In this county, AI is its ‘institutional knowledge in a box’

Washoe County in western Nevada has had an influx of new residents in recent years, as people from neighboring California cross the border into Nevada’s second most populous county.

Many are moving for Nevada’s lower rate of taxation, but their expectations certainly aren’t lower. Those Californians, according to David Solaro, assistant county manager, still expect a certain level of service from government agencies.

That creates challenges for local officials. Washoe County and surrounding jurisdictions, Solaro said, often “struggle providing the level of service that our citizens really have come to expect.”

So, Washoe County is turning to artificial intelligence. Like numerous states and cities across the country, county officials see generative AI as a path forward.

“Government is not fast, and it's probably good that we are not fast in certain aspects,” Solaro said. “But things like a permit review or a building permit, processing tax payments, those types of things, they ought to be quick. We've got all the tools out there available to us, so we should be looking for any opportunity to help speed that process up. If it's easier for our community, it's easier on our staff, and so … then we can provide a better service.”

Washoe County leaders are moving on AI on several fronts. One initial project is a simple, low-risk use case that’s not likely to garner too many headlines: helping staff write reports.

Staff reports, which can be hundreds of pages long, are designed to give elected officials background, context and other important information on development projects, grants, and other initiatives that they will have to vote on during their regular legislative meetings. Those reports often need to be typed manually by the relevant department, which means an employee is often pulled away from their day-to-day responsibilities.

“One of the things that drives me crazy is I hire engineers to do engineering,” Solaro said, “and then they sit around and write staff reports for the governing body to approve things.”

To hand the process off, Washoe County will feed all its laws, previous agenda items, meeting minutes, zoning code, master plans and other relevant background information into a generative AI tool officials dubbed “Madison,” named for founding father James Madison to reflect their desire to maintain good governance.

Employees can now use what Solaro called Madison’s “institutional knowledge in a box” as an assistant to find policy and code and help them draft staff reports. He estimates that Madison can help draft around 80% of a staff report in far less time than a county employee. Like other agencies, Washoe is using generative AI as a facilitator, rather than as a replacement for its employees.

Madison is a closed generative AI tool, which means that, unlike public facing tools such as OpenAI, it only relies on a limited dataset. As a result, Solaro said, it is less likely to hallucinate and produce incorrect information about Washoe County. Madison also has citations for all its findings and is part of the Microsoft ecosystem so it has cybersecurity protections familiar to those in local government.

Erica Olsen, chief operating officer and co-founder at the strategic planning company OnStrategy, which is helping the county leverage generative AI, said using closed generative AI to help draft staff reports may not appear to be an earth-shattering use case, but could make a tremendous difference.

“It's dead simple, and it's really boring,” she said. “But also, it's critical to the function of government, of governing a public entity.”

It’s one of several Washoe County experiments with AI, which also includes a chatbot to help streamline the business licensing process and an AI-powered search tool for the County Assessor’s Office to look up and research property. Both of those projects are still under development.

Solaro piloted Madison with an elected official and a group of county employees. The effort has already prompted discussions about whether the format of staff reports themselves should be changed.

“As you're utilizing this tool and playing with it, what information do you really need to do good governance?” Solaro said. “There’s nothing that says we've got to continue to do the same staff report style that we've used the last 23 years I've been here. Let's really understand the information you need, now that we've got a different tool that can provide it in a different way.”

Olsen said Madison could be a springboard for Washoe County to do bigger “transformational” projects with AI. Efforts like this with staff reports will help them get there.

“We need to be able to create some capacity in a staff restricted organization, in order to be innovative in that regard,” she said. “This doesn't feel very innovative, it feels super tactical. But maybe that's also the brilliance of it because people aren't very scared of it, like nothing's going to break.”