-ready” prototypes ready to be tested and validated in real-world environments, Madison said. Awardees in the pilot track will have 12 to 24 months to work on their projects and receive investments between $500,000 and $2 million.

The other track will serve agencies that have projects in the research and development phase, enabling them to test “a specific hypothesis in a controlled or sandbox environment,” according to the request for proposals. This track will help organizations demonstrate that their proposed intervention can resolve an administration problem, which will take six to 12 months, Madison said. Awardees in the early-concept category will receive up to $500,000.

Beyond funding, awardees will also have access to a cohort of other organizations dedicated to “maximize support for their projects and their chances of success,” Madison said. For example, CCF has an agreement with Better Government Lab to offer further technical assistance, such as evaluating project impact or ROI.

The Recoding America Fund will also serve as a partner to help agencies address structural and operational barriers to adopting innovative tech solutions for benefit system enhancement.

Applications to participate in the Public Benefit Innovation Fund are due May 15. CCF will host a webinar April 22 for candidates to learn more about the initiative and application process.

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Pro-Iran hackers appear to ramp up critical infrastructure cyberattacks

Chris Teale — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

Cyberattacks against critical infrastructure from groups sympathetic to Iran appear to be ticking up, as the federal government warns hackers may look to exploit other vulnerabilities.

Last week, pro-Iranian hacking group Ababil of Minab claimed responsibility for a hack on the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, known as LA Metro. The cyberattack it experienced last month forced the transit agency to shut down access to some of its network after its security team found unauthorized activity, although LA Metro said bus and rail service was unaffected.

The hacking group published claims on Telegram that they said showed them accessing LA Metro’s internal systems. Tim Miller, field chief technology officer for public sector at Dataminr, an artificial intelligence-backed platform that helps leaders track events, threats and risks in real time, said in a blog post that the group is an “emerging” one “with a limited public profile and little verifiable prior activity in threat intelligence reporting — making any definitive capability or intent assessment premature at this stage.”

“What can be cautiously observed from available evidence is that their explicit pro-Iran messaging and targeting of a major US public transit authority is broadly consistent with Iranian-aligned actors’ known pattern of targeting US critical infrastructure,” Miller continued.

Other experts tracking such events are similarly cautious about whether the group is responsible for the LA Metro hack. A spokesperson for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which has warned previously of attacks on critical infrastructure from pro-Iran hackers, said in an email “there is no clear evidence that the claim is legitimate.”

Even though reports are unconfirmed, it makes for a worrying time for state and local governments, as well as critical infrastructure operators, who have been waiting with bated breath to see if groups sympathetic to Iran would launch attacks on these shores to retaliate against the ongoing war there.

"The threat of cyber-attack from Iran is real,” Andrew Chipman, governance, risk and compliance manager at cybersecurity company ProCircular, said in an email. “At this time, we expect to see that threat realized through proxies, hacktivists, and other allies to the Iranian regime. If Iran is able to build back their regime, we may see direct retaliation from Iran in the form of cyber-attacks against highly visible targets. History teaches us that hospitals and medical service providers are prime targets for the regime and its supporters. However, any critical infrastructure is a potential target.”

The alleged Iran-backed hack in Los Angeles came days before a warning from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and a slew of other federal agencies earlier this month that various operational technology devices used in critical infrastructure, including programmable logic controllers, have been exploited by bad actors linked to Iran.

The agencies said those efforts, which have at times “resulted in operational disruption and financial loss,” have been designed to “cause disruptive effects within the United States.” CISA and its fellow agencies said the targets have included government services and facilities, water and wastewater systems and energy.

“Iran using cyberattacks to probe and impact American utilities should come as no surprise,” Lt. Gen. Ross Coffman (Ret.), president of artificial intelligence company Forward Edge-AI, said in an email. “Iran is using its long-range targeting tools to fight in every domain possible. We must continue to harden our cyber defenses and remind employees that they are the first line of defense. Our government's cyber professionals are the best in the world, so Iran is probing daily to find an exposed flank.”

Ababil of Minab warned that their “forthcoming actions will exact sterner pain,” although Miller said in the blog post that those pronouncements should be “treated as unverified rhetoric until corroborated by additional intelligence.” Chipman said some form of escalation could happen.

“Iran is not currently in a position to wage large scale cyber warfare against the United States or its allies, but hacktivists and proxy attackers are plentiful — expect attacks to come and prepare appropriately," he said.

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Amid artificial intelligence explosion, Illinois lawmakers debate best path to regulate

Jenna Schweikert, Capitol News Illinois — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This story was officially republished by Capitol News Illinois.

As the artificial intelligence industry rapidly expands, state legislators appear poised to continue imposing regulations on the technology.

Committees in both chambers of the Illinois General Assembly have heard bills that would implement various restrictions and give recommendations on the use of AI in state government and certain industries. The state already has some laws in place, but legislators raised concerns about the harm AI may still be causing consumers.

On April 9 and 10, the Senate held two virtual subject matter hearings on nearly 50 bills about AI and consumer protection, privacy, education and data centers.

Sen. Mary Edly-Allen, D-Libertyville, pointed to social media as an example of what happens when government does not place guardrails on new technology.

“If we got social media wrong, and we did, we cannot afford to get AI wrong,” Edly-Allen said. “Will we act on the lessons we have already learned?”

Industry stakeholders recommended lawmakers let the federal government take control of regulating AI, while acknowledging concerns about its impact. The president, however, declared via executive order in December that he is not in favor of broad AI regulations.

AI advocates also recommended Illinois mirror other states’ laws to prevent a complicated system for companies who operate in many locations.

“Our core concern is creating a patchwork environment, making Illinois a compliance outlier,” said Jarrett Catlin, state AI policy advisor at TechNet, a national technology policy advocacy group. “We need to create clear incentives for responsible behavior without prescribing a one-size-fits-all compliance regime.”

The “patchwork” argument echoes the president’s executive order, which declares that companies must be “free to innovate without cumbersome regulation,” and that state regulation “thwarts this imperative.”

In the hearings, the senators emphasized that they did not want to hinder development and business in the state but are deeply concerned about the lack of guardrails currently in place, particularly around chatbots and minors.

“This isn't about stifling innovation … but you need to have guardrails to protect minors,” said Sen. Sue Rezin, R-Morris. “This bill is about ensuring that as technology moves faster than the law, we don't leave consumer protections in the dust, especially when it comes to minors.”

Current and Proposed Statutes

Illinois already has some laws targeting AI use in image manipulation and intellectual property, according to Andrew Cunningham, senior director of government relations for the Illinois Chamber of Commerce. And broader legislation can be applied to AI usage, as has been done to AI meeting tools under the Biometric Information Privacy Act.

“In many ways, our state laws are adaptive, and bad actors using AI, or any technology, irresponsibly are not operating without potential legal ramifications,” Cunningham said in a statement to Capitol News Illinois.

Ketan Ramakrishnan, a Yale law professor, testified at the Senate hearings on the use of tort law to hold AI companies accountable. Tort is a branch of civil law that allows individuals to seek compensation for harm done to them by a company or individual.

“A lot of these early chatbot suits that you're seeing are being brought through the common law in various states,” Ramakrishnan said. “These absolutely are not enough, as these systems become more powerful, but they provide an essential basis for other laws that might be passed.”

During the Senate hearings, lawmakers echoed concerns that these laws were not enough, especially when it comes to chatbots. They claimed the terms of service exempt those companies from being held liable for incorrect or harmful information the chatbots may share.

“Large corporations shouldn't be allowed to hide behind a computer algorithm,” Rezin said. “If AI gives advice that causes consumers to lose their life savings or suffer an injury, the company that deployed the AI must be held responsible.”

The Chamber of Commerce is also currently working with the Illinois Department of Human Rights on implementation of a bill passed in 2024 that prohibits employers from using AI for recruitment, hiring and other employment-related decisions in ways that could result in discrimination of a protected class like gender or race.

“Unfortunately, because rules have not been adopted to implement this act, despite a Jan. 1 effective date, compliance and interpretation for businesses on such a new topic can be extraordinarily cumbersome,” Cunningham said, adding that this is a good example of how new technology is difficult to regulate and broad legislation can be difficult to implement.

Outside Spenders, Economic interests

As lawmakers consider these regulations, industry donors spent millions supporting “pro-AI” candidates in the midterm primary elections, with mixed results in statewide and national races. And just days before the primary election on March 17, human resource professionals from across Illinois descended upon the Capitol to meet with lawmakers about the use of AI in business and employment.

“Illinois is one of 19 states in the country who has started to try to regulate, to some extent, the use of AI,” said Emily Dickens, chief administrative officer for the Society of Human Resource Management.

A growing number of businesses have begun implementing AI in daily tasks, from generative AI in marketing campaigns to AI programs that analyze large data sets.

Cunningham said that while AI is playing an “increasingly important” role for businesses, its adoption is still in the early stages, with many companies navigating how to apply it.

“There is certainly growth in the hard and soft tech innovation sector when it comes to AI, but today many small businesses are relying more and more on AI to compete in today’s economy and expand their presence with limited budgets,” Cunningham said. “AI is also helping mid-sized and larger businesses with product development, cybersecurity, and tough fixes in our supply chain.”

Dickens emphasized that AI can be used to supplement work, but responsible use should recognize the necessity of humans: “There’s a balance between the innovation … and making sure that you are not excluding people from the workforce who are talented and want the dignity of work.”

That’s where HR comes in, she said.

“People will need a more nuanced and technical skill set” to use AI, Dickens said. “It's the difference between going in with the whole army and going in with Navy SEALs.”

“HR is what's been missing, because HR has to hire, HR has to train,” Dickens said. “HR is right in the middle, and we are the connector to education and employment.”

While any proposed bills are still a long way from becoming law, lawmakers remain deep in negotiations with AI industry stakeholders.

The question of whether and how Trump might impose his innovation-first agenda on the states also remains. He revoked Biden-era AI policies within days of taking office in January 2025, but The Department of Justice has made no move to sue states for their AI regulations — yet. With many conflicting interests, the path forward is still a long one.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Virginia governor amends bills that shift costs onto data centers. Critics say her tweaks weaken them.

Shannon Heckt, Virginia Mercury — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Virginia Mercury.

Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed and suggested changes to dozens of bills this week, including tweaks to a key energy measure that’s at the center of legislative and public debate about data centers shouldering more costs for the state’s growing power demands.

Spanberger suggested sweeping alterations to Senate Bill 253 and House Bill 1393, sponsored by Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, and Del. Destiny LeVere Bolling, D-Henrico, measures designed to shift more costs onto data centers to save residential electricity customers money and expand a power line burial program.

What the Bills Do

SB 253 and HB 1393 would extend Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power Company’s weatherization and bill assistance programs for low-income customers.

The bills would also shift certain costs onto high-load users including data centers and large manufacturers that fall under the new GS-5 rate class for Dominion customers.

Those costs include the full price of capacity auctions, which the companies pay in order to purchase power from the regional grid operator PJM so they can maintain grid reliability during high power use days.

The bills would also allow the State Corporation Commission to potentially approve shifting the cost of new distribution infrastructure that serve the high-load customers, which lawmakers said could save residential customers $5.52 a month. The provision would increase high-load customers’ monthly bills by about 15%.

The bills contain a one-time opt out of the GS-5 rate class for facilities that have over 200 full-time employees. This way they won’t be beholden to the same requirements but will have different rates.

Dominion’s Strategic Undergrounding Program (SUP) would be also renewed under the measures. The program, started in 2014, has led to 2,900 miles of distribution lines being buried in the most outage-prone areas of the state.

The utility has spent $1.4 billion burying lines, which equates to a $4.88 monthly price tag for residential customers. The program was set to sunset in 2028 but the bills extend that to 2038..

Customer advocates said that the SCC should have more discretion in deciding if burial of lines is a reasonable cost and benefit to all customers. Legislation passed 10 years ago that ended the commission’s authority to deny undergrounding lines under the cost per mile cap that was $750,000.

The two bills that passed this year would increase that cap to $900,000 and limit the investment in the program to a maximum of 4% of the distribution rate base.

What the Governor’s Amendments Aim to Change

The amendments handed down from Spanberger strike out the explicit cost shift mechanism in the bills, preventing the capacity and distribution infrastructure costs from being placed on the high-load customers.

Spanberger replaced that aspect of the bill with language that more plainly directs the SCC to be mindful of not passing down costs from high-load customers onto the rest of the customer base, weakening its key provision.

The amendments change the one time opt-out threshold. They raise the number of full-time employees at a company to 10,000, which would limit the ability to switch rate classes to a small portion of the companies. It would also only apply to existing customers, not any new customers who have yet to come online.

For the power line burial program the amendments lower the incremental price increase the utility is allowed to charge ratepayers from 4% to 2%, which significantly reduces how much the company can invest in their goal of burying 4,000 miles of distribution lines.

It also eliminates the assumption that projects under the proposed $900,000 per mile cap are prudent and reasonable – which could lead to potential projects being denied by the commission even within the price cap.

Spanberger also proposed adding an entirely new piece of policy onto the bills, which appears to be a cost-savings attempt for residential customers.

The SCC currently decides how much return on equity the utilities can make during their biennial rate cases. Most recently, the SCC allowed Dominion a 9.8% return. Spanberger added a provision that directs the SCC to cap the return on equity at 9.3% and any earnings over that would be returned to the customers on their bills.

Reaction to Changes

The ongoing debate over the state budget fueled the governor’s alterations to the bills, she said this week. Lawmakers are still at odds over whether data centers’ sales and use tax exemption should continue.

The House version of the budget kept the exemption, but the Senate version removed it. Virginia misses out on an estimated 1.6 billion annually from allowing data centers to opt out of paying the 5.3% tax on their equipment and software upgrades, Lucas said in February.

“There are efforts afoot in the General Assembly, as it relates to the budget, to ensure that data centers are paying their fair share, as I think everyone broadly agrees is necessary,” Spanberger told reporters Tuesday.  ”And so that will continue to play out in those negotiations.”

Bolling said the governor’s office didn’t consult with her before the amendments were released. While she is still reviewing the amendments, she anticipates her colleagues in the legislature will reject the majority of them.

“HB 1393, as passed by the General Assembly, reflects months of work to strike a careful balance — expanding energy assistance and weatherization programs for low-income Virginians while ensuring fairness in how costs are allocated and protecting the broader ratepayer base,” she said in a statement.

Dominion also favors preserving the bills as passed during session.

“We fully supported the legislation’s original goals of lowering costs for our customers, expanding energy assistance, and reducing outages. The amendments undermine these goals,” a spokesperson for the utility said.

The legislature will return to Richmond on April 22 to review Spanberger’s changes to their bills. They will have to decide whether to reject the amendments, which could leave them vulnerable to a veto, or accept the changes.

On April 23, a special session to finalize the outstanding budget will begin. However, some lawmakers are skeptical on if a deal will be reached in time. “I’d be really surprised that there’s a budget by April 23rd. Anything’s possible, but I’d be really surprised,” Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, said Tuesday.

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REPORT: Text campaigns can help states increase public benefit participation

Kaitlyn Levinson — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:46:26 -0400

Results of a pilot program conducted by the Maryland Department of Human Services suggest that text message campaigns are an important lever that state agencies can utilize to increase enrollment across benefit programs and, ultimately, better serve families.

A mobile-first approach to resident outreach demonstrated the potential for state agencies to effectively reach vulnerable populations and link them with government services aimed at reducing hunger and poverty, according to an impact report released last month by mRelief, a nonprofit that helps people nationwide apply for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

The report evaluated the Maryland Department of Human Services pilot in partnership with mRelief that explored how SMS text messages could impact cross-enrollment of benefit programs in the state.

“The insights generated through this partnership can also inform similar cross-enrollment strategies in other states seeking to strengthen participation in nutrition programs and better connect families to the benefits they are eligible to receive,” the report reads.

The initiative launched last year after Maryland leaders realized there was an enrollment gap between its SUN Bucks program, which offers families with school-aged children financial assistance to purchase groceries during the summer, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Indeed, only 51% of SUN Bucks beneficiaries were also enrolled in SNAP in 2024, “despite significant overlap in eligibility criteria,” the report states.

Agency staff believed such gaps persisted in part due to language barriers and challenges connecting with hard-to-reach or otherwise isolated communities, according to the report.

In a bid to mitigate those challenges, MDDHS and mRelief launched an SMS outreach campaign in September that ultimately increased SNAP enrollment by 2,700 households and unlocked an estimated $5.5 million in federal food assistance.

To do that, mRelief leveraged the state’s existing enrollment data to send texts to 194,402 unique phone numbers that were enrolled in SUN Bucks but not SNAP. The texts encouraged SUN Bucks recipients to complete the organization’s SNAP eligibility screener. There were 170,707 successful deliveries, and 55% of targeted households — up from 52% the prior year — completed the screener, according to the report.

More than 40% of those who completed the screener were deemed “likely eligible” for SNAP benefits, and people who fit into that category were then prompted to apply for the program through the state’s benefit portal.

The report recommends several additional action steps that Maryland could implement to further drive enrollment and program engagement. MDDHS could integrate SNAP-related materials with SUN Bucks content to prompt residents to learn more about the former program earlier in the enrollment process. For example, the agency could include a QR code or referral link on SUN Bucks webpages that directs users to the SNAP eligibility screener.

“Embedding eligibility tools directly into existing program experiences such as SUN Bucks creates a more seamless pathway for families to access benefits and allows states to operationalize cross-enrollment as a standard part of program delivery rather than a one-time outreach campaign,” the report reads.

The agency could then deploy automated follow-up text messages to beneficiaries reminding them to apply for SNAP, based on their SUN Bucks program application or enrollment. According to the report, this approach “would eliminate the need for labor-intensive data processing and provide a more client-centric approach, compared to a one-time high-volume SMS campaign.”

MDDHS should also consider gathering more user data to inform further expansions or improvements to outreach campaigns, the report suggests. Indeed, the agency and mRelief had limited language preference data before implementing the pilot program, preventing them from identifying Spanish-speaking households in advance.

“Identifying opportunities to collect language preference data near or during the enrollment process would also expand opportunities for SMS outreach,” the report reads. Such information can position the agency to develop targeted communications to populations that speak a language other than English and may be underrepresented in outreach initiatives.

In fact, the organizations launched “small-scale message tests” to determine how to move forward with the SMS campaign with language accessibility in mind. For instance, program administrators found that fully bilingual texts that included both an English and Spanish translation yielded higher engagement rates among Spanish-speaking clients.

Ultimately, the agency’s SMS campaign “demonstrated that cross-enrollment strategies where populations are targeted based on current program enrollment are highly effective,” according to the report.

MDDHS could consider additional benefits programs to weave into its cross-enrollment strategies, such as the state’s Medicaid or Emergency Assistance for Families with Children programs, due to their high crossover in eligibility requirements, access to enrollment data and compatibility with SMS outreach, the report states.

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Surveilled and sold: Privacy and sanctuary in Portland

Narimes Parakul, InvestigateWest — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This story was originally published by InvestigateWest.

When I first see Nemorio, he is sitting by himself at the Voz Worker Center in Southeast Portland, Oregon. The 56-year-old is bundled up in neon-colored winter clothes and watching a soccer game on his phone.

Job hunting looks a lot different than it used to. When he joined the Worker Center 14 years ago, he left behind standing on a cold street corner for a safer, warmer place to find work. Nemorio is a professional landscaper, but he takes all sorts of jobs: a request to help someone move, paint their house, clean their business’s exterior, or other construction or landscaping-related needs. A Portlander of 22 years, he has worked for some of the same clients for over a decade.

Nemorio is one of dozens of immigrant day laborers searching for work at the Worker Center. Along with central heating, coffee, pastries, and conversations to pass the time, the Center also provides a degree of security for its workers, some of whom are undocumented. A poster that says in big block letters, “NOT OPEN TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC,” is pasted over the front door, next to a Ring camera. Volunteers regularly sign up for shifts to sit on a folding chair and guard the front door. Often bundled up in rain jackets with hot tea in hand, they observe the Worker Center’s surroundings — watching who approaches the building. With increased ICE presence in Portland over the past year, their job is to alert workers if they spot masked agents.

Voz Workers Center, where volunteers stand watch outside the front door, on February 27, 2026 in Portland, Oregon. Photo credit: Celeste Noche / Fi2W.

When I initially approach Nemorio, he politely declines to participate in an interview. But he stays in the same room as I speak to another member: a house cleaner from Oregon City, fresh off a two-hour bus ride into town. Not long after we begin talking, one word piques Nemorio’s attention — enough to join in on the conversation.

“Camera.”

The house cleaner and I are discussing high-tech cameras that are installed all over the city of Portland. They’re hard to miss, with big solar panels and a recording of a male voice repeating the same message: “This property is being monitored by video surveillance 24/7.” When I show Nemorio a photo I took of a camera in a Lowe’s parking lot, he recognizes it immediately. He’s seen the cameras everywhere, he says. He begins listing grocery stores like WinCo and Fred Meyer. He remembers one in particular at La Tapatia, a Latino grocery store in Gresham — a city bordering Portland. “ICE was looking for somebody there,” he says.

He’s seen the cameras out in nearby towns like Beaverton, too. “There are more undocumented immigrants and more troubles there.”

Any one of those cameras in the parking lots he named could be capturing his truck’s license plate every time he drives past, silently recording his routine movements.

And any of them could’ve been the one that led to an encounter last October, when an ICE vehicle followed Nemorio’s truck, landscaping equipment in tow, after he left a work site. He says he was lucky, because the agents eventually split off to follow a different car instead.

“It’s better now,” he says. “I’m lucky to have no problems. Maybe Jesus protects me.”

An ALPR in a Fred Meyer parking lot in Northeast Portland, Oregon on February 27, 2026. Photo credit: Celeste Noche / Fi2W.

This happened to him despite living in a sanctuary city within a sanctuary county and state. In 2026, Nemorio and other immigrant Portlanders face daily threats and fears of being targeted or profiled while driving. Surveillance technologies are helping federal immigration agents bypass state and local sanctuary protections to reveal immigrants’ personal information and track their movements — in many cases, leading to their arrests without a warrant or reasonable suspicion.

Over the past year, immigrants in Portland and across the country have had growing suspicions of being watched and followed. It’s not unwarranted: ICE arrests quadrupled last year, and street arrests increased by 1100% nationwide. The number of ICE detainees went up 75% in just one year.

This has all been disrupting immigrants’ daily lives. A 2025 survey by KFF and the New York Times shows that 41% of immigrants are worried that they or a family member could be detained or deported. About 14% avoided seeking medical care. Around 13% were not showing up to work. While their fears are valid, what they don’t know is how they’re being surveilled.

These concerns have prompted Portland community organizers to take action. Elizabeth Aguilera is the Director of Communications of an immigrants’ rights advocacy group called Adelante Mujeres. Last year, they started organizing volunteers to drive children to school and pick up groceries for families who are afraid to leave their homes.

Allies in Portland’s city government are also responding in their own ways. As Portland’s only immigrant City Councilor, Angelita Morillo co-sponsored an emergency ordinance last fall to codify Portland’s sanctuary city declaration into law. “The community wanted us to indicate that we were working on these issues and taking a critical look at them,” says Morillo.

While Nemorio doesn’t know the mechanisms behind the cameras, he has a hunch about why they’re here.

“Somebody is looking in the cameras,” he says.

Tools of Control

An ALPR in a Fred Meyer parking lot in Northeast Portland, Oregon on February 27, 2026. Photo credit: Celeste Noche / Fi2W.

The cameras are automated license plate readers (ALPRs). They are typically installed on road signs or bridges. They can also be mounted on police cars or left on mobile trailers for extended periods of time in the parking lots of grocery stores, shopping centers, banks, and gas stations.

You’ve most likely seen them around your neighborhood. ALPRs are used in all 50 states by over 4,000 local law enforcement agencies. In the Portland metro area, there are approximately 130 ALPRs installed. Nationwide, these ALPRs have captured millions of people’s movements — likely including yours.

ALPRs record every vehicle they see, capturing and logging its license plate number and characteristics, along with the date and time. These cameras all feed into one network, which can reveal a person’s daily routines — recording what streets one takes to go to work, school, places of worship, medical appointments, and so on. Those details are then stored in an easily searchable database.

It’s a system that runs with little to no oversight.

Police don’t need a warrant to look up a license plate. Curiosity alone is often enough reason to search for a track record of a car’s movements. Officers can construct a list of targeted plates and receive an immediate alert once an ALPR detects one, detailing exactly when and where it was found. Police can also access data from cameras owned by private businesses such as Home Depot and Lowe’s, which are popular gathering sites for day laborers.

Two companies, Flock Safety and Vigilant Solutions, corner the market on selling these tools to law enforcement agencies and private corporations. These companies claim their missions are in service of public safety and crime solving. But both have been known to collaborate with the Department of Homeland Security on immigration enforcement efforts.

ICE routinely taps into vehicle location data collected by local and state police departments for deportation operations. A lack of federal data privacy protections allows ICE agents to buy access to private databases through data brokers. The agents can use these databases to match license plate numbers and ALPR data to DMV records as a loophole circumventing sanctuary laws. It’s a quick and easy way to reveal someone’s image, address, and daily movements.

During President Donald Trump’s second term, license plate reader data — combined with subscriptions to private data brokers — are increasingly being exploited to find and seize immigrants. ICE does this without warrants across the country, including in sanctuary cities and states like Portland, Oregon.

“About a third of the detentions are happening out in community, and usually [while someone] is in a vehicle going between one place to the other,” Aguilera says. “Part of that is because of these surveillance techniques, including tracking license plates.”

Local sanctuary protections only function on the local level, determining what city and state resources and personnel can and can’t be used for. They are not enough to stop federal agencies from buying access to data brokers and using surveillance technology to monitor Portlanders. And these sanctuary protections have not stopped the Portland Police Bureau from sharing its residents’ information with a database ICE can access.

Tracked and Hunted

According to Aguilera, most detentions in Oregon last year occurred along the highway through Washington County, where one-sixth of all Latino Oregonians live. Smaller towns within the Portland metro area (like Beaverton, where Nemorio was followed) are where day laborers often find work. 90% of these vehicle stops, Aguilera says, usually happen between six and nine a.m., when people are heading to work or school.

An ALPR is stationed at a gas station along the busy intersection of NE Grand and Broadway in Portland, Oregon, on March 4, 2026. Photo credit: Celeste Noche / Fi2W.

On an early morning last October, a farmworker in Woodburn, Oregon was on her way to a job. Just like Nemorio, that same month — in a town 30 minutes away — she was being followed while in transit.

But unlike Nemorio, her car was pulled over by DHS officers. The agents who stopped her did not ask her name or show any papers. They broke the glass of her car window and detained everyone in the car. Immigration enforcement swept her up along with 30 others that day. Their arrests were part of an ongoing surveillance and deportation campaign in Oregon called Operation Black Rose.

“They sit and surveil and run license plates,” says Aguilera. “And then they’re doing sweeping arrests without [reasonable] suspicion.”

In February, a federal judge issued an emergency order to halt warrantless arrests in Oregon. By that point, over 800 ICE arrests had occurred in Oregon between January and October of 2025, with over 500 immigration arrests in Portland alone.

“What does that say about us as a sanctuary city?” Marina Ortiz asked the city council at a hearing in September. Ortiz is co-chair of Latinx PDX, a resource group for city employees. “Sanctuary must be more than a word. No one should have to fear that a lunch break or commute home could change their life forever. Yet for many city employees and community members, that fear is real. We need more than your symbolic words.”

Incomplete Promises of Sanctuary

A month after Ortiz’s plea, Portland City Council passed an emergency ordinance to codify the city’s sanctuary status. The ordinance legally prohibits all Portland city employees and resources from assisting any federal agency with immigration enforcement.

“I’m really not a fan of resolutions that say we care about X group of people but we’re not gonna do anything materially for them,” Councilor Morillo says. In 2017, during President Donald Trump’s first term, the city council passed a resolution declaring Portland a sanctuary city. “City Council encourages all Portlanders to unite and work together to promote kindness and understanding in our shared community,” the city council wrote in the conclusion of the 2017 resolution.

But resolutions are not legally binding. They merely express the formal opinion of the city council. Without specific policies that define what sanctuary status means in practice at the city or state level, these declarations remain mere political statements.

This criticism was echoed by city residents who urged city council to codify sanctuary protections at the public hearing in September.

“Prior to this year, sanctuary policies sort of felt like the equivalent of a company changing their logo to a rainbow during June,” said Portland resident Jack Dickinson at the hearing. “We no longer live in a world where that can be justified as sufficient.”

Portland District 3 Councilor Angelita Morillo in Council Chambers at Portland City Hall on February 27, 2026. Photo credit: Celeste Noche / Fi2W.

But even with the new emergency ordinance, local sanctuary laws cannot override federal policies. That means sanctuary laws cannot protect immigrants from deportation or criminal prosecution by the federal government.

By the time the city’s sanctuary status became law last October, immigration arrests in Oregon had shot up almost 80 times more than the year before.

Portland resident Nick Kai remembers that two of those arrests involved immigrant fathers in their neighborhood in the same week. Kai is a trained legal observer with the National Lawyers Guild. One of Kai’s neighbors was taken by ICE on his way to work. At the same hearing, Kai shared that they now drive their friend’s daughter to school because her mother is afraid to leave her home.

“True sanctuary means safety in every part of your daily life, not just when you enter a city building,” says Kai. “It’s sanctuary in schools, churches, hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, community centers — every essential thing that we need. No one should live in fear of being torn from their family simply by leaving home. That is sanctuary.”

Contracts Reveal Police Share Portlanders’ Data

Both the Portland Police Bureau and the Sheriff’s Office in Multnomah County, which encompasses the city of Portland, have denied any active contracts with Flock Safety. Yet in January 2026, the police bureau confirmed a recent contract with Motorola Solutions, the owner of Vigilant Solutions.

This relationship suggests Portlanders’ private information may be being shared without their knowledge, regardless of citizenship status.

“That information is being funneled systematically all over the country to private data brokers,” says Laura Rivera, a senior attorney with Just Futures Law, an organization that provides legal support to immigrants’ rights organizers. “[They] sell it to law enforcement agencies and private parties that could exploit it.”

Since 2017, Vigilant Solutions has sold license plate data to DHS and its agencies via Thomson Reuters, a data broker company. The data is searchable through a Thomson Reuters investigative database called CLEAR.

Through its new contract with Motorola Solutions, any plates read by ALPRs owned by Portland Police Bureau will feed into CLEAR — right into the hands of ICE — in direct violation of the city’s ordinance and the state’s Sanctuary Promise Act.

Local businesses like Bipartisan Cafe in Southeast Portland, Oregon, hang signs in support of immigrant communities on March 4, 2026. Photo credit: Celeste Noche / Fi2W.

That’s not the only way ICE can access Portlanders’ data. A public records request Feet in 2 Worlds submitted to the Portland Police Bureau showed its active subscription to LexisNexis Accurint, a different investigative database with access to millions of people’s names, social security numbers, addresses, vehicle registrations, utility bills, and ALPR data, among many others.

In an email to Feet in 2 Worlds, Sergeant Kevin Allen — the Public Information Officer at the police bureau — said that the bureau uses the database to “assist in identifying and locating subjects involved in investigations.”

The police bureau’s subscription includes access to another investigative database originally developed for the federal government after 9/11. The Accurint Virtual Crime Center (AVCC) was created to conduct mass personal data searches of Muslims to generate suspect lists following the 9/11 attacks.

As a condition of access to AVCC, the police bureau and other local law enforcement agencies must share their data with the Public Safety Data Exchange database (PSDEX). PSDEX compiles data from thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide.

ICE has access to both AVCC and PSDEX.

The Portland Police Bureau is handing over its data to the same investigative database ICE uses to find immigrants. That means even if Portland law enforcement is not directly cooperating with ICE, Portlanders’ data can still be accessed by ICE.

Importantly, ICE can also access jail release data through AVCC. ICE often asks local police to hold someone in their custody for an extra 48 hours through a form called a detainer request. Once ICE knows the exact date and time of a detainee’s release, agents can arrive at the jail and directly transfer them into federal custody. The police bureau’s FAQ says that “officers shall not honor or comply with federal agency immigration detainer requests,” in compliance with sanctuary city laws. Their data-sharing with PSDEX — formalized in a contract — undermines that claim.

When Feet in 2 Worlds reached out to the Portland Police Bureau, Sergeant Kevin Allen denied any participation in PSDEX via an email statement. “We do not see this anywhere in the current contract with LexisNexis,” he wrote. He also denied that the police bureau is contractually required to share license plate data and jail release data to LexisNexis’s databases, including the post 9/11 tool AVCC.

Yet the addendum Feet in 2 Worlds received via a public records request states that the police bureau “agrees to submit to LexisNexis Customer Data Contributions.”

“ICE is looking to exploit data brokers increasingly to power its deportation machine,” says Rivera, the attorney with Just Futures Law. “We’re seeing right now under this government how data brokers and other surveillance tools are being weaponized to criminalize our community members and expose them to arrest and deportation on a new scale.”

Without strong federal data privacy laws preventing the sale of people’s personal information, sanctuary protections will remain toothless against these loopholes. Meanwhile, the federal government is building and bolstering a vast surveillance infrastructure to harvest our data — targeting immigrant communities first.

Feet in 2 Worlds is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Ford Foundation, the Fernandez Pave the Way Foundation, the Elizabeth Bond Davis Foundation, an anonymous donor, and contributors to our annual NewsMatch campaign.

InvestigateWest (investigatewest.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Visit investigatewest.org/newsletters to sign up for weekly updates.

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3D-printed homes, an abandoned $590,000 deposit, the FBI: What really happened in this small town?

Molly Parker, ProPublica — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by ProPublica.

Outside a repair shop in rural southeastern Illinois, the parts of a massive 3D construction printer sat disassembled on a flatbed trailer, weeds climbing the wheels.

The $1.1 million investment wasn’t meant to end up there, abandoned.

Two local men had taken out a loan from a tiny bank to buy the printer, promising it would spark an affordable-housing revival across hard-pressed southern Illinois. Their first stop was Cairo, at the state’s southern tip — a historic river town beset by the loss of jobs and safe housing, now home to fewer than 2,000 mostly Black residents.

In August 2024, after months of negotiations, the city finalized a deal with their company, Prestige Project Management Inc., to build 30 duplexes. Days later, the printer arrived and crews assembled it on a vacant corner lot at 17th Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue.

More than 100 people showed up for the groundbreaking. Children clutched cotton candy and popcorn. Pallets of Amazon giveaways spilled from a truck. Behind a chain-link fence, the towering printer hummed to life, two American flags clipped to its steel legs, laying down the base of what was billed as the first new home built in Cairo in at least 30 years. The crowd cheered.

Kaneesha Mallory pressed against the fence. She had grown up in Cairo, moved away, then returned after her daughter was born. Living in a cramped one-bedroom public housing unit across town, she imagined a bedroom her 6-year-old could finally call her own.

Mayor Thomas Simpson called the project “just the beginning.” State Sen. Dale Fowler, whose district incorporates some of Illinois’ most destitute counties, described it as an “extraordinary project” — the start of more development to come. His nonprofit organization, which serves low-income children and families, had secured a $40,000 donation to help pay for the event.

Mallory couldn’t bring herself to leave while her future seemed to be taking shape. She stayed in the August heat so long that she fainted and was taken to the emergency room by ambulance.

Crews worked overnight to avoid the heat. Within about a month, the walls went up. Interior work followed.

But then the work stopped before the duplex was finished. The owners would later say cracks — dozens of them — had begun running through the walls and that they needed to make sure the structure was sound. The printer disappeared.

A year later, no one had moved into the duplex. It stood alone in a wide lot along a sun-bleached road.

As I began to examine what happened, the story grew complicated.

I learned that before the 3D printer arrived in Cairo, the Prestige owners had forfeited about $590,000 as a deposit for a different printer when they ended up canceling the order, a fact that would quickly turn the atmosphere tense as I pressed the company’s owners, the bank, Fowler and others for answers.

I also learned that not long after the groundbreaking, several employees left Prestige around the same time a spray of anonymous emails hit inboxes across the region. The emails called the Cairo duplex project little more than a publicity stunt and alleged fraud tied to Prestige’s other construction projects.

I also wasn’t the only one asking questions. I discovered that the FBI has launched an investigation into Prestige led by an agent in southern Illinois who specializes in white-collar and public corruption investigations. To date, there have been no charges filed or arrests made, and Prestige’s owners deny any wrongdoing.

Over the past eight months, the more questions I asked, the more public officials distanced themselves from the project and the company. The broader housing plan — the one that had fueled speeches and celebration — started to look increasingly uncertain.

I was determined to know: Was this simply another failed pitch to this dirt-poor delta town — or something more?

“God Sent Us”

Jamie Hayes, who inherited a Ford dealership from his father, and Erik Burtis, who had long supplied labor to coal mines, founded Prestige in 2021 in Harrisburg, Illinois, a town of fewer than 8,000 people about 80 miles northeast of Cairo.

It is one of seven companies Hayes has started since 2020, three of them co-owned with Burtis, according to Illinois business records. The two, business partners since 2012, have taken on an eclectic mix of projects: school construction management, solar farm fencing and the 3D printing venture. Hayes provides the capital; Burtis runs the day-to-day operations.

Burtis said he landed on 3D printing in early 2023 after asking his son Josh, who works for the company, to find out what was hot in construction. He reported back that it was 3D construction — based on trends in Europe. “Usually we’re five, maybe six, seven years behind what happens there,” Burtis said.

Burtis said God then laid it on his heart to start building in Cairo by donating the first home his company would print. Fowler, the state senator whose district office is in the same building as Prestige, said he listened to Burtis’ plan as they drove to Cairo to meet with town officials a few years ago. Fowler said he suggested building a duplex instead of a single home so two families could benefit. Burtis was moved by that idea.

“He literally started tearing up,” Fowler said. He told me the story in August as we talked in the back booth of a local barbecue restaurant.

“Did you cry, too?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Fowler said. “I’m about to right now just thinking about it.”

Cairo’s housing crisis is rooted in a long and complicated history. In 1972, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights visited the town and documented how racism had harmed Black families, including through neglect of their segregated public housing. Those problems only worsened over time.

I grew up nearby and have reported on Cairo’s housing problems for more than a decade. In 2015, I documented how conditions in those once-segregated developments had withered into mice-infested slums, overrun with mold and contaminated with lead, while federal overseers looked the other way.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development took over the local housing authority and then demolished those apartment homes, displacing nearly 400 residents. In 2022, HUD evacuated another high-rise for seniors, then home to about 60 people. In less than five years, more than 300 apartment units were razed, accelerating the county’s decline into one of the fastest-shrinking places in America.

Cairo had seen ambitious promises before the 3D printer arrived. At the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, it draws entrepreneurs who see unrealized potential in its vacant storefronts and magnolia-lined streets of dilapidated mansions built by river barons in another era. Some come to help, others to take advantage — it can be hard to tell. Residents have grown wary of outsiders with big ideas.

City Council member Connie Williams, a retired school principal, said city leaders had warned the Prestige owners not to make promises they couldn’t keep.

“We kept saying to them, ‘Look, we’ve had enough people come through Cairo talking all this crazy stuff and then back out,’” she said. “And they were just like, ‘No, no, oh no, that’s not us. We are here. God sent us.’”

The project attracted attention from Illinois’ top powerbrokers: Gov. JB Pritzker met privately with Burtis and Fowler in Harrisburg. Fowler also invited staff from U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s office to learn about the project. Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza toured the unfinished duplex and praised the effort on social media.

To help manage the project in Cairo, the company hired Bucky Miller, a broad-shouldered lineman with a baritone voice. He said part of his job was to craft development plans and an agreement with city officials. Miller regularly drove 300 miles round trip from his home near St. Louis to meet with city officials. He told residents at a housing task force meeting that he took the job after reading about the decades of failed promises made to Cairo, and “because of what I’m good at: keeping my word.”

But he had no experience developing affordable housing, and neither did anyone else at Prestige. Burtis acknowledged the inexperience but said he planned to partner with developers who would secure financing and hire his company to handle construction.

Before the Party, an Unraveling

The block party in August 2024 — kids clutching cotton candy, everyone in a jubilant mood — made it look like everything was on track. But I have now learned that significant parts of the project already were shaky even before the printer squeezed out the first cement.

One big problem was acquiring the printer to begin with. In October 2023, Grand Rivers Community Bank approved the $1.1 million loan to purchase the printer — a big bet for the rural lender in Karnak, Illinois, population 450, about 25 miles north of Cairo. The loan was nearly double the bank’s single-customer limit, requiring another regional bank to join in.

That month, Grand Rivers sent half the cost of the printer, about $590,000, to Peri 3D Construction, which operated out of Texas, to purchase one of its most expensive models. Their agreement stated that delivery of the printer would occur six months “at the earliest” from receipt of the deposit. The exchange of funds triggered Peri 3D to commission a large-scale commercial printer from COBOD International, a Danish company that bills itself as the world’s leader in 3D construction printing technology.

By January 2024, Hayes and Burtis said, they had become impatient. It had been only three months, but they said they’d given Cairo their word they’d start building that spring and felt the printer wasn’t progressing fast enough. Hayes said, “‘Here we go again’ is what Cairo is thinking.”

Fowler emailed the governor’s office a few days ahead of a visit Pritzker had scheduled that month in southern Illinois, calling the new 3D printer business “a major humanitarian mission” and asking for an opportunity to introduce the governor to Burtis, records show. Fowler and Burtis met with Pritzker at Harrisburg City Hall and discussed with Pritzker whether he had contacts in Germany, where Peri is headquartered, who could help speed production, according to Burtis. A Pritzker spokesperson said the governor’s office took no action after the meeting.

Days later, a Peri 3D sales rep emailed Burtis’ son that the printer was on track for delivery that April.

Then, shortly after, Burtis and other Prestige employees traveled to Las Vegas to a concrete industry expo. Fowler said that Prestige paid for him to come along and that he agreed because he wanted to see demonstrations of the 3D printer technology. He did not report the trip on his annual economic disclosure form; he amended the form after I asked him about it last year.

Burtis said a COBOD engineer at the expo told them that their printer was only 10% complete, though a COBOD executive said it did not have any engineers present at the expo that year. While there, Burtis also met with one of the few other potential printer suppliers, Black Buffalo 3D. That New Jersey-based company said it had printers available that it could deliver right away, according to Burtis.

Shortly after the conference, Prestige tried to cancel the order for the original printer. Peri 3D did not appear to respond to Prestige’s requests, according to an email exchange that Hayes shared with me.

Two months later, Prestige’s lawyer sent a letter to Peri 3D saying the company’s request had been “blown off” and proposed Peri 3D keep about $60,000 — 10% — and return the rest. When Peri 3D responded in April, just as the printer was due, it said none of the $590,000 deposit would be returned. Prestige did not write back, according to email records the company provided.

Burtis and Hayes hadn’t yet spent about $500,000 of their loan. Hayes told me they were ultimately “no worse for the wear” since Black Buffalo 3D agreed to sell a printer for what they had left.

“If I get 10 grand for a car,” Hayes said. “Say I pay 5 grand for a car and I don’t get my money back, but I can buy another car that does the same exact thing, and I only pay another 5 thousand. What do I give a shit if I can get back and forth to work?”

He called the bank.

“We don’t need any more money,” Hayes said he told them. “Can we get this taken care of?”

The bank agreed and wired the remaining funds to Black Buffalo 3D in April 2024.

A Flimsy Plan

Getting the printer to Cairo was one problem — it wouldn’t arrive until August 2024. Getting it to make sense financially was another entirely.

For months before the printer arrived, Miller, the Prestige employee managing the project in Cairo, had been telling city leaders that Prestige would secure financing to build the remaining 29 homes after donating the first duplex.

But city attorney Rick Abell said he couldn’t get straight answers about how the development would be paid for or what it might look like.

Typically, housing tax credits are used to build affordable housing in the U.S. But acquiring those is a highly competitive process that can take years to complete, a process that would be made even more challenging using an unproven construction technology and in a rural community. There’s no record that Prestige applied for any housing program funding.

Phillip Matthews, who chaired the town’s housing task force, said he repeatedly asked for a project rendering but “never got it.” That was strange, Matthews said, “because normally, when a company determines they’re going to develop a piece of property, they have designs.”

Abell and city officials grew frustrated with the lack of clarity around the deal.

Weeks before the kickoff party, city officials visited Prestige’s office in Harrisburg. According to Abell and Matthews, Burtis told them Cairo would need to come up with the financing to build the other homes.

The city did not have that kind of money.

Simpson, the mayor, was perplexed. He said Burtis offered to help the city apply for grants for a fee but offered no specifics. “I’ve been getting grants for all kinds of stuff, but there’s nothing for building housing,” Simpson said.

Burtis would later say that Miller had made unauthorized promises that Prestige would secure financing for the project; Miller disputes this.

Despite the uncertain financing, the city wrote up a contract: Cairo would sell a vacant lot to Prestige for $1. Prestige would build one duplex, manage it for 18 months and then transfer ownership back to the city. The contract called for 29 more over the next three years, with no details on how they would be funded.

The mayor signed the contract, hopeful the project would build momentum in a place that hadn’t experienced much.

Cairo’s Last Hope: Not “Some Big Serious Whatever”

I first met Hayes, the Harrisburg car dealer who co-founded Prestige, in early September 2025, more than a year after Cairo’s 3D printer party. At the time, I didn’t know about the abandoned $590,000 deposit or that there had never been a real plan for additional housing. I didn’t know Prestige and its suite of sister companies had drawn the attention of the FBI.

But I had already visited the defunct printer in the middle of nowhere late last summer. A former Prestige employee had sent me a Google pin to show me where it had been parked for nearly a year.

So I was taken aback when Hayes told me the printer, the size of a small garage when assembled, was stored on his lot.

I asked if he’d show it to me, a request that seemed to take him by surprise. Outside, we walked past rows of vehicles to the back lot. There was no printer — just heat shimmering off blacktop and a long chain-link fence.

He squinted into the sun, looked at me and shrugged. “I don’t see it, do you?”

He’d later tell me it had been there at one point, and he didn’t realize it was gone. That strange episode would set the stage for the interviews that followed.

Over many weeks, we’d spend hours talking in the corner office of his car dealership in Muddy, Illinois — population 40, a fading patch of coal country just outside Harrisburg near the Indiana border.

With an easy, elastic charm, Hayes slid between humor and confession, candor and confusion. He told me Prestige was named after the fictional do-nothing company in the Will Ferrell comedy “Step Brothers.” “It’s just stupid,” he said. “I’m not like some big serious whatever.”

Eventually, he’d blame everyone else — including both printer suppliers — for what happened: the stalled project, the cracks and the fact that Cairo still has no new housing.

Hayes told me Prestige had sued Peri 3D to recover its printer deposit. But for weeks he was vague about it. He said he hadn’t seen the lawsuit and didn’t know where it was filed — “nowhere around here,” he told me.

He flew into a rage when I told him the Peri 3D salesperson they’d worked closely with had called his company “shady.” At that point, he promised to find out where it was filed, but over multiple visits, he’d tell me he still hadn’t located it.

I found the lawsuit during a records search at the Saline County Courthouse, steps from Prestige’s office. It turned out that Prestige had filed the suit in early 2025, just as Peri 3D was laying off its U.S. staff. Prestige claimed in the lawsuit that it signed a “mock document,” not a real contract, and that it never received the language Peri 3D later claimed made clear the deposit was nonrefundable.

Five months later, in August, a judge ruled in Prestige’s favor after Peri 3D failed to respond to the lawsuit. In Saline County, where the poverty rate hovers around 20%, nearly double the statewide rate, the lost money stood out. “That’s a lot of money,” the judge remarked, according to a court transcript.

“It’s a bad situation,” Prestige’s lawyer said. The judge replied, “I guess good luck trying to collect it.”

Before I could tell Hayes that I had located the lawsuit, he texted me that afternoon: “Looks like we did sue and won!!!” he wrote. “Who’s the shady one now?” (He later said he couldn’t tell me where the lawsuit had been filed because he’d largely left the business to Burtis to manage.)

Still, he said he was resigned to the fact that they’d likely never collect their money — and to date they haven’t.

Burtis said they can’t locate anyone from Peri 3D. When I followed up with Hayes this month, he acknowledged that the contract made the deposit nonrefundable and said he regrets not reading the fine print. “Every time I’ve done that, I’m like, you know what, gahhh, why do I get screwed? Next time I’m going to read through everything,” he said.

Burtis said Prestige owes the bank roughly $13,000 a month under the terms of its 10-year lending agreement to pay for the original $1.1 million printer; over the full term, the company would pay more than $400,000 in interest. Prestige can’t afford the note; Hayes said he’s paying it out of one of his other business accounts.

In an emailed statement from its German headquarters, Peri 3D said in October that it had conducted business “in accordance with the terms and conditions” of its contract with Prestige but would “investigate the matter diligently in the coming weeks.” When I followed up recently, the company declined to comment further. COBOD said it had not been delayed in constructing the printer and that it had no knowledge of a lawsuit since its contractual obligation was to Peri 3D and not Prestige.

As I continued to ask Hayes questions, he told me the state senator could vouch for the deal.

“Ask Dale Fowler if there’s any-fucking-thing going wrong,” he said.

A Modern-Day Daniel

When I reached out to Fowler in October, he wasn’t vouching for much. He described Burtis and Hayes as acquaintances and himself as “just a guy that wants to help people.” He scoffed at Hayes’ claim that he could speak to any of their business dealings. And he said his role with the Cairo duplex project was minimal, limited to that of a cheerleader.

His attempts to distance himself from the housing plan and company struck me as odd.

The month after Prestige secured a loan for the printer, Fowler’s office emailed promotional materials for Prestige’s 3D printing business to the Illinois Housing Development Agency and touted the project before the state poverty commission he sat on, public records show.

He brought other top state officials into the orbit as well. Three months after Cairo’s duplex block party, Fowler led Mendoza, the comptroller, on a tour of the property with Burtis and his son. In since-deleted social media posts, she called them “visionaries.” A Mendoza spokesperson said Fowler asked if she wanted to tour the duplex, but she was not otherwise involved with the company or its owners, and they’ve received no state funding. The posts were removed after I asked the spokesperson if Mendoza had been aware that FBI agents had delivered a subpoena to Prestige’s office just days before her tour.

Fowler didn’t tell me, but I’d later also find out he’d convened Duckworth’s staff to a meeting with Prestige’s owners and the president of Grand Rivers Community Bank in early 2023 — 18 months before the 3D groundbreaking party in Cairo. A Duckworth spokesperson said the senator’s office had just revived discussions about how to address Cairo’s housing crisis when Fowler reached out and that the office did not have additional involvement with the company.

People in Cairo also saw Fowler as key to the deal and reached out to him after it became clear the duplex had been left unfinished.

“When it fell through, we were all calling Sen. Fowler personally, because he brought them here,” said Williams, the council member. According to Williams, Fowler told Cairo officials he was oblivious to Prestige’s business dealings.

Since its founding in September 2021, Prestige has been Fowler’s largest source of campaign donations, not including those from political action and other committees. The company, and others owned by Burtis and Hayes, gave him $22,000 between May 2022 and August 2024. Its final donation of $6,500 was made to Fowler five days after the groundbreaking party for the 3D-printed duplex. Fowler said he doesn’t track who donates to his campaign; he and Burtis said the donation was for Prestige co-sponsoring a golf fundraiser two months earlier.

Fowler, a decadelong state senator who plays a key role shaping his caucus’ legislative priorities as a Republican assistant leader, announced last summer that he wouldn’t seek reelection, citing a 10-year term limit pledge; his term expires in January.

Fowler also told me in October that he had no knowledge of the federal probe of Prestige and had never been approached by investigators. “Are they grabbing for straws?” he said of the FBI.

Fowler said he’d known Hayes and Burtis for decades and doesn’t believe they’ve done anything wrong.

Still, he said he’d taken some unfair heat over the ordeal — “guilty by affiliation, I guess.”

But Fowler told me it wasn’t the first time he’d been criticized as an elected official, leading him to believe in his “spiritual soul” that he is the modern-day Daniel. In the Old Testament, Daniel was a virtuous believer thrown into the lion’s den by his enemies. But angels closed the lion’s mouth, saving Daniel, while his enemies ended up being “chomped, mutilated, by the lions.” Fowler said the story put him “at peace.”

“I’ve never told this to anyone,” he added. “I’ve never told this to my wife.”

The FBI Comes Knocking

Not long after I began digging into what happened to the duplex in Cairo, I learned the FBI was also looking into Prestige’s broader business dealings.

Within weeks of the block party, six employees — more than half Prestige’s staff — quit. Then Prestige received a federal grand jury subpoena asking for its financial records, Hayes and Burtis said.

The FBI has also subpoenaed two school districts and the city of Harrisburg for their contracts with and payments to Prestige for work unrelated to the duplex project, according to records obtained under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. The FBI declined to comment on the status of its investigation.

Harrisburg Mayor John McPeek said the city did two projects with Prestige, though he said Fowler had encouraged the city to use the company more. A school district in Eldorado, one of those subpoenaed, ousted the former superintendent in September, in part for failing to get school board approval for about $2 million in payments to Prestige and related companies, public records show. The district declined to comment, and the former superintendent did not respond to requests for comment.

Miller, the Prestige employee who hyped the 3D printing project to Cairo residents, was one of the employees who quit. When we first met up late last summer, he told me he had become an FBI whistleblower.

Miller told me he’d been taken advantage of, sent to Cairo to sell a false promise the company had no intentions of standing behind. He also told me about a flurry of anonymous emails sent via Proton, an encrypted email service, that accused Prestige of fraud not long after Cairo’s block party. The emails went out to various businesses and schools that had contracted with Prestige.

I, too, had received a Proton email about Prestige. It wasn’t anonymous like the others, but was instead from someone claiming to be a COBOD executive. It directed me to open a DropBox file, but the link didn’t work. That executive told me she’d been impersonated; the company said it takes the matter “very seriously.”

At one point, Miller claimed to me that he was the one who sent the Proton emails — under instructions from the FBI, in an attempt to drum up investigatory leads. The FBI declined to comment, though three law enforcement experts told me this would be highly unlikely. Miller later changed his story, saying he hadn’t sent the emails.

Burtis initially refused to answer my calls, texts and knocks on his door, but he called me back in October and said he wanted to talk.

“For some reason, I woke up today, and after praying, it was like, ‘You need to go ahead and talk to her,’” he said. Tears streaked his face. His aunt sat beside him, taking notes on a legal pad. He blamed Miller for trying to ruin his company and for spreading unfounded rumors about him and Hayes. Miller did not respond when I asked him about Burtis’ claims.

Burtis also said he and Hayes have fully cooperated with the FBI, handing over all the financial records requested in the subpoena, though he said they’d never been interviewed by agents. “If I was really in trouble, don’t you think I’d have been handed an indictment by now?” Burtis said.

His son Josh, who had been put in charge of the 3D printing venture, said the construction issues had been disappointing but they had been keeping the city updated. Hayes said he’d been fully transparent with me and investigators.

As I asked questions last fall, the printer sat outside on the flatbed, though some parts of it recently moved to Hayes’ car lot.

The cracked house remained abandoned.

Hayes said the concrete “ink” that came with the Black Buffalo 3D printer was faulty and that’s why the printer has been idle since. Black Buffalo 3D said it has offered Prestige a new concrete solution and to find a buyer for the printer if Prestige no longer wants it.

Prestige and Black Buffalo told me in a joint email in September that they would return to Cairo by the end of October to fix the cracks, which they said were nonstructural. But Black Buffalo never showed up, saying its engineer couldn’t sign off on a repair plan without city permits, which don’t exist because they aren’t required. The company, which has sold only two printers in the U.S. since its founding in 2020, filed for bankruptcy in December.

Burtis later said he engaged his own engineering firm to sign off on a remediation plan to fill the cracks with a hydraulic cement, though he declined to share that plan or the company name. Crews were recently working on the duplex; Burtis said the cabinets they ordered did not fit.

Once the duplex is finished, Burtis said, he plans to turn the keys over to the city. Simpson said he will be ready. Still optimistic, the mayor said he hopes someone else will eventually follow through and build homes in Cairo.

Abell, Cairo’s city attorney, said the failed venture has never sat right with him. “I’ve seen a lot of deals fall through,” Abell said. “But we always knew why. Here, we got nothing.”

“Even today,” he added, “I probably have a lot more questions than I’ve got answers.”

While some questions remain unanswered, one set of facts is undisputed: When HUD began dismantling housing here a decade ago, officials promised there would be an effort to build back. Today, the only thing that has been built is one duplex, still unfinished.

Mallory, the mother who’d hoped to have a two-bedroom home one day, said she is tired of waiting, as much as Cairo has always felt like home. In mid-March, she applied for a housing assistance program in Chicago. She worries Cairo can’t give her daughter all she needs to thrive. “I want more for her,” she said. “I thought I was going to be able to get a two-bedroom apartment.”

But in the end, she sighed, with the kind of resignation that comes from being disappointed too many times, it was just “a bunch of broken promises.”

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Connecting learners and employers requires more than just good technology. It needs real leadership.

Nathaniel Rankin and Robert McGough — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0400

In late 2025, the U.S. Department of Education launched a nationwide challenge to states to build talent marketplaces that support skills-based hiring. That announcement came on the heels of a new National Governors Association’s initiative to advance skills-based practices and talent management strategies in nearly 20 states.

It’s easy to see why talent marketplaces are gaining traction. Not only do they align education systems with regional and statewide workforce needs, but they also hold the key to unlocking greater access to opportunity for learners and creating a larger talent pool of skilled workers for employers.

But states looking to stand up a well-functioning talent marketplace must do more than simply purchase technology platforms and merge data. While technology is a critical piece of the talent marketplace puzzle, building a robust and enduring piece of public infrastructure requires real leadership and effective governance that can bridge the gap between workers and employers and foster buy-in from each group.

In today’s economy, skills have become the currency of opportunity that connect education, work and economic mobility. Automation, demographic shifts and new industries are reshaping the skills that employers need. Employers are no longer just focusing on college degrees, credentials, titles and the time spent in school or on the job — the traditional proxies for skills. Millions of Americans have the skills to thrive in good jobs but lack ways to show what they know. This confluence is causing policymakers and employers across every industry to ask what people can actually do.

To leverage this new emphasis on clear, validated and trusted skills, states are beginning to build skills-based talent ecosystems to serve as the foundation for hiring, training and advancement and help workers and employers navigate a rapidly evolving labor market.

These talent marketplaces are public-private systems in which all participants — state agencies, employers, credential providers and residents — share a framework that defines, validates and values skills. They allow workers to document and signal what they can do. They help employers find talent based on the demonstrated capabilities of job seekers. They enable political leaders to craft policies and steer investments to strengthen talent pipelines and regional economies. And they allow education and training providers to use labor market information and state longitudinal data systems with regular feedback loops so they can align their programs with actual and projected workforce demand so their graduates are job ready for in-demand roles.

These talent marketplaces clearly depend on tech platforms to help employers find workers, to help workers find opportunity and to help data be collected, measured, validated and used. But tech should play only a supporting role. What underpins this entire structure is trust — trust that needed skills are defined accurately and delivered efficiently to learners and workers. Trust comes from validation — that is, from buy-in from all participants in this ecosystem and from consistent, transparent and evidence-based methods for assessing and verifying skills.

State-led governance builds the foundation for this trust by leading alignment and investment efforts across numerous agencies and participants. They define the criteria for competency and quality credentials. They establish the data standards that integrate learning and employment records into multiple public systems. They align funding and accountability systems to reward outcomes tied to skills and employment. Governance also ensures that learner-earners, who lack the large-scale representative structures that employers and education providers rely on, have a voice in shaping these systems. When guided by state-led policies and collaboration, talent marketplaces create the trust infrastructure that make the currency of skills spendable across education and employment systems.

Alabama became the first state to build a skills-based talent marketplace. Formed by the Alabama Committee on Credentialing and Career Pathways — which brought together education, business and government leaders — in partnership with C-BEN, the Alabama Talent Triad brings together job seekers, employers and education providers in a single skills-based ecosystem. Since 2020, the state has recorded nearly 272,000 completed and validated credentials that are powering the state’s economy and providing new and better opportunities for Alabama residents.

Arkansas has followed a similar talent-driven playbook. Created in 2025, Arkansas LAUNCH is seeking to expand labor force participation and help employers find the skilled talent they need. This new tech platform allows state residents to explore career paths and find jobs that match their skillsets and connect with training to learn new skills. Through aligned legislative and executive actions, Arkansas is removing unnecessary barriers to education and training and strategically coordinating the state agencies and organizations that drive workforce, education and economic development.

Advances in technology have made it possible to match job seekers and employers more efficiently than ever before. But effective governance and leadership are required to make this relationship last. By leading these efforts and bringing the right people to the table, states can build enduring talent marketplaces that support the growth of their economies and of their people.

Nathaniel Rankin is director of the Alabama Governor's Office of Education and Workforce Statistics. Robert McGough is the Arkansas chief data officer.

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REPORT: Agencies are getting better at communicating with the public, but progress remains

Kaitlyn Levinson — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:16:37 -0400

As governments across the U.S. increasingly strive to connect with their residents, a new report offers data-informed strategies for improving public trust and service delivery through government communications.

Expanding outreach and communications to residents is a crucial pathway for constituents to learn about government services available to them, like public benefit programs, that could otherwise remain underutilized, according to a new report from civic engagement software provider Granicus.

In fact, the report’s release comes as state governments must implement major eligibility and enrollment changes to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by the end of the year. Such changes include new rules for work requirements and state’s payment rates that state governments must clearly and effectively communicate to beneficiaries to help reduce the risk of people losing coverage and having to reenroll.

“Limited communication also fosters perceptions of [government] inefficiency or even secrecy, eroding public trust,” the report reads. “The solution lies in a strategic commitment to growing and understanding the audience.”

The report highlights the changing landscape of government communication efforts and offers agencies a framework for leveraging data to enhance their engagement with and service delivery to constituents. The findings released last week are based on internal data from Granicus and survey results of nearly 1,300 public sector employees collected by ath Power Consulting last year.

The report aims to help governments “get access to as many [residents] as they possibly can, but also do it in a very smart way,” said Stu MacFarlane, general manager for local government at Granicus.

From 2024 to 2025, data suggests that agencies’ priorities transitioned from building an audience to strategizing how to leverage “a more diverse toolkit to provide more dynamic touchpoints” with residents, like emails, texts and other digital resources, more effectively, according to the report.

These findings point to the framework’s first pillar, which is growth. The report suggests that increasing access to self-service resources is one way agencies can grow their audience base.

Indeed, basic website forms and email campaigns were the main engagement channels leveraged by government agencies in 2024. But data indicates that agencies in 2025 increasingly used methods like text messaging, targeted social media campaigns, cross-promotional website content and dynamic online forms to interact with more residents, the report found.

Agencies should consider ways to make access to their content and services more diverse as a way to increase their engagement, according to the report. This allows residents to subscribe to or complete forms for services they are most interested in and therefore likely to interact with, according to the report. Radnor, Pennsylvania, for instance, has seen a 98% increase in email subscriber growth since 2024 after enabling residents to join mailing lists from the jurisdiction based on their topics of interest.

The second pillar of Granicus’ framework is knowing the audience’s behaviors and feelings, then turning them into actionable insights. “This means moving beyond basic demographics to harness behavioral data, preference tracking and community sentiment to build public trust and drive operational efficiency,” the report states.

Agencies should dig deeper into performance and engagement metrics for more effective insights, MacFarlane said. Instead of focusing only on, for example, open rates of email campaigns, officials could track how often recipients click through the message’s content or what type of information gets the most views. Doing so can help agencies better understand what content and resources they should prioritize when communicating with constituents, he explained.

Governments can also directly ask residents to describe their experiences with agency outreach methods through user surveys, according to the report. Such efforts can not only improve the performance of government communications, but also impact the flow of operations. For instance, the report found that agencies that did not leverage audience intelligence reported a 33% higher incidence of service delays.

Another pillar of the report’s framework is the delivery of public information. The report calls for government leaders to continue digitizing or modernizing their services to ensure that things like critical program or policy information seamlessly reaches the public.

“Agencies that embraced integrated digital service delivery moved beyond static webpages to create dynamic, transactional journeys that make it easy for citizens to get things done,” the report states.

By consolidating online resources and services into fewer sites or platforms, for example, governments can more clearly present data that residents need to complete their own tasks, like applying for a city permit. The report suggests that doing so can reduce friction with agency resources and administrative burdens for staff.

Data shows that agencies that failed to modernize saw 40% more calls to help desks and 28% more stalled applications compared to agencies who reported using modernized digital service platforms, according to the report.

The final framework pillar suggests that agencies should measure more meaningful outcomes from their efforts to improve communications and service delivery. In 2025 and moving forward, agencies have shifted from focusing on surface-level data metrics, such as page views and clicks, to examining additional key performance indicators, like program enrollment and compliance rates.

Indeed, agency data indicated that in 2025, “organizations had shifted 65% of their core measurement framework to outcome-based KPIs,” a move that helps government leaders “directly connect communication initiatives to agency policy objectives,” the report states.

In fact, the marrying of communications-related data and service delivery data is becoming increasingly common, as 42% of local agencies reported they have integrated the two streams in 2025 compared with 15% in 2024, according to the report.

“Integrated analytics enabled agencies to correlate outreach activity with spikes in service utilization, allowing more responsive and impactful program adjustments,” the report reads.

Despite agencies’ inroads to expanding and optimizing communications in 2025, MacFarlane said challenges remain for agencies facing budget, resource and staffing constraints. The survey found, for example, that 70% of staff said they lack the technology needed to perform their jobs more efficiently, and only 53% said their current engagement activities helped build public trust in government.

But by prioritizing constituent engagement data insights, MacFarlane said that agencies can continue to build the evidence that certain communication mediums or strategies are effective, which “helps them get access to budget dollars … to help fund” these operational improvements.

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Data centers hit the ballot this year

Chris Teale — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

A first-of-its-kind ballot measure to restrict data center development passed in a Wisconsin city earlier this month, and similar efforts are underway across the country.

Voters in Port Washington near Milwaukee voted 66% in favor of a ballot initiative asking if voters should have to approve tax increment financing districts over $10 million, which are also used for data centers, according to results released by Ozaukee County after the April 7 election.

A grassroots group known as Great Lakes Neighbors United had the ordinance put on the spring ballot after collecting 1,000 signatures and then bringing the petition before the Port Washington Common Council. The effort doesn’t affect the joint data center development by OpenAI, Oracle and Vantage, a $15 billion project that includes a $458 million TIF district, but organizers said it bodes well for addressing future developments.

“We are not against development,” Carri Prom, one of the group’s organizers, said in a statement after the vote. “We are for development that the community understands, supports and has chosen together. Tonight proves that when citizens organize and engage, their voices can be heard.”

The vote does not necessarily mean residents will be successful, however. Multiple business groups sued the city after it placed the referendum on the ballot, reportedly warning that it could set a “dangerous precedent.” In response, city officials said they “largely agree” with those sentiments but had no choice but to add the measure to the ballot. A judge did not prevent the referendum from going forward, but warned that the results could be invalidated if it passed.

Data centers are crucial infrastructure underpinning artificial intelligence and its supporting technology, but they have come under severe criticism from communities and residents who worry about the centers’ impacts on water supply, the power grid and their neighborhoods.

More communities are considering similar ballot initiatives on data centers, while one state looks poised to do the same this November.

Monterey Park, California will vote in June on an amendment that looks to ban data center development indefinitely within the city limits, while voters in Augusta Township, Michigan will vote in August on whether to override a decision to rezone an area of property for a proposed data center. Another Wisconsin city will vote in November, this time Janesville, where voters will decide whether to redevelop a former General Motors plant earmarked as a potential data center site if project costs exceed $450 million.

Meanwhile, Boulder City, Nevada will vote in November on whether to support allowing data centers to be built in the Eldorado Valley Transfer Area, a region that has been designated for public recreation, solar energy and other infrastructure, as well as a desert tortoise preserve.

But the ballot initiative likely to gain the most attention nationwide is in Ohio, where voters could get to decide whether to amend the state’s constitution to ban the construction of new large data centers. Organizers received approval early this month to start gathering signatures to add the question of whether to ban building new data centers that have a peak load of more than 25 megawatts per month to the November ballot.

Organizers must obtain more than 413,000 signatures from at least 44 of the state’s 88 counties by July 1, with those signatures then requiring verification by Secretary of State Frank LaRose. The petition for the ballot initiative was accepted by the Ohio Ballot Board last month.

The Port Washington effort has also sparked more interest throughout Wisconsin, including a petition calling for residents to have more say on data center development.

“Decisions that shape everyday life are being discussed in ways that are out of reach, hard to follow, influenced by the very companies taking advantage of the communities, and/or already in motion before the public catches up,” organizers said. “And when residents push for answers about their water, their land, their future and their community, it takes time, money, and persistence just to get a partial picture. That is not how this is supposed to work. That is not how democracy works.”

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Maine is set to ban data centers, becoming the first state in the nation to do so

Julia Tilton, The Daily Yonder — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by The Daily Yonder.

The Maine Senate took a final vote on April 14, 2026, to enact first-of-its-kind legislation banning large data centers in the state until November 2027. The bill, LD 307, puts a moratorium on data centers with power needs of 20 megawatts or more, stymying proposed developments in several parts of the state, including in the rural mill town of Jay in Western Maine and at the former Loring Air Force Base in rural Limestone, Maine, near the Canadian border.

The bill would also create a council to study future electric load projections on New England’s grid and identify strategies to protect Mainers from paying higher electricity rates, among other issues related to data center development and policy.

The bill now heads to Maine Governor Janet Mills’ desk for a final decision. Mills, who is also a Democratic candidate for United States Senate in a primary race against oyster farmer Graham Platner, will have 10 days to sign the bill into law, announce a veto, or let the clock run out in what’s known as a pocket veto, which will kill the bill if the legislature adjourns during the 10 days. The bill passed final votes in the House on April 8 and the Senate on April 14, with most Democrats in favor of the ban and most Republicans opposed. There was some bipartisan support for the measure in the House.

If enacted, the legislation would be the first in the U.S. to ban data center development. Maine’s bill represents one approach to data center regulation as lawmakers across the country grapple with growing community backlash over rising electricity prices and environmental impacts linked to the facilities that power artificial intelligence. At least 10 other states, including Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York, are considering similar measures to impose statewide bans on data centers, according to Axios research as of April 3.

New England’s Power Struggle

Whether Mills will follow her party’s lead to support the data center ban is still an open question.

On April 10, the governor said that a data center proposed at a retired paper mill in Jay, Maine, must be exempt from the ban while speaking to the press at an event in Bangor, Maine. An amendment with that carveout failed to pass the legislature, and the version now awaiting Mills’ signature does not exempt any existing projects.

The data center bill arrives on the governor’s desk on the heels of a March 31 commitment to address the growing demand for power in the state and region more broadly. Last month, Mills signed onto a bipartisan agreement from all six New England states – Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island – to explore advanced nuclear energy technology to address the region’s long-term power needs.

Power demand from data centers in the U.S. could hit 106 gigawatts by 2035, according to BloombergNEF’s December 2025 projections, which rose 36% from an outlook published in April 2025, just seven months earlier. How much of that power demand will be supplied by New England’s grid is unclear – and rests on policy decisions like the one Mills will soon make about a data center ban. Currently, New England has 30 gigawatts of installed electricity-generating capacity on its regional grid.

More than half of New England’s electricity is currently generated by natural gas, leaving the region vulnerable to price shocks during global conflicts. Supporters of data center development in Maine contend that the facilities provide a path for the state to wean off fossil fuels.

“The method for advancing next-generation nuclear power is through the balance sheet of these new data centers,” said Patrick Woodcock, President and CEO of the Maine State Chamber of Commerce. He said he is “100% against” the blanket data center ban that doesn’t carve out exceptions for existing proposals, warning that the effect will be to scare away developers from communities that need investment dollars, including in rural places.

One such community is Jay. There, a $550 million proposal from New York City-based Sentinel Data Centers LLC has the support of the town government. The plan is to develop the former Androscoggin paper mill site, which closed in 2023, into a data center, generating up to 150 megawatts of power from an on-site solar system and drawing up to 25 megawatts of power from Central Maine Power, the electric utility. Yet under LD 307, the facility would be in jeopardy under the ban’s 20-megawatt limit.

Still, not all data center proposals in rural parts of the state would be affected by the bill. At the former site of the Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, Maine, a small-scale data center being developed by LiquidCool Solutions plans to continue business-as-usual, with a slight adjustment to its electric load. Herb Zien, LiquidCool’s vice chair, wrote in a statement to the Daily Yonder that the development “is able to move forward with the 20-megawatt limit.” The site was originally slated to operate at 26 megawatts.

“There will be data centers someplace, no matter what Maine does,” said Tony Buxton, an energy and utilities attorney at Preti Flaherty, a legal and lobbying firm in the state. Buxton’s firm is representing a data center proposal in Sanford, a town in Southern Maine. It too would be affected by the data center ban. Buxton said he sees an opportunity for data centers to fill in the “holes” left in the grid by the exit of large industrial customers, like mills, that have shut down across the state over the years.

What Mainers Want

Supporters of the data center ban praise it as a piece of legislation backed by Maine community members.

As of April 14, 4,900 Mainers had sent letters to state legislators and Governor Mills, favoring the bill through an online petition set up by Our Power, a nonprofit organization advocating for energy democracy in the state. Seth Berry, Our Power’s executive director and former House Chair of the legislature’s Joint Standing Committee on Energy, Utilities and Technology, called the response to the letter-writing campaign “unprecedented” and said Maine people “overwhelmingly support” the legislation.

“I really don't think it’s fundamentally an issue that belongs to Democrats,” Berry said. “I think there’s growing concern among a broad swath of the American public about rising electricity costs [and] about the lack of employment that data centers offer.”

A March Quinnipiac University national poll of adults found that 65% of Americans oppose the building of AI data centers in their communities, compared to 24% who support the facilities. Of those in opposition, 72% listed electricity costs as a primary reason for their stance, followed by 64% who listed water use, and 41% who listed noise.

In Maine, Berry sees a way for Mills to take action on some of these concerns. “By signing a first-in-nation pause, she has the chance to stand out as a real champion for ratepayers and for rural America,” Berry wrote in a statement to the Daily Yonder.

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The good, the bad and the unknown: The future of AI in North Carolina

Clayton Henkel, NC Newsline — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This story was originally published by NC Newsline.

Leading experts in research, government and industry innovators gathered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus this week to discuss how artificial intelligence can be responsibly designed and used for the public good.

UNC-Chapel Hill Provost Magnus Egerstedt said one of the greatest challenges in higher education is producing an AI-ready workforce in a world that is changing faster than curricula can adapt. Egerstedt said while students are already using some generative AI tools, they must have a baseline of AI literacy and understand the constraints that come from using this evolving technology in their chosen field.

“You’ve got to be able to use the tools,” said Egerstedt. “It’s going to take people that can see around corners, who can make new connections, who can keep a finger on the pulse of the future with very limited and oftentimes contradictory information.”

AI and Medical Advances

Ashok Krishnamurthy, director of the Renaissance Computing Institute, said AI is currently being used to provide more rapid cancer identification as well as individualized treatment.

That can be especially important in a state like North Carolina where 41% of colon cancer patients are diagnosed when they go to the emergency department.

Krishnamurthy said rather than a manual process that can take months or years to diagnose, AI-based tools will enable doctors to quickly evaluate clinical notes and have a diagnosis in hours or days.

UNC School of Medicine Professor Melissa Haendel said AI will also help advance clinical trials of new drugs that are often slowed down or delayed by the failure to recruit and enroll enough patients. All of this will require greater investments in data infrastructure and privacy protections, Haendel said.

Ronnie Chatterji is OpenAI’s first chief economist. (Courtesy Photo)

Not All Good News As AI Models Evolve

OpenAI is a leader in the artificial intelligence industry. Its chief economist Ronnie Chatterji said part of his job is to understand how AI is changing the labor market.

“One of my jobs is to watch those numbers every month and try to figure out how long the job market will look the way it does today,” Chatterji said. “The other piece of my job is a lot harder, which is trying to tell people what to do with the future.”

Chatterji, who also teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, said he has been asked to give a graduation speech this year, and is struggling with the message.

“The research shows if you graduate in a time of economic recession or great technology disruption, the legacy of that will affect your job 15 years from now — your wages, how much you earn over a lifetime, and your career trajectory,” said Chatterji.

A report by outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found artificial intelligence was a top reason U.S.-based employers cut jobs in March.

“Companies are shifting budgets toward AI investments at the expense of jobs. The actual replacing of roles can be seen in Technology companies, where AI can replace coding functions. Other industries are testing the limits of this new technology, and while it can’t replace jobs completely, it is costing jobs,” wrote workplace expert Andy Challenger in the April report.

Claude AI, developed by Anthropic, is designed to handle complex tasks like data analysis and coding. While each new model can offer huge technological gains, there are also concerns about privacy, job loss, and the impact on the environment. (Photo: Clayton Henkel/NC Newsline)

For now, Chatterji says he plans to tell the Class of 2026 that leadership still matters,”because you’re going to need a human at the end of the day to make the decision, make the call, and from a legal perspective, be accountable.”

Anthropic’s Claude Mythos made headlines this month over concerns that the powerful new AI model could exploit security flaws and vulnerabilities in every industry. Some observers have suggested that it shouldn’t be released at all.

In an online blog post, Anthropic cautioned: “Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely.”

Thompson Paine, Anthropic’s head of geopolitics, told the Chapel Hill audience that the company is trying to be transparent about what it is seeing and learning, so there can be an open dialogue with policymakers and other experts about the capabilities of this technology.

Paine said this new frontier underscores why the United States must stay on the cutting edge of developing these intelligence models.

“Let’s say a Chinese lab had come up with Mythos and these incredible cyber capabilities ahead of an American lab,” said Paine. “Do you think they would have reached out to the U.S. government to figure out how we patch as much software as possible? Do you think that they would have reached out to ten American companies to make sure that we’re covering as many vulnerabilities as possible before this technology goes public?”

Seeing Through ‘A Fog’ of Financial Data

State Treasurer Brad Briner (left) discusses how his agency is using artificial intelligence. (Photo: AI for Public Good livestream)

State Treasurer Brad Briner told the conference that his agency would expand its use of artificial intelligence.

A pilot project using ChatGTP found it to be a time-saver, Briner said, adding that he believes AI can also be useful in combing through volumes of data from more than 1,100 municipal governments in the state to find errors or problems, like the inadequate budget oversight the agency flagged in Rocky Mount this month.

“It’s just so enormous, you can’t see through the fog,” said Briner. “We can see through the fog now. Now we can have a predictive ability to tell the citizenry, your municipality is doing this. We know how this ends.”

There’s No Free Burrito

In a separate session on AI infrastructure and privacy, Martha Wewer, the state’s Chief Privacy Officer, said consumers are increasingly interacting with AI without ever realizing it.

She asked panelists what users should take into account before clicking on an email offer for a free Chipotle burrito.

Ogzun Ataman, the Chief Technology Officer at Well, said consumers need to look at the fine print and see whether a company is retaining personal data, for how long, and whether it will be used to further train the AI model.

“You can choose to allow them to do that, but you should at least be aware of that choice,” said Ataman.

DJ Sampath, a senior vice president for AI software at Cisco, said at the very least consumers can also use artificial intelligence to read the fine print, something most people never take the time to do.

“That should give you an instant understanding of what am I giving away to be able to get that free burrito,” said Sampath.

“From a privacy perspective, I think what becomes really, really important is you have to understand that trade-off. What is okay by me, and what is not okay by me?” said Sampath.

NC Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Laura Leslie for questions: info@ncnewsline.com.

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Public-facing AI tools could yield more efficiency gains for states, report says

Kaitlyn Levinson — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:53:54 -0400

State tech leaders have been busy brainstorming ways to incorporate artificial intelligence capabilities into agencies’ and their staff’s operations. While the tech has demonstrated its usefulness to streamline benefits administration, optimize audits and forecast natural disasters, a new policy brief suggests that state leaders may be missing out on fully leveraging artificial intelligence’s potential.

Earlier this year, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey announced that the state is partnering with OpenAI to deploy an AI assistant tool within the state’s executive branch, which includes approximately 40,000 staff members. State leaders anticipate that staff will leverage the AI assistant for tasks like drafting reports, summarizing documents or researching work-related things.

Several other states, like Maryland, New Jersey, Utah and Vermont, have already deployed similar AI assistants to support state employees with tasks like drafting reports, summarizing documents and others.

“AI use cases often help employees be more efficient at their current work, which is good, but this efficiency may take the place of transforming the work itself,” a policy brief released last week by the Pioneer Institute, a Massachusetts-based think tank, reads. “This sometimes results in missed opportunities to save even more money, think differently about the process of a program, or fix problems.”

There is opportunity for Massachusetts and other states to take AI’s potential further to achieve efficiency gains beyond reducing the time to complete administrative tasks, said Gary Blank, author of the brief and senior fellow for government effectiveness at Pioneer Institute.

While internal AI tools can help streamline and expedite agency operations, “other forms of AI can be a lot more transformative,” Blank said.

Take, for example, external AI services, such as chatbots or other tools state residents can leverage on their own, he said. Such resources can help residents address and resolve their own inquiries that could have otherwise held up an agency staff member, keeping them from fulfilling higher value responsibilities.

Public-facing AI tools also offer residents 24/7 access to online services or answers to their questions that can be translated to several languages for increased accessibility, Blank explained. These factors can help reduce burden on state agencies by, for example, diverting resident touchpoints from call centers to an AI tool they can access on their own device.

Massachusetts only has three AI use cases designed for external users, including the state’s virtual assistant at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, according to the brief. Launched last year, the RMV AI chatbot has helped more than 300,000 customers and reduced calls to the agency by 1,000 daily.

The other two external AI applications are grants navigators for local governments to find and apply for federal grants and for small businesses and organizations to search for grant opportunities within the state’s Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.

In comparison, Massachusetts has nearly 20 internal AI applications, Blank said. This gap presents one way Massachusetts and other states in similar positions can leverage AI to further promote efficiency in programs and services when both staff and residents can be involved in the process, Blank said. Agencies can, for example, analyze customer experience data to determine how an existing AI tool can be enhanced or if there is a need for a new application could fill.

Offering AI services to the public can bring state tech leaders closer to the people they serve, helping officials better understand residents’ needs to ultimately translate them into more effective tech applications and services, he explained.

Indeed, accepting feedback surrounding AI tools being used by staff and residents is a critical lever for states to further make the most out of the new and evolving technology, according to the brief.

“AI is a new technology and a new way of working,” the brief states. “The challenge now is how agencies take advantage of it.”

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How public records requests could help ‘fight AI with AI’

Chris Teale — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

ORLANDO, FLORIDA — Receiving and responding to public records requests is a major task for states and localities, but it has gotten even more complex and time-consuming in recent years.

Governments receive thousands of requests a year, and that number is only set to increase as artificial intelligence supplies automated and repeated requests. Meanwhile, the constraints on staff time, including on attorney’s offices, mean the discovery and redaction processes during and at the end of requests take longer, as they trawl through communications and remove any personally identifiable information and other sensitive records.

But experts suggested AI does not just have to bog down efforts to comply with the Freedom of Information Act and similar state and local laws. Instead, it could help process requests, find relevant documents and take a first go at redaction before humans come in to verify its work.

“We need to fight AI with AI a little bit,” said Erica Olsen, co-founder and CEO of government AI platform Madison AI, during the International City/County Management Association’s Local Government Reimagined Conference in Orlando, Florida, last week. In an interview on the sidelines of the conference, she said public records requests remain the “biggest administrative headache for any agency,” in part due to a reluctance to use tech to help reduce the burden.

An effort to use AI for FOIA requests is already somewhat underway at the federal level. Last year, the National Archives and Records Administration found in a report that almost 20% of agencies who responded to the survey said they use the technology or machine learning in processing requests.

But NARA warned that it will not be as simple as letting technology handle the entire FOIA process.

“AI and machine learning have the potential to aid in FOIA processing but are not a substitute for a FOIA professional’s judgment on application of exemptions and foreseeable harm,” the report says. “It is important that agencies explore the use of AI and/or machine learning options to help improve FOIA processing response times.”

One of the biggest obstacles to timely responses to public records requests is the need to manually review records, something that has become more challenging as the definition of a public record has become broader . Now, governments are not just required to produce emails when asked for records, but also other communications like instant messages.

“The opportunity is absolutely to rethink that whole process and instead of engaging the [government’s] technology services team, fetch [records] through a specifically written AI assistant that fetches all the data, the records, emails, evaluating those records [like] a human is doing,” Olsen said in an interview at the ICMA conference. “But AI can do an initial review of that. It can also do an initial review of what needs to be redacted. And then the human in the loop and the district attorney can do the final review.”

AI can also help refine and validate public records requests, especially if they are too broad or need more information. The technology already helps validate information from the public in areas like professional licensing and has helped speed up that process by checking paperwork and asking for more when needed. A similar initiative could help check and modify FOIA requests.

“Most often, those processes fail at some point because the information that was provided by the resident was incorrect, invalid, or somebody did not qualify,” Luke Norris, vice president for platform strategy and transformation at software company Granicus, said during a session at the ICMA conference. “So now AI can actually help us do that. We're effectively using our staff’s time, and they're not reviewing applications that simply would not be compliant, but instead are actually helping that resident fulfill and create and do that work the first time in the right way.”

Some governments have tried to help ease the burden by suggesting governments raise the costs associated with FOIA requests in a bid to reduce their number. Legislation in California would make the fees associated with requests in the state higher, in an effort to discourage nuisance filers. But experts said there must be another way to make it easier on staff.

“One choice is a charge, that's a choice,” Olsen said. “Or the other choice is to figure out how to use tools to meet the service demand from the community without hiring more staff or charging the community. It's either creating equitable access to information, or not.”

In time, AI could totally transform the public records process and make it something close to self-service with requests fulfilled in a matter of hours or days rather than weeks, months or years, Olsen said. But, she added, there is a long road ahead.

“If we really think about where this could go, that is sort of the Holy Grail of a fully transparent government,” Olsen said. “Some folks are quite scared of that. Clearly, we’ve got a way to go. The data is not ready for that yet. But if we think about the big bold vision, that would be the big bold vision, that any city would have their AI solution such that a citizen can ask for anything they needed, information wise.”

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World needs to ‘get ready’ for more powerful AI, Anthropic co-founder says

Alexandra Kelley — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Anthropic’s groundbreaking new large language model, Mythos, won’t be the last advanced — and extremely powerful — AI model to be created, Anthropic’s co-founder said.

Speaking on Monday at the Semafor World Economy, Jack Clark, Anthropic co-founder and head of Public Benefit, discussed Project Glasswing’s mission and how its central model, Mythos, was developed.

Clark said the work to develop Mythos began with the realization that existing AI models have the potential to be trained to focus on cybersecurity operations and were headed toward cybersecurity-specific development.

“What we saw made us realize: the next time we train a really big model, we should expect it to have these capabilities sort of inherent to it, rather than ones that we need to elicit,” Clark said.

Even in its early stages of development, Clark said Mythos surpassed every benchmark that researchers applied and could detect vulnerabilities in applications and operating systems.

Despite this early capability coming from Anthropic, Clark said more Mythos-like models will emerge from other developers.

“This is not a special model,” he said. “There will be other systems just like this in a few months from other companies, and then a year to a year and a half later, there'll be open-weight models from China that have these capabilities. So the world is going to have to get ready for more powerful systems that are going to exist within it.”

Project Glasswing, which grants certain companies selective access to Mythos for further safety and capability testing, will help reveal more about the AI’s capabilities, Clark added.

Clark’s comments come as the Pentagon and Anthropic remain locked in a legal dispute over the Defense Department labeling the company a supply chain risk following its decision to prevent the Pentagon from using its models for domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons.

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North Carolina Treasurer’s office expands use of AI throughout the agency

Lynn Bonner, NC Newsline — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This story was originally published by NC Newsline.

The North Carolina Treasurer’s Office is going all in on AI with the announcement Monday that artificial intelligence tools are being deployed throughout the agency.

“We have a moral obligation to the taxpayer to use their money wisely,” state Treasurer Brad Briner said in a statement. “That means improving the efficiency of everything we do as state government, and artificial intelligence is already being used throughout the private sector with stunning results.”

However, the State Employees Association of North Carolina cautioned that AI’s effect on workers is “a great unknown.” Its adoption in other sectors has sometimes been accompanied by job losses.

The decision to integrate AI into the Treasurer’s office follows a 2025 12-week pilot program where the agency’s Unclaimed Property and State and Local Government Finance divisions tested ChatGPT.

A report evaluating the pilot project determined that using ChatGTP was a time-saver.

“Our 12-week pilot program with OpenAI showed up to 10% increased productivity in certain divisions,” Briner’s statement said. “We expect that implementing AI tools across the department will replicate that productivity increase across our entire team, leading to a better return for your taxpayer dollars.”

Personal data will be secure, the office said in a news release.

The office used ChatGPT for free during the 12-week test.

Last month, the office purchased 150 ChatGPT licenses for about $51,700 a year. Additionally, the office purchased Microsoft Copilot and GitHub Copilot licenses six months ago. The Microsoft AI costs about $16,200 a year, and GitHub Copilot costs about $45,100 a year.

The new NC Investment Authority is negotiating a purchase of Claude by Anthropic, according to an information sheet the Treasurer’s Office provided.

The Treasurer’s Office has wide-ranging responsibilities. It manages state pension plan investments, state employee health insurance policies, is a repository for unclaimed cash, and monitors the fiscal health of local governments.

SEANC Executive Director Ardis Watkins said in a statement that investment in AI requires a clear plan.

“SEANC recognizes that AI may enable state employees to better assist North Carolinians. We’re not opposed to progress,” her statement said. “It’s a great unknown for everyone at this point, though, how much it will affect all workers.

The public needs to know more about how the office is going to use AI, Watkins said.

“The treasurer’s office is huge and covers many issues important to state employees and retirees, who want to know that their health care and retirement security are not in jeopardy,” Watkins said. “Any adoption of AI tools must be transparent with employees, involve them in the process, and commit to protecting the workforce that makes these agencies function.”

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State privacy officers persist despite limited resources, report finds

Chris Teale — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

More than 30 states now have a chief privacy officer, according to a report released last week, but many challenges lie ahead if they want to be truly successful.

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers found that 31 states now have a CPO or an equivalent role, and that many play an important role in governing artificial intelligence, risk management and procurement. Meanwhile, states are making progress with their own privacy laws and regulations in the absence of federal action.

But they face a number of challenges, including a lack of money, as well as an ill-defined role and insufficient staff considering the complex initiatives they must lead. Despite those obstacles, NASCIO said the CPO role is an important one and will continue to grow in state government.

“One thing is clear: privacy is no longer a back-office issue,” Amy Glasscock, NASCIO’s program director for innovation and emerging issues, said in a video accompanying the report. “It's front and center in state government. Digital services are expanding. AI is becoming more embedded in how states operate. And state CPOs are playing a bigger role than ever, especially in areas like AI governance and technology procurement.”

The growth of this role comes as states have taken the lead on privacy regulations while Congress’ attempts to form a federal framework have consistently fallen short. As of this year, 29% of states reported having an established privacy program — up from 24% in 2024 — with more than half reporting that their programs are in progress.

Implementing those programs have taken a lot of work from CPOs, who reported that they did so by, among other things, developing privacy rules, statements, policies and guidelines; establishing training and points of contact in every agency; implementing data sharing agreements; and conducting training and privacy assessments.

NASCIO found that CPOs are also heavily involved in setting AI policies for their states, as well as conducting AI risk assessments, procurement review, due diligence on vendors and incident response.

Coordination with other tech leaders remains something of a challenge, although the CPOs surveyed indicated that there is progress being made. One third said there is regular coordination with defined roles between the CPO, chief information officer and chief information security officer on AI-related tasks, while 26% said that coordination is more ad hoc or informal. Just 22% said it is highly integrated with shared decision making.

As it relates to other risks to state government IT, 39% of CPOs said privacy is treated on par with cybersecurity risks, showing the importance of protecting residents’ data and ensuring it is not leaked or abused. However, 21% said it is treated as less important than most other risks to the IT enterprise, again showing there is more work to do.

Forty-six percent of CPOs said they have authority over executive agencies, but enforcement is another matter, as 36% said they can enforce privacy policies on those agencies, while 29% said those policies are not enforced and 11% said they are enforced by another entity. Other reasons that appear to undermine the CPO’s enforcement authority include a lack of policies to enforce; enforcement taking place at the agency level; their agencies only providing recommendations; and authority only in the procurement process.

And the “real challenge,” the report said, remains having a defined budget for the state CPO. Just six states reported having a specific budget for privacy this year — up from three in 2024 — and three of those six states said their budgets have increased, while one remained the same and another decreased due to across-the-board budget cuts.

“We can see here the tough spot that privacy is in today,” the report says. “Almost half of state CPOs are given authority over the executive branch, over a third of them are tasked with enforcing privacy policies in the executive branch, but only 21 percent of them have a defined privacy budget. It’s understandable why they list lack of budget as their top challenge and funding as their top need.”

Sixty-four percent of CPOs said a lack of funding was their biggest challenge, while 54% said they still struggle with a lack of understanding about their roles among state employees. Half said the lack of authority was also a common challenge. They urged state governments to provide better funding; support from the CIO, governor or other senior leaders; more staffing; and enforcement ability.

Looking ahead, CPOs were split on what will happen in the future as AI takes hold, even as the technology was cited as the biggest force shaping privacy in the coming years. Some said AI will elevate privacy’s importance, while others were more skeptical.

“Honestly, I see AI crowding privacy out of the conversation and not much progress on privacy,” one CPO is quoted as saying in the report.

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As states spend millions to woo data centers, Colorado is having a reckoning

Jennifer Oldham, Colorado Newsline — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Colorado Newsline.

Community organizer Alfonso Espino stood near the newest industrial building rising in his north Denver neighborhood, which ranks among the nation’s most polluted ZIP codes. Now it’s the epicenter of a tense debate over data center expansion in Colorado.

Espino raised his voice over construction noise and a train horn and pointed to 14 shipping-container-sized diesel generators that line the building, just yards from a half-built senior living center. Exhaust from such engines, designed to provide backup power during an outage, is categorized by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as “carcinogenic to humans.” Xcel Energy, which will provide power to the site, projected “large load” customers like data centers will comprise two-thirds of its new electricity demand.

The bank of generators also sits across the street from an affordable housing facility, a community park and a health clinic with a weeks-long waiting list.

Espino is concerned that particulate matter and poisonous gases emitted by these generators during electrical outages could increase hospitalizations for respiratory illnesses that residents in the neighborhoods of Globeville and Elyria-Swansea already experience at higher rates than the rest of the Denver metropolitan area.

“I have asthma, my little brother has asthma,” said the community organizer, who also sits on the board at the Tepeyac Community Health Center. “We want to do everything we can to protect the health of our neighborhood.”

Higher rates of such diseases are the legacy of this community’s location. The region’s two busiest highways bifurcate the area and a petroleum refinery with a history of air pollution violations sits nearby. More than two-thirds of the land here is occupied by industrial or commercial businesses, compared to one-third in Denver overall.

Given that its residents are disproportionately impacted by exhaust from vehicles and air toxics from the refinery, Espino said his community deserved a more transparent approval process when it came to the data center complex.

The city of Denver greenlit the facility administratively because the property was already zoned for an industrial use, bypassing the need for a public hearing before the planning board and the City Council and raising questions among residents.

“A lot of things are concerning about the way the city handled this,” Espino said.

Mounting tension around the CoreSite development led Denver Mayor Mike Johnston to call for a citywide moratorium on data center construction on Feb. 23. There are 46 data centers currently in the city. The Denver City Council’s Community Planning and Housing Committee approved a measure on March 31 that would seat a working group to define rules around land, energy and water use, as well as zoning and ratepayer protections. The City Council is expected to take up the one-year moratorium bill later this spring.

“We think we need to build more data centers,” Johnston said on Feb. 26 on the “City Cast Denver” podcast. “The key is we need a framework to figure out how and when and where to build them.”

AI Building Boom

The controversy around how the CoreSite facility was approved mirrors debates nationwide around how to ensure the approval of such developments is considered in the open and that such complexes don’t negatively impact resource-strained regions and ratepayers and undermine greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals.

Lawmakers from Wisconsin to Georgia, Oklahoma, New York and Maine are considering similar moratoriums to provide municipalities more time to design regulations governing data center construction.

The push comes on the heels of a building boom driven by the need to power artificial intelligence that caught public officials off guard and left communities reeling. The industry is projected to double in size globally by 2030 in an “infrastructure investment supercycle,” according to a January Jones Lang LaSalle IP Inc. report.

By 2028, U.S. data centers’ annual electricity consumption will exceed that of 28 million households, according to nonprofit Food & Water Watch. Such facilities’ water needs to cool computer servers could equate to the consumption of 18.5 million households by that year, the report found.

The data center gold rush is also taxing state budgets. About 37 states offered tax incentives for companies to locate their servers there. Some are reconsidering these offerings as such policies add up to millions of dollars in lost tax revenue.

In Colorado, dueling bills in the state Legislature reflect the nation’s fraught relationship with the industry. One would offer sales and use tax exemptions to attract data centers, and a second “guardrails” bill would require developers to use renewable energy, hold public hearings and forge community benefit agreements with disproportionately impacted communities such as Globeville and Elyria-Swansea. It would also set standards for backup systems.

At a March 18 hearing on the guardrails bill, which offers no government incentives, state legislators expressed frustration with the process the city of Denver used to approve the CoreSite campus.

“Even local council members had no idea what was taking place, what plans were or were not being proposed,” said state Sen. Julie Gonzales, a Democrat who represents Globeville and Elyria-Swansea, during six hours of testimony before the Senate Transportation & Energy Committee.

Denver City Council members who represent the area, including Councilman Darrell Watson, and two at-large members, Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez and Sarah Parady, did not return phone and email requests for information about the CoreSite approval process.

Another council member, Paul Kashmann, addressed the controversy at the council’s March 31 Community Planning and Housing Committee meeting.

“While you can point fingers at data centers, you can also point fingers at Denver city government,” he said. “We did not do enough advance regulation — I think we need to do better in the future.”

An environmental justice summary that CoreSite filed with the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment on Feb. 24 contains a page-long list of statistics that illustrate how the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood bears more environmental and socioeconomic risks than other census tracts.

About half of those who call Globeville and Elyria-Swansea home are low income and a majority are of color. The residents here are exposed to more air toxics than 93% of the state’s census tracts, more particulate pollution than 100% of such geographic regions, and more traffic.

Diesel Generators Among Chief Concerns

Espino, the community organizer, said to protect residents’ health, his coalition presented CoreSite with a binding Good Neighbor Proposal signed by 215 people living near the complex. The company plans to build three buildings to house servers. The first is under construction. It must apply for permits with the city for the other two.

Community organizers asked the firm to disclose its energy and water requirements, measure pollution emitted by its facility and conduct an independent health equity analysis that quantifies the center’s emissions, noise, traffic, water use and emergency plans.

Residents also asked that CoreSite use diesel generators designed to reduce particulate matter and poisonous gases that contribute to the formation of ozone — a haze that leads Colorado to violate federal air pollution standards each year and forces health officials to issue dozens of air alerts warning people to stay inside.

Public health researchers found that air pollutants associated with data center operations nationwide could contribute to about 600,000 asthma cases each year and lead to public health costs of more than $20 billion by 2028.

CoreSite said it began engaging with the community in June 2024 and hosted in-person meetings with GES Coalition members.

“We’re committed to continuing engagement,” CoreSite Vice President of Marketing and Sales Development Megan Ruszkowski wrote in an email. “We’ve begun a city-sponsored mediation process in the hope of fostering a constructive conversation with the community that could lead to an agreement all parties accept.”

Residents were upset, however, when representatives of the firm failed to show up at a community meeting in February. Among the chief concerns are diesel generators. A state-issued construction permit for the company’s 14 diesel generators limits emissions, allows only two engines to operate simultaneously, and caps the number of nonemergency hours each engine may run per year to 25.

The 17-page permit says the engines “must only be operated to provide back-up power to the facility when electric power is interrupted, or for periodic maintenance and testing purposes.”

The generators are “expected to run for less than 50 hours per year, though generators at our other Denver locations run on average as few as 10 hours per year,” Ruszkowski said.

CoreSite operates two other data centers in Denver. The building under construction in north Denver, designed for an 18-megawatt capacity, is its third. The new facility will use 230,000 gallons of water per day at its peak capacity. Both water and electrical use will likely be lower than this, Ruszkowski said, and will not impact consumers because the company ensured adequate supply with area utilities.

Eighteen megawatts can power up to 12,000 homes per day, depending on location and climate, and 230,000 gallons of water is equivalent to water used daily by 4,600 residential consumers. (Denver Water estimates its single family residential customers use 50 gallons per person per day.)

The facility will cater to customers who pay to use servers that CoreSite says will “provide common applications we all use in our daily lives, including e-commerce, online banking, telehealth, 911 and emergency services, remote work, video streaming and social media.”

The 14 generators approved in the construction permit issued by the state health department are not the cleaner options residents requested.

Similarly, most diesel backup generators installed at data centers nationwide are Tier 2, which allow higher levels of air pollutants than newer Tier 4 designs, according to a March report compiled by the nonprofit Better Data Center Project in collaboration with former employees of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Ruszkowski said that generators on the site are “positioned toward the center of the facility to minimize exposure to fence line neighbors.” She said additional generators “would only be needed if we developed the two additional buildings — if customer demand makes that necessary.” This probably wouldn’t occur until the 2030s, she wrote. The first building is scheduled to begin operation this summer.

Until then, Espino said coalition members are focused on working with CoreSite and state and city officials to devise protections “that will actually make a difference in protecting the health and integrity of our communities.”

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A bill would explore making NH a ‘technology first’ state on disability. Here’s what that means.

William Skipworth, New Hampshire Bulletin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This story was originally published by New Hampshire Bulletin.

Some lawmakers and disability advocates are working to make New Hampshire the latest to adopt what’s called a “technology first” framework for state-administered services for people with disabilities.

The technology-first framework is designed to address a persistent issue within state services for people with disabilities: a nationwide shortage of professional disability caregivers, commonly known as direct support professionals. Adopting this framework would mean the state prioritizes new technologies that might be able to mitigate the need for hard-to-come-by caregivers.

For example, in Missouri which has adopted the framework, the state offers automatic medication dispensers instead of hiring a direct support professional to come to a disabled person’s home and administer medicine when possible. Washington, D.C., has a program that allows people with physical disabilities to receive smart speakers that can control household features, such as lights, with their voice. In Ohio, the state established 10 regional “tech hubs” where people can be trained on using these new assistive technologies.

Kansas University’s Lifespan Institute, which promotes this type of legislation nationwide and tracks its progress across different states, ranks Missouri and Ohio as leaders — or “expert states” — in the technology-first movement. The institute categorizes Washington, D.C., as “advanced.” All but 11 states have adopted some form of this framework, according to the Lifespan Institute. New Hampshire is one of those 11.

If enacted, House Bill 1685 wouldn’t go so far as adopting the framework, but it would establish a commission to study the issue and develop ideas on how to move forward with it. That committee would include lawmakers, disability advocacy organizations, people with disabilities themselves, and their families.

“We in the disability community believe in exploring options and giving opportunities for people to use technology as a way to solve some of the problems that they’re facing with some of the barriers that are occurring, especially around the workforce,” Vanessa Blais, policy and planning director for the New Hampshire Council on Developmental Disabilities, told state senators in support of the bill in March.

Rep. Heath Howard, who sponsored the bill, said the legislation would ensure New Hampshire becomes “a more inclusive and thoughtful state.” He also framed it in economic terms, saying it would “foster economic growth in (the) high-tech sector” that creates this assistive technology. The commission would also study ways to attract assistive technology companies to New Hampshire.

“Technology first is more than a phrase; it is a framework that ensures that technology is considered first in discussions of support options to promote meaningful participation, social inclusion, and self-determination for individuals and their families,” Howard, a Strafford Democrat, said. “Similar legislation has already passed and seen bipartisan support in other states, and it’s time for New Hampshire to join them.”

An amendment to the bill softened its original language, removing the term “technology first” in favor of “assistive technology.” Some advocates worry this will result in a less comprehensive system-wide approach, but Heath is still promoting the bill as a technology-first measure. HB 1685 has been passed by the House with the amendment and is now being considered in the Senate.

New Hampshire Bulletin is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com.

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Getting privacy policy right in a competitive digital economy

Brendan Thomas — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0400

State and local leaders are working to protect residents’ privacy while keeping their economies competitive, affordable and innovative.

Those goals often reinforce one another, but some approaches to privacy policy risk undermining competitiveness if they limit how businesses and consumers use everyday digital tools. Getting the balance right matters, especially as more states move forward with their own rules.

Today, more than 20 states have enacted comprehensive consumer data privacy laws. Where laws share common approaches to transparency, consumer choice and responsible data use, businesses can operate with greater certainty while consumers benefit from clearer, consistent privacy protections.

This is consistent with the research from the Interactive Advertising Bureau showing that many people are willing to share information when companies protect it. Consumers also expect transparency about how their data is used and meaningful choices about sharing it. Taken together, these findings suggest people want both protection and clarity.

Businesses’ use of data to understand customers and serve them better supports much of modern commerce, particularly for small businesses that increasingly reach customers they may never meet in person.

A national survey of small businesses conducted by TechnoMetrica for the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council found that online advertising generates an estimated $163 billion in annual savings and efficiencies, helping small firms lower marketing costs, reach new customers and reinvest in growth. For many entrepreneurs, data-driven tools have made modern commerce possible.

But that progress can be undone by inconsistent or outlier privacy rules. As commerce and marketing move online, fragmented privacy rules can undermine the tools small firms now depend on — raising costs, shrinking reach and creating compliance challenges.

A study by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimates that, without a consistent baseline, different state rules could impose $98 billion to $112 billion in annual compliance costs, exceeding $1 trillion over a decade. As much as $20 billion to $23 billion of that burden would fall on small businesses. Independent reporting shows many small firms already face compliance costs topping $50,000 a year, often more than they spend on hiring.

Take “data minimization” definitions. Maryland’s Online Data Privacy Act illustrates how principles that sound reasonable can create challenges in practice. By tying what is considered “reasonably necessary” to providing or maintaining a product or service requested by the consumer, the law can limit how businesses collect and use information for other common purposes, including advertising, even when consumers might otherwise expect it.

When routine commercial activity triggers heightened restrictions by default, businesses lose flexibility and communities lose valuable connections between local businesses and the people they serve.

Other states have taken a more balanced approach. Privacy laws in states such as Virginia, Colorado and Connecticut focus on transparency, consumer choice and responsible data practices while allowing businesses to continue using common digital tools to reach and serve customers. Thoughtful privacy rules can strengthen trust online while preserving the tools that make the modern internet useful, affordable and accessible.

Enforcement matters as much as definitions. Fortunately, most states have avoided creating broad private rights of action that would allow individuals to sue businesses directly over alleged violations. One need only look at how plaintiffs’ lawyers in California have used the private right of action in the California Invasion of Privacy Act to file countless lawsuits based on common digital advertising activities.

Instead, states have wisely placed enforcement in the hands of attorneys general and regulators, allowing officials to focus on serious problems while working with businesses to correct issues and improve compliance. That approach helps protect consumers while avoiding costly litigation that can discourage innovation and growth.

In a global, digital, data-intensive economy, privacy laws will help determine whether small businesses can grow and whether communities see new jobs and opportunities. The good news is that many states have already shown the path forward. By building on the common elements shared across existing laws like clear notice requirements, meaningful consumer choice and reasonable data minimization practices, policymakers can ensure people understand how their information is used and can easily access, delete, or opt in or out of data use when they choose.

Privacy policy that strikes this balance can strengthen consumer trust while preserving the digital tools that help small businesses grow, attract investment and compete in today’s economy.

Brendan Thomas is the executive director of Internet for Growth, a national coalition of small businesses and online creators that champions access to the digital tools Americans need to succeed in the modern economy.

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Human review, responsibility should be the ‘core feature’ of AI solutions, official says

Kaitlyn Levinson — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:06:29 -0400

Artificial intelligence has emerged as a tool to help agencies issue parking fines and tickets more efficiently, particularly as many cities have understaffed enforcement teams, but well-trained human reviewers remain critical to the approval process, experts say.

Across the U.S., cities and towns are expanding, but, in many cases, their parking and curb real estate is not, said Subhash Challa, CEO of SenSen, an AI platform provider. As more residents and visitors pass through communities where apartments, businesses and other facilities vie for curb space, AI-enabled camera systems and sensors are helping traffic authorities more efficiently catch people who stay parked past their meter time or drop their vehicle in a restricted area.

Indeed, cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and Santa Monica, California, have recently installed surveillance systems onto street signs or government vehicles to enforce parking regulations that help reduce traffic build up on public streets. For many municipalities, more streamlined parking enforcement can be an additional revenue stream for cities grappling with declining budgets.

It can be tempting to incorporate an AI solution into parking enforcement, like an automated ticketing or fine system, but “everybody adopting any of these [artificial intelligence] technologies needs to address the risks … and develop appropriate risk reduction or mitigation strategies,” said Marc Pfeiffer, senior policy fellow at Rutgers University’s Center for Urban Policy Research.

“That’s where subject matter expertise becomes important. AI seems so confident, and the language [the tech] uses is intended to build confidence in you,” he said. That’s where being trained on how AI works and its limitations can help agency staff be more attuned to double-checking AI-enabled results or identifying potential errors that need further evaluation.

Without that expertise, more mistakes, like incorrectly issuing fines to drivers, can occur, “and there will be times when there is an egregious error made, and it’s going to snap back into the agency’s face,” Pfeiffer said.

Indeed, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority faced backlash against the agency’s use of AI-enabled cameras on certain public buses that mistakenly flagged and ticketed approximately 3,800 vehicles for blocking bus lanes in 2024. More than 870 of those tickets were issued to vehicles that were legally parked. Similar challenges unfolded in Alameda, California, after reports emerged of the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District incorrectly issuing $110 tickets to some cars that were parked in legal spaces away from a bus stop.

Both agencies claimed the ticket cases were being reviewed by human staff, but such incidents underscore the value of proactive risk assessment and management before deploying AI for enforcement purposes.

For example, potential lawsuits, negative pushback from the community and other impacts are where prevention and risk management upfront could have saved agencies from trouble, Pfeiffer explained.

“Technology alone does not determine success,” Maria Tamayo-Soto, parking services manager for Las Vegas, said in an email to Route Fifty. “Implementation strategy, staff training, clear public communication and well‑defined processes play an equally important role.”

Las Vegas has been leveraging a platform from SenSen to enable AI-driven parking enforcement through license plate reader units throughout the city since 2020. The system enables LPRs to flag vehicles that are violating parking regulations in zones based on GPS data, which generates an “evidence package” that includes images of the vehicle, nearby signage, its license plate and relevant geolocation data, Tamayo-Soto said.

Officers also receive training so they can responsibly leverage the platform and better decipher whether a case flagged by AI was a valid violation or not, at which point “the decision to issue [a ticket], change [it] to a warning or dismiss the citation remains entirely human,” she said.

Ultimately, “the officer is responsible for the outcome,” Tamayo-Soto said.

Officers may also be required to evaluate the scene in person and take additional pictures to validate citations, particularly since “AI cannot fully interpret unique circumstances such as temporary signage, unusual conditions or exceptions which fall outside typical patterns,” Tamayo-Soto explained.

The city’s cautious approach to AI-enabled parking enforcement could be paying off, she said. “To date, we have not received community concerns regarding the use of the technology. What the community does see is more consistent and equitable enforcement, which is exactly what the system was designed to support.”

“Human oversight prevents errors and ensures each citation is accurate and defensible,” Tamayo-Soto said, which is why “human review should be treated as a core feature rather than a safeguard for AI limitations. It is fundamental to legal, public and operational defensibility.”

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Gen Z increasingly skeptical of — and angry about — artificial intelligence

Jo Napolitano, The 74 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.

While some might envision Gen Z welcoming artificial intelligence into their lives, a new Gallup survey finds people between the ages of 14 and 29 are becoming increasingly skeptical of — and downright mad at — AI.

Compared to a similar survey last year, they’re less excited and hopeful about the change it could bring and more angry at its existence, citing concerns about AI’s impact on their cognitive abilities and professional opportunities.

Respondents said they used AI at nearly the same rate they did before — they reported only a slight increase in daily and weekly exposure — but when asked how it makes them feel, the answers revealed growing misgivings.

Thirty-one percent said it made them angry, up 9 percentage points from 2025. And just 22% said it made them feel excited, down 14 percentage points from last year. Only 18% of respondents said it made them feel hopeful, marking a nine-point drop. Forty-two percent said it made them feel anxious, roughly the same as last year.

Zach Hrynowski, senior education researcher at Gallup, said the switch was swift.

“One of my working theories is that (it’s) the high schoolers, who are in their senior year, or especially those college students, who are maybe thinking, ‘AI is taking my job. I just went to college for four years: I spent all this money and now it’s turning my industry upside down,” he said.

Only 46% of respondents believed AI would help them learn faster, down from 53% the prior year, Gallup found. Fifty-six percent of respondents said it would help them to expedite their work compared to 66% last year.

Hrynowski notes, too, that users’ unease wasn’t entirely tied to the amount of time they spend engaging with AI.

“Year over year, among that super user group, they’re much less excited, they are much less hopeful — and they are more angry,” he said. “So this is not a case of some people who are adopting it and loving it and some people who are just avoiding it and feel negatively about it.”

Nearly half of respondents said the risk of the technology outweighs the benefits in the workforce. Just 37% believed it would help them find accurate information, down from 43% the prior year and only 31% believed it would help them come up with new ideas compared to 42% in 2025.

(Gallup)

The survey also notes some disparities by age and race. For example, older Gen Zers are more likely than younger ones to voice concerns about AI’s impact on learning in general.

Asked how likely is it that AI designed to mainly complete tasks faster will make learning more difficult in the future, 74% of K-12 respondents said it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” compared to 83% of Gen Z adults who said the same. Men and Black respondents were also less concerned about learning impact than their peers overall.

Results are based on a survey of 1,572 people spread throughout every state and Washington, D.C., conducted between Feb. 24 and March 4, 2026. It was commissioned by the Walton Family Foundation and GSV, Global Silicon Valley. Together, Walton Family Foundation and Gallup are conducting ongoing research into Gen Z’s attitudes toward AI.

Hrynowski believes there might be a link between recent revelations about the harmful nature of social media and AI-related distrust: Many of the respondents came of age, he notes, just as former surgeon general Vivek H. Murthy called for a warning about its use.

Generative AI shapes the user experience in social media. Just last month, a California jury found social media company Meta — owner of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads — and YouTube injured a young woman’s mental health by design in a landmark case that could encourage untold others.

This was the second of two critical decisions: Just a day earlier, a New Mexico jury found Meta knowingly harmed kids’ mental health — and hid what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

“I’ve always been very impressed from the start of this work with Gen Z that across the board, not just with AI, they are keenly aware of the risks of technology, whether it’s social media, whether it’s AI or screen time,” Hrynowski said.

They are not the only generation to harbor these worries. A growing number of parents of K-12 students are pushing back on their screen time, not just at home, but at school.

Despite respondents’ skepticism about AI, they’re also readily aware that the technology won’t be walked back: 52% acknowledge that they will need to know how to use AI if they go to college or take classes after high school, while 48% think they will need to know how to use AI in the workplace.

An earlier Gallup study, released just last week, shows 42% of bachelor’s degree students have reconsidered their major because of AI.

Gen Z, in its reluctant acceptance of the technology, wants help in how to navigate it, both in an academic setting and in the workplace. Schools are stepping up, the survey revealed: The share of K-12 students who say their school has AI rules moved from 51% in 2025 to 74% this year.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

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Fewer phones and more books — Utah governor commends new education laws

Alixel Cabrera, Utah News Dispatch — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Utah News Dispatch.

From taxing social media companies in the state, to banning cellphones during the full school day and implementing policies to improve literacy, Utah leaders’ K-12 theme in the past legislative session centered on students going back to basics. The vision, some of them say, is to see children talking more with each other face to face, or working on increasing the list of books they have completed.

Surrounded by classic literature, works of fantasy and Harry Potter decorations at Valley Elementary’s library in Eden, Gov. Spencer Cox ceremoniously signed a set of bills that he, first lady Abby Cox and lawmakers hope can encourage more kids to get off their phones and open their attention spans for books.

“As we’ve seen social media uptick over the last decade, we’ve seen literacy decline, and that is not unrelated, and we need to make sure that, as we’ve done as a state, pull that out of the classrooms, out of the hands of kids, and get us reading again,” Abby Cox said on Thursday in front of a group of fourth through sixth graders, lawmakers and lobbyists that contributed to the new laws.

The governor took a few minutes to explain to the students the legislative process these bills went through and commended teachers for their work, which he said has made a substantial contribution to the high rankings the state has scored in recent years.

“One of the reasons that we’re number one is because we have one of the best education systems in the state. One of the reasons we have one of the best education systems in the state is because we have the best teachers in the state,” Cox said. “And so make sure you thank your teachers for the good work that they’re doing.”

Some of the bills Cox signed in the ceremony were among his biggest priorities, like the bell-to-bell cellphone ban, which establishes a default policy prohibiting phones but that individual schools are free to change. Another was a $16 million investment to boost early literacy among K-3 students, after a report showed that almost half of the state’s third-graders don’t read at grade level.

However, other education bills that didn’t have as big of a spotlight during the legislative session were celebrated at the Eden school, including one that had unanimous approval among lawmakers, creating a required course for seventh and eighth grades on digital skills.

South Jordan Republican Rep. Jordan Teuscher, the bill sponsor, said during the Thursday event the legislation stemmed from parents’ concerns about their kids’ lack of tools to navigate digital spaces.

“One of the areas that was lacking was helping kids understand how to navigate in this important space. I hope none of you get on social media anytime soon,” Teuscher told the kids at the library. “If you can hold out until after you’re adults, that is way better, and you’re going to be healthier and happier and stronger. But for those that are getting involved in that, how can they safely navigate there?”

Gov. Spencer Cox, Utah first lady Abby Cox, lawmakers and students pose during a bill signing ceremony at the Valley Elementary library on April 9, 2026. (Alixel Cabrera/Utah News Dispatch)

The course won’t be about “just how bad the technology is,” Teuscher said. It will also tackle the benefits of digital technologies, and help students to balance the virtual and real world.

But the state remains interested in disincentivizing social media use in other ways, like taxing platforms that collect user data for targeted advertising. It’s a law that according to Teuscher, who sponsored the bill on the House floor, may be the most controversial of the set the governor signed Thursday.

“In Utah we don’t like raising taxes, right? We want to keep taxes as low as we possibly can,” he said. “But in this case, when you see that there’s opportunities where we need to get less of something, the best thing that we can do is tax it.”

The funds collected by the 4.7% tax will pay for youth sports and recreation, and volunteerism and mental health programs for young Utahns, a model Cox said he felt “very passionate about.”

“The money that we’ll collect will go back to helping our young people who have been so damaged by social media and the wealthiest (companies) in the history of the world, we think that they should be able to pay a little bit to make up for the harms that they’ve caused,” Cox said about the bill.

Another law Cox highlighted during the ceremony also involved students’ interaction with digital technologies, but focused specifically on artificial intelligence use in public classrooms.

Kaysville Republican Rep. Ariel Defay, who sponsored the legislation, said it limits the use of technology in elementary schools so students can develop foundational skills in literacy and math.

“And then as you move on to junior high and high school, there’ll be more and more and more technology, because it will be important for you to use technology and to navigate it, but in a very balanced way,” she said.

Other laws highlighted during the event included some aiming to intervene earlier in cases of dyslexia by funding tests to detect it, not only in schools but with therapists, as well as partnering with the University of Utah to develop a statewide dyslexia intervention plan.

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The overlooked reentry tool for veterans: Prison tablets

Tammy Ferguson — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Incarcerated veterans live at a difficult intersection: military service, involvement in the justice system and a society where nearly every step of reentry — from applying for benefits to securing housing, health care and employment — requires digital access.

Today, even basic reentry tasks often demand navigating online forms, identity verification tools like ID.me and other web-based systems that are hard to reach from inside a prison.

For governors, corrections leaders and policymakers, this is not just a human story; it is a public safety, fiscal and moral question: Are we using the technology infrastructure we already control to support successful reentry for those who have served?

According to recent federal estimates, roughly 181,000 veterans are incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails. As they return home, they are expected to navigate a modern, digitally driven benefits and service system, often with limited support.

The Department of Veterans Affairs deploys Veterans Justice Outreach specialists to engage justice-involved veterans through outreach, assessment and case management. These specialists help veterans understand and access benefits during incarceration and after release — support that improves institutional adjustment and, as evidence shows, can reduce recidivism.

Yet too many veterans remain cut off from the digital tools and structured information they need to navigate a digital‑first VA benefits system.

Unlike the public, incarcerated individuals do not have open internet access or the ability to independently search for employment, housing, health care, or benefits. Many correctional facilities instead rely on secure-network tablets as the primary source of digital access. These devices offer a critical opportunity to deliver accurate, structured information that can shape reentry outcomes.

When these tablets are underutilized, veterans leave incarceration without timely or credible information about VA benefits — a gap no amount of post-release intervention can fully close.

State and local corrections leaders play a decisive role in determining whether this digital access and reentry information gap persists. They control the content on secure-network tablets and influence the technology providers selected to deliver those services. They are not passive users of technology, but gatekeepers of information that can influence public safety, recidivism and long-term stability for veterans and their families.

In many jurisdictions, secure-network tablets are already deployed at scale. Using them to deliver structured, VA-aligned reentry content requires no new infrastructure — only leadership direction.

This is not about providing open internet access inside corrections facilities; it is about using existing systems more strategically. While tablets already support communication and entertainment, a critical opportunity is missed if they are not also used to deliver targeted, rehabilitative content. When loaded with accurate, relevant resources — including VA benefits information — these systems become extensions of institutional programming rather than disconnected add-ons.

Two sets of leaders are positioned to close this gap.

The VA should ensure that information on benefits, health care, housing assistance, employment programs and reentry resources is available in nonproprietary formats that can be easily deployed across tablet systems. Video modules, step-by-step guides and plain-language explanations should work across different secure tablet platforms without proprietary barriers or licensing hurdles.

Technology should reinforce, not replace, human expertise. Clear, standardized digital content can provide veterans with a foundation of knowledge about eligibility, enrollment and available support, so that when they meet with VJO specialists or other case managers, time can be spent on problem-solving rather than on basic orientation.

State and local corrections leaders, in turn, can ensure that this information reaches the veterans in their custody by:

Requiring high-quality, VA-approved reentry content for justice-involved veterans in secure-network tablet contracts — with the same standards applied to any vendor.
Formalizing partnerships with VA and VJO programs to coordinate content, training and dissemination.
Directing procurement teams, chief information officers and IT leaders to prioritize vendors that can deliver vetted, nonproprietary public content and update it as policies change.
Integrating tablet-based resources into case management and reentry planning and tracking indicators such as how many veterans start VA benefits applications or health care enrollment before release.

These are vendor-neutral expectations that any technology provider serving corrections should be able to meet.

Aligning tablet content with the work of VJO specialists offers a practical, scalable way to strengthen the service network that supports justice-involved veterans. It allows veterans to absorb information at their own pace, revisit it and prepare informed questions before engaging with service providers. It moves reentry preparation upstream — into the period of incarceration — reducing delays, confusion and missed opportunities after release.

Early access to accurate digital information narrows gaps in care upon release, lowers the risk of food insecurity, homelessness and unemployment and supports continuity of treatment for physical and mental health needs. Intentional use of existing digital tools during incarceration becomes a public safety strategy — one that can improve reentry outcomes, reduce recidivism and reinforce the broader veteran support infrastructure.

If we are serious about honoring service, reducing recidivism and building stronger communities, then ensuring justice-involved veterans leave incarceration informed, prepared and connected must be a shared responsibility. Governors, corrections commissioners, VA leaders and technology partners can align tablet contracts, content standards and reentry planning so that every justice-involved veteran leaves custody with clear information and a digital bridge to the benefits they have earned.

The infrastructure already exists. What is still needed is alignment on leadership.

Tammy Ferguson is director of Operation Veteran Reentry at ViaPath Technologies, and is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force and the Pennsylvania Air National Guard. She is a former executive deputy secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and now works in the corrections and reentry space, where she also serves on a governor’s advisory council on veteran services. Her views here are focused on public policy, emphasizing standards that any correctional technology provider should meet.

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New Jersey uses data to improve population health

Margaret Arnesen — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Data helps state agencies and policymakers make informed decisions about the policies and practices that protect the health and safety of their communities. In New Jersey, the Integrated Population Health Data Project (iPHD) aims to improve the overall well-being of residents and the efficiency of state government by securely linking administrative datasets to support research.

The New Jersey Department of Health contributed the initial funding and datasets to support the design and implementation of the iPHD. Now, the project is working to meet researchers’ needs by expanding its data to include other departments and agencies.

To learn more about this work, The Pew Charitable Trusts spoke to Margaret Koller, executive director at the Rutgers Center for State Health Policy, and Rachel Hammond, the chief ethics, data privacy, and research integrity officer for the New Jersey Department of Health. As part of their roles, Koller directs the implementation of the iPHD and Hammond chairs the iPHD’s governing board.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

So Margaret, you’re one of the leads on the iPHD. Can you give me a brief overview of the project and the goals it was established to meet?

Koller: The iPHD is an integrated data system New Jersey created by statute in 2016. The goal of the project is to harness the capability of health and administrative datasets to create a more comprehensive look of a person’s interactions with New Jersey’s health services systems.

A lot of data that can be used to better understand individual and community health are siloed across various departments and agencies. But with the iPHD, we’re able to link some of that data and break down some of those siloes to improve population health and the efficiency of state government programs. We already have more than 90 million records that have been linked at the person level.

What role did that legislation play in establishing the iPHD?

Hammond: Legislation is probably the most vital component to getting something like the iPHD project up and running. It lays out clearly how datasets that are shared with the iPHD will be used and, importantly, how they’ll be protected.

Koller: Being able to point to the legislation when speaking to agencies outside of the Department of Health is important. Other agencies are not compelled to put their data in the iPHD, so it’s much easier to initiate conversations when you have legislation that clearly defines our goals and mandates.

It also acknowledges the capacity of the Rutgers Center for State Health Policy to lead this work because we are named in the legislation as the entity that will oversee the operation of the iPHD.

What is the value of linking multiple data streams from the New Jersey Department of Health under this one umbrella?

Koller: It creates a more complete understanding of how people navigate and use different services in New Jersey’s health care delivery system. It also helps us identify underlying conditions or barriers to accessing care.

Hammond: Data lends itself to being divided into siloes. Data collected by different agencies can have different confidentiality requirements, different funding streams, different legislative mandates, and so on.

The iPHD helps break down these siloes by collecting data from across departments and agencies and making it available in a limited dataset or without identifying information. That way, you still have the value and holistic picture that the data creates, but you’re protecting people’s data privacy as well.

Koller: That’s a great point. Data privacy and security is not a secondary priority. It is of equal value to collecting data and putting it together in limited datasets that are de-identified for research purposes.

So what kind of challenges has the iPHD faced since its inception and how have you overcome them?

Koller: Funding is a big one, and we’re lucky to have Rachel advocating for us in the administration. She’s spearheaded the continuous support from the New Jersey Department of Health. We’ve been through five or six commissioners since the iPHD started, and Rachel has been able to really advocate for us and make sure that the funding support for the iPHD has been preserved in the annual budget.

One more thing we’re always thinking about is forecasting what’s coming down the pike. What data should we really prioritize integrating into the iPHD that’ll be interesting and meet our researchers’ needs? It takes time to build the relationships and trust to get data from other departments, and then it takes time to process the data and create those de-identified datasets. So, we’re always trying to think ahead.

Have there been any challenges that surprised you?

Koller: The one thing that has surprised us is the kind of data researchers are asking for. When we started the iPHD, we just focused on data from the Department of Health, which was our legislative mandate.

But over the last year and a half, we started seeing more requests for third-party linkage. People are saying, “OK, the iPHD dataset is great, but we also want to connect it to a Medicare CMS dataset or a Child Protective Services file at a geographic level or the Medicaid data.”

That’s where data linkage is going, so we’re trying to find the balance between what is feasible to include in the iPHD and where users’ needs are headed. It’s all about setting priorities.

Rachel, you chair the governing board that oversees the iPHD. What role does the governing board serve?

Hammond: The governing board is responsible for oversight of the entire project. The team at the Center really does all the heavy lifting of operationalizing and managing the project, and the governing board does the lifting relative to overseeing it.

Specifically, the governing board determines what data is appropriate for inclusion in the iPHD project. That’s one of our statutory charges. We’re also responsible for policy development and adoption relative to our data governance, access, privacy, and security. We also adopted and implemented the criteria for approving researcher applications requesting to release data, pilot projects, and fee waivers.

Koller: I think something that really works is the environment of trust that the governing board creates. We’re always talking about process improvement—things that we think we could do better or differently or more efficiently, so that we can continue to grow the iPHD and still be able to service it as we do now. As part of that, we at the Center have the freedom to go to the governing board and give feedback on what we think could work better. That environment of trust and accessibility to the board members is a great benefit for our team at the Center.

Can you give an example of a recent research finding that used data linked by the iPHD?

Koller: We have a faculty member in the School of Public Health at Rutgers, Slawa Rokicki, who used the iPHD for her research on perinatal depression associated with increased pediatric emergency department (ED) use. Using hospital discharge records and birth records, she found that, compared with infants who had mothers with no symptoms, infants with moms with mild or moderate-to-severe depression symptoms had significantly higher overall non-emergent ED use.

The positive association between depressive symptoms and ED charges were particularly striking for kids on Medicaid, which pays a disproportionate share of the pediatric ED costs in in the United States.

This research contributes to thinking about the importance of perinatal depression screening and how that correlates to pediatric ED use and outcomes for infants. It can help inform Medicaid policy and policies around preventive programs, such as perinatal depression screening.

Why did you see value in expanding the datasets beyond the New Jersey Department of Health?

Hammond: Determining what data is appropriate for inclusion in the project is one of the governing board’s specific charges. I think we’re always thinking about diversity, equity, and inclusion because we want to make sure that we’re including vulnerable populations in our effort to link data in a way that creates this whole-person view.

So, for example, with data from the Department of Children and Families, we want to make sure that we understand the health challenges that are faced by vulnerable populations such as foster children because addressing those challenges could be incredibly helpful in providing better services and better care.

The iPHD legislation specifically envisions this as a statewide integrated data project, so this is part of the natural evolution beyond Department of Health data.

In the future, we look forward to integrating administrative data from other state agencies that can paint an even more vivid picture of the services and programs that New Jersey residents use and how that might impact health and well-being.

How does integrating these additional datasets contribute to better outcomes for New Jersey agencies and New Jersey residents?

Hammond: Ultimately, the data can and should lead to better policymaking. We want the state to be able to optimize resources and cost efficiency. We’re hoping to use insights from this research to enhance our public health interventions and improve health equity.

What would you tell other states who are interested in either setting up or better leveraging their own cross-sector data integration projects?

Hammond: One thing to me that’s incredibly important is having a data privacy officer, especially in health and human services agencies, who works to protect the privacy of people whose information is sitting within those agencies and to facilitate the data’s legal and ethical use and sharing.

The other piece of advice, as we discussed earlier, is having legislative authority to fall back on, and I would hold up New Jersey’s legislation for the iPHD as a really great example.

Koller: Setting up a project like this takes time. It’s not a sprint, and if you think it is, you’re likely not going to succeed. I can almost guarantee you of that.

It’s about relationship building and trust building. Don’t expect that people are going to trust you just because you flash your academic credentials. Understanding how to do these kinds of data linkages is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Cultivating the relationships and trust with other agencies, departments, and researchers that is required for making the iPHD successful takes time.

One of the things I’ve learned is that when data is in a silo, it’s not because people don’t care about the impact of using it. Most of the time, the people I interact with are well-meaning, well-intentioned, and care deeply about doing good for our state. The siloing within departments or agencies is often a consequence of staff being overworked and under-resourced. If the iPHD can be a bridge and create that connective tissue, that will be our definition of success.

Is there anything else you’d like to say?

Hammond: This is such an amazing project, and I’m so honored to be a part of it. I know that someday when I retire, this will be one of those projects I look back on with immense pride—a true highlight of my career.

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