Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, is convening experts to develop interventions that could decrease the number of motor vehicle deaths and address disparities in where collisions occur. Dr. Ben Weston, chief health policy adviser for Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, joins the Priorities Podcast to explain how a recent public safety project is pitting data against a fatal challenge. After publishing a data dashboard last year, a county task force is now looking at trends and recruiting the help of expert statisticians, biomechanical engineers and academics who can develop ways to make streets safer. “[We’re] saying, why is this the most fatal intersection in Milwaukee County, and what can we do about it?” Weston says.

This week’s top stories:

Current and former government officials told StateScoop they’re concerned by cuts at two information sharing organizations widely used by state and local governments to protect IT and election systems from cyberattacks.

Two cybersecurity experts are questioning whether officials in Mission, Texas, were too hasty when they declared a state of emergency this month in response to a recent cyberattack.

Jim Bryson, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Finance and Administration, has announced that Kristin Darby, a former health care and finance executive, will be the state’s new chief information officer.

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.
For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.



Pitting data against a fatal challenge in Wisconsin county

Two Pennsylvania state employees explain on this week’s Priorities Podcast how they’re accelerating the time it takes to hire new employees. Miranda Martin, director of talent management, and Harrison MacRae, director of emerging technologies, said that through a combination of process changes and technology, they’ve reduced time-to-hire from 90 days to 58 days. “Three months is just too long to compete for talent, so we got to work right away and looked at our processes and procedures and worked really hard to reduce that time,” Martin said. The state also used its ChatGPT Enterprise licenses to ensure that agencies were properly aligning their hiring needs with job classifications.

Top stories this week: 

Washington state’s technology bureau has partnered with the University of California, Berkeley to better understand how nonprofits in the state may be exposed to cybersecurity risks. Bill Kehoe, Washington’s chief information officer, said protecting nonprofits ensures that the public will get the best from their state and local governments.

Kentucky’s acting chief information officer, Jim Barnhart, has been promoted to lead the commonwealth’s Office of Technology as its statewide CIO. The promotion comes after Barnhart spent nearly two decades serving as the state’s deputy CIO.

And Maine lawmakers last week urged the Trump administration to unfreeze Digital Equity Act funds that they say are essential for the state’s future. Led by Republican Sen. Susan Collins, the group said that the rural state was depending on the $35 million it was set to receive to improve access to technology and skills training.

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.
For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud or Spotify.

How Pennsylvania is hiring employees faster

For Stephen Dawe, the chief information officer for Opelika, Alabama, work life took an unexpected turn during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was tasked with building an IT system that could detect when detergent had been dumped into a city fountain, a recurring and costly prank kids had been pulling. Dawe says it took a lot of work, including recruiting the fire department to help his team set up an environment to create bubbles that could be photographed and used to train an artificial intelligence model. Today, the system works, he says, but even coming up with a possible solution wasn’t easy. “It was like, OK, what are we going to do to stop this? And it took probably about six months to come up with a reasonable answer to that question.”
Top stories this week:
Dozens of privacy advocates, along with groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have attached their names to a new campaign to change the technological standard backing mobile driver’s licenses. The campaign, titled No Phone Home, is backed by a statement that calls for identity systems like mobile driver’s licenses to adopt a technological standard that is incapable of tracking or surveilling users.
A group of more than 80 national and state school and library organizations have sent a letter to House members, urging them to vote against a measure that would repeal a Federal Communications rule allowing schools and libraries to spend E-Rate funds on wireless hotspot lending by schools and libraries.
As California braces for what could be another blistering summer, Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced a new digital tool to help residents stay safe in extreme heat, along with a $32.4 million investment to support local efforts to combat the state’s rising temperatures.
New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.
For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

Fountain bubble prank presented city CIO with unique technical challenge

Years into an effort to consolidate and modernize the New Jersey state government’s call centers, humans remain an important part of the process. On this week’s Priorities Podcast, Dave Cole, New Jersey chief’s innovation officer, and Joe DeLaTorre, product manager at the New Jersey Office of Innovation, say that even after improvements to the state’s digital presence, residents said they still want to talk to a live human when it comes to sensitive questions about taxes or unemployment benefits. The state’s “warm callback” algorithm predicts how many calls must be added to agents’ queues, reducing wait times and maximizing agent productivity. “A lot of these call centers are billed per minute, so whether you're talking to somebody or they're sitting on hold, your costs are the same,” Cole says. “The problem was people needed to have confidence in the system whether they were going to wait on the line or get a call back. They needed to know that somebody was actually going to follow through.”

This week’s top stories:

States are picking sides as competing election integrity efforts move ahead. New York and Virginia each recently joined competing election integrity efforts, highlighting the growing weight of politics in the nation’s elections process.

“I run at the speed of business, not at the speed of government,” Teena Piccione, North Carolina’s newly confirmed chief information officer, told StateScoop in a recent interview. Piccione became CIO last January and was confirmed last May.

As the Atlantic hurricane season begins, at least one emergency response expert is raising concerns that federal staffing cuts at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration could hinder state and local government coordination and impede public warning systems during natural disasters.
New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.
For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.


Inside New Jersey’s AI-powered ‘warm callback’ system

On this week’s Priorities Podcast, Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, says that the broad use of facial recognition technology by New Orleans police extends even beyond endangering the city’s residents, but invites outside actors to take advantage of its surveillance environment. The police, which were recently revealed to have been using facial recognition against city policy, are now seeking broad approval to use the tech, in part as a response to a recent jailbreak. Marlow says the proposal is not only an overreaction to the rare jailbreak event, but potentially a support to the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation policies and anti-protestor actions. “This is the situation that the New Orleans City Council needs to realize,” he says. “If they set up this system in their city, they can not insulate it from these other bad actors.”

Top stories this week:

Lawmakers in New Orleans are set to consider a proposal at the end of the month from police that would allow broad use of facial recognition technology during investigations. The proposal comes after an investigation by The Washington Post last month that showed police have already been using the tech against current city policy.

Bill Kehoe, Washington’s chief information officer, said that when funding from the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program ends, state governments will have to collaborate more closely with their municipalities. The grant money, he said, has been key to efforts to bolster local cybersecurity.

After an extensive effort last year to examine her state’s technological shortcomings, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued an executive order that will rearrange the state’s IT efforts and place a greater emphasis on cybersecurity. The order requires the state's IT division to reform as the Department of Shared Administrative Services, Office of State Technology.

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.
For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

New Orleans' battle over facial recognition

On this week’s Priorities Podcast, the StateScoop team breaks down what the recent cancellation of the Digital Equity Act will mean for states and communities that were expecting the funding to improve connectivity, access to devices and digital skills training. Keely Quinlan explains that a recent letter — signed by 156 people representing the 140 organizations that serve communities across 39 states — asks for it to be reinstated. And StateScoop reporter Sophia Fox-Sowell offers a preview of her reporting on food banks and their use of state data. Data is important for their efforts, she explains, but access is uneven.

Top stories this week: 

State and local governments overseeing populations of at least 50,000 people have 10 months remaining to comply with new accessibility rules, to ensure that people with disabilities of all sorts can find information and use services. Code for America has developed an AI-powered tool that helps them get organized. So far it’s being used by Salt Lake City, Utah, and the State of Georgia.

A new report from the emergency tech firm Carbyne paints a troubling picture of the nation’s 911 system, highlighting a growing wave of outages and cyberattacks, along with an outdated infrastructure that threatens public safety. It shows that nearly 90% of emergency communication centers across the U.S. experienced at least one system outage in the past year caused by aging equipment or cyberattacks.

In a letter last week to Commerce Sec. Howard Lutnick and Adam Cassady, acting administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, more than 140 state and local organizations asked for the Digital Equity Act to be reinstated. The letter claims the act’s cancellation could leave residents and some businesses behind on issues of economic opportunity, education, health care and online safety.

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.
For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.


Inside report: Food bank data and the Digital Equity Act

Just in time for another hot California summer, the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment this year launched CalHeatScore, a data-powered tool that’s designed to help local governments and their constituencies better prepare for levels of heat that can become health hazards. On this week’s Priorities Podcast, Walker Wieland, manager of the office’s Extreme Heat Ranking System Development Section, says that heat affects everyone, but it especially affects groups like low-income populations, the elderly and people who live in cities, who must suffer the urban heat island effect. “Extreme heat really disproportionately impacts vulnerable populations throughout California,” Wieland says. “Some examples are the very young, older adults, those that work outside for a living, those with preexisting chronic health conditions. These are the people that are most commonly more sensitive to extreme heat and ultimately end up in the emergency room.” He explains how the tool can be used by members of the public to plan their summer schedules, but also by communities to guide policies, such as the opening of additional cooling or respite centers.

This week’s top stories:

The Senate voted Tuesday to remove from the federal budget bill a proposed moratorium on states enforcing their own artificial intelligence laws. The ban that was championed by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., lost virtually all support before the vote. The defeat is being celebrated by states and advocacy groups as a win for state sovereignty.

The Supreme Court last week ruled to protect the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes phone and internet services in rural areas and schools through a number of programs, including the E-Rate program. The fund collects billions in fees from telecommunications services and users each year to support rural broadband networks, internet for health care centers and low-income households.

Taking a page from President Donald Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last week signed a bill establishing a $10 million store of cryptocurrencies that lawmakers said will position the state for economic prosperity. Two other states — Arizona and New Hampshire — have passed legislation to create their own crypto reserves, but Texas is the first to fund one with state dollars. One expert, though, told StateScoop the fund’s small size makes the move largely symbolic.

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.
For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

The tool helping vulnerable populations in California beat the heat

Over the July 4th weekend, extreme rainfall in Central Texas caused catastrophic flooding along the Guadalupe River, leaving over 100 people dead and 160 people missing. Amidst the devastation, one question remains: in an area known as “flash flood alley,” why wasn’t there a flood warning system in place? This week, the Priorities Podcast reruns an episode from last year that centered on the alerts issued in another disaster, in North Carolina. A system there uses data from stream gauges, small devices that measure the water level and discharge of rivers and streams, for flood forecasting and disaster preparedness, which helped in the response to Hurricane Helene.

Top stories this week:

On Monday, ranking members of Congress sent a letter to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, demanding to know why the agency hasn’t responded to their recent inquiries about how its supporting state and local election offices. Democratic leaders Rep. Joseph D. Morelle and Sen. Alex Padilla wrote that they’re seeking “urgent updates” to the status of numerous election security policies and programs available under previous administrations.

A new California bill aims to address the harmful impacts of “companion” chatbots, artificial intelligence-powered systems designed to simulate human-like relationships and provide emotional support. The bill would require companies running companion chatbots to remind users that they’re talking to a machine, not a person and clearly state that chatbots may not be suitable for minors. If passed, it would be among the first laws in the country to regulate AI companions with clear safety standards and user protections.

In signing the state’s two-year budget last week, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont authorized funding for the Voting Rights Act. The act offers voter protections, including legal tools to fight discriminatory voting rules in court, expanded language assistance for voters who struggle with English and a data portal to host all of the state’s election results and demographic information.

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.
For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

What could Texas learn from North Carolina’s flood warning system?

This week we’re joined by North Carolina Chief Information Officer Teena Piccione, and Bernice Russell-Bond, the state’s chief information security officer. They share details of an upcoming cybersecurity internship program hoped to create a pipeline of talent for the state government. Starting next August, 10 college students will get a chance to work for the state as part-time interns, learning on the job as they perform a broad range of cybersecurity tasks. Russell-Bond says the program will give students exposure to “all aspects of cyber,” while providing the state a reliable source of fresh talent.

This week’s top stories: 

A pilot project in Virginia is using agentic AI to slim down the commonwealth’s regulations. State agencies are being directed to use artificial intelligence to achieve a statewide goal of reducing regulations by 25%.

A new study from The Pew Charitable Trusts shows that federal broadband data used by states has several key shortcomings that should be remediated. Researchers found that broadband data is unreliable and inconsistent, making it difficult for states to plan their infrastructure buildouts.

A new report from the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice found that 61% of local election officials are concerned about the cuts to election security services made this year by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Eighty-seven percent said they think state and local governments need to step up to fill the gap.

New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.
For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.


Inside North Carolina's cyber internship program

On this week's Priorities Podcast, we're joined by Center for Humane Technology's Pete Furlong and Transparency Coalition.ai's Rob Eleveld to discuss the impacts of AI companion chat bots. 
As AI companion chatbots become more sophisticated and accessible, so do the risks—especially for children. Hear this conversation covering what policymakers, parents, and the tech industry need to know now to protect vulnerable users. :studio_microphone:

Full episode at the link in our bio 
#AIethics #OnlineSafety #ChildProtection #TechPolicy #DigitalWellness #ResponsibleAI #AIforGood #CenterForHumaneTechnology #TransparencyCoalition #ArtificialIntelligence #TechRegulation

Center for Humane Technology's Pete Furlong and Transparency Coalition.ai's Rob Eleveld

This week’s Priorities Podcast is joined by Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who explains why he’s concerned about an AI-powered tool being adopted by police departments. The tool is Axon's Draft One, which pulls audio from body cam footage to help officers draft police reports. Following a recent investigation into how the technology works, Guariglia claims it was designed without transparency and auditing safeguards that he says ought to be present. He said he’s especially concerned by the window of plausible deniability the technology opens, providing no way for the public to discern between text written by human officers and that generated by software.

This week’s top stories:
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday activated the state National Guard to help respond to a cyberattack on the state’s capital city. According to an announcement by Walz’s office, the National Guard’s help was needed because an ongoing cyberattack against St. Paul was larger and more complex than city staff were able to handle. St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter called the attack a "deliberate, coordinated digital attack carried out by a sophisticated external actor."

Two local governments in Kansas and Nebraska are using GIS, artificial intelligence and lidar to fix accessibility issues with their curb ramps and sidewalks. The technology, which is helping the cities find and fix infrastructure that might not be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, helped save over 1,000 hours of manual labor. 

Delaware’s Department of Technology and Information adopted a policy this month that outlines how and when state employees can use generative artificial intelligence tools, and permits them to use many public and enterprise AI models, but not ones considered to be potentially malicious, like DeepSeek.
New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday.
For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.


Cop or AI? This tech makes it hard to tell

Each Wednesday, StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast explores the latest in state and local government technology news and analysis. Listen to in-depth conversations with government and industry’s top executives, and learn about trending stories affecting state and local IT leaders ranging from modernization and digital accessibility to the latest advances in generative artificial intelligence.