Route Fifty

For state governments, it may be tempting to roll out generative AI, but leaders urged caution at National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO)'s conference in New Orleans last week. Washington CIO William Kehoe said during a session that governments cannot just do “AI for AI’s sake.” One of the biggest stumbling blocks for states looking to use generative AI is making sure the data the technology uses is accurate. In Missouri, for instance, Deputy CIO Paula Peters said training the state’s new chatbot was a challenge because of difficulties indexing all the state’s web pages and documents to provide correct information Not investing ahead of time in data governance but plowing ahead with generative AI anyway could be catastrophic, warned Chris Estes, EY’s US state and local technology leader. He compared it to a decade ago when states suffered high-profile data breaches, and policymakers realized they needed to invest in cybersecurity. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/eXNvxsSB

Federal transportation grants can give local governments a big boost in getting needed projects off the drawing board. But the kinds of projects that the federal government picks for that extra money can vary significantly from one presidential administration to the next, according to new research from the Urban Institute. Under President Donald Trump, more than half of the grant program’s money went to building or expanding highways—far higher than what it was under his Democratic predecessor. When President Joe Biden took office, the share of RAISE funds going to road projects never went higher than 20%. “It’s clear that transportation priorities—as shown through funded RAISE projects—do change with administrations, whether that’s coming top-down from the presidents themselves, or if it’s the folks they’re putting in at the DOT,” said Amanda Hermans, MPP, one of the report’s authors and a research analyst at the Urban Institute. “As we look forward to the election in November, it’s clear those priorities change when administrations change, so we can likely expect that again.” Find out more at the link below: https://lnkd.in/etxd6M5h

Hurricane Helene served to highlight the growing role of state technology leaders in natural disasters. It’s a shift that state CIOs are increasingly thinking about as they take on more and more responsibilities in disaster management and preparedness, according to a recent survey by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO). NASCIO’s annual State CIO Survey found 80% of state CIOs said they play a role in restoring communications services, while 77% said they are tasked with contracting with third-party, off-premise cloud solutions that can be stood up quickly to provide uninterrupted services. “CIOs continue to see their role as focused on continuity of operations as opposed to provision of new or enhanced services while states recover from a disaster or disruption in business services,” the survey found. https://lnkd.in/e_H-Q_Rq #CIOs #govtech #disasterrecovery #hurricanehelene #digitalservices

Cities across the country are currently finalizing their budgets. But budgeting is just one ingredient in a city's financial success. Budgets are, or should be, the implementation phase of a long-term financial plan, part of a longer, cascading process that engages stakeholders at every level. If you think about city governance as a kind of recipe, there are five key ingredients: 🔹The strategic plan 🔹A long-term financial plan 🔹The budget 🔹An annual financial report 🔹The auditor’s report on internal controls Learn how the ingredients can work together here from Mark Funkhouser, municipal finance expert and president of Funkhouser & Associates, here: https://lnkd.in/exfxKayD #publicfinance #citybudgets #auditing #financialplan

The last time Ohio voters changed the way new districts were supposed to be drawn for state legislative seats, the Republican officials in charge of the process ignored the reforms they’d approved. That brazen power play outraged the good government groups that had struck the deal with politicians in 2015 to ensure fairer, more competitive elections for statehouse seats. Now, those activists are pushing a new process for drawing legislative districts, one that leaves politicians out completely. A proposed amendment would set up a 15-member citizen commission made up of Democrats, Republicans and independents. If voters approve Issue 1, Ohio would take a similar approach to several other states that have switched to citizen-led redistricting processes in recent years, joining Arizona, California, Colorado and Michigan. Read more at Route Fifty: https://lnkd.in/e3VgNRNy

Public officials in several metropolitan areas have begun to explore transforming unused or underused garages and parking lots into affordable housing units. More than 250,000 Americans were living in temporary shelters or on the streets in 2023, according to estimates by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. At the same time, once-full parking garages and lots in metropolitan areas across the U.S. have experienced a significant decline in daily use. The trend has devastated many parking garage operators. Los Angeles is one city where empty parking garages are getting a makeover to become affordable housing. Learn from Wes Guckert, president & CEO of The Traffic Group, Inc., how cities can handle the transformation here: https://lnkd.in/ezj2zPaK

While research shows taxes on sweetened beverages like soda generally achieve their goal of reducing people’s consumption of the unhealthy products, experts say cities should consider the sustainability of such levies. Many cities, for instance, use revenue from so-called “soda taxes” to fund initiatives for improving the well-being of communities like health campaigns or public park upgrades. Philadelphia, the first major U.S. city to impose such a levy in 2017, uses nearly 40% of its sweetened beverage tax to fund the city’s free preschool program. But revenue from the soda tax has been falling in Philadelphia and other cities that impose a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages in recent years. What does that mean for the programs they fund? Learn more at the link below: https://lnkd.in/e9eMB8eb

Voters in six states and Washington, D.C., are set to decide in November whether to change how they elect their leaders. Ballot measures in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, D.C., will ask residents if they want to institute ranked choice voting, an approach that allows voters to list candidates in order of preference instead of selecting just one. Three of the proposals would also replace party primaries with nonpartisan contests, and one (Oregon) would extend ranked choice voting to both primary and general elections for some statewide and federal offices. The approach is supposed to reduce polarization, but now it appears to be dividing people along party lines and receiving its first real backlash. In addition to the Alaska and Missouri ballot measures, lawmakers in several red states this year voted to ban ranked choice voting at all levels: Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma. In total, 10 states prohibit ranked choice voting. Learn more at Route Fifty: https://lnkd.in/ex7undda

Local, county and state election officials, poll workers and even contractors like voting machine operators are best positioned to identify and warn of attempts to interfere with the election process, according to a guide for whistleblowers in battleground states released last week by the Government Accountability Project. “These are just public servants who we are depending on to really protect our democracy,” said Dana Gold, director of the Government Accountability Project’s Democracy Protection Initiative. The guide is a way to ensure election workers know “that they have the right to speak up … and that they don't have to do it alone.” Read more at Route Fifty: https://lnkd.in/eYnF-zhP

Few people take a government job with the goal of striking it rich. But in Tennessee, a concerted effort to make state employees’ pay competitive with the private sector has paid off—for both employees and the state, officials say. The effort required changing the state’s theory on how public workers should be compensated, said Kim Thau Yap, assistant commissioner for the Tennessee Department of Human Resources. “We changed the philosophy to say, ‘Okay, we're going to have competitive pay to market … and we want to retain our above-market benefits.’” After the first year of what the state called “compensation modernization,” turnover dropped and the number of people applying for state jobs increased by more than half, according to state data. Learn more about Tennessee’s wage gap solution here: https://lnkd.in/eGjgfTqg