City and County AI Policy Kit

The situation you are in

Your staff are already using generative AI. Not "might be." Are. The planner tightening a staff report, the code officer turning field notes into a narrative, someone in HR who pasted a job description in to make it sound less like 1997, a supervisor who ran a disciplinary memo through one to make it "more professional" — and that memo had a name in it. At least one person is doing it on a personal phone with a personal account, because the work laptop blocks the site.

Nobody involved thinks they are being reckless. They are doing what every knowledge worker in the country is doing. The problem is that no one told them where the line is, so each of them drew their own, and the lines do not match.

Then a council member reads an article and asks, on the record, "what's our policy on AI?" Or a department wants to buy something and procurement has no rubric. Or a records request lands and the clerk realizes nobody knows whether prompts are records. Or — most commonly and least noticed — a vendor you have paid for four years turns on an AI feature in a quarterly update, and the data flow changes while the contract does not.

You do not have a year to work this out. You have a budget cycle, a help desk, a Title II accessibility deadline somewhere on the calendar, and maybe one person who has time to think about this at all.

What this kit is

A starter set. Fourteen templates, an eleven-chapter guide, and a 90-day plan, written so an IT director, a deputy administrator, or a clerk can produce a council-ready draft in about a week of part-time work and then hand it to the attorney for the real edits.

It is opinionated where opinions help. It says a ban is fiction that moves the usage to personal devices where you have no visibility and no records capture. It says the council instrument should be two pages and everything operational belongs in an administrative directive the manager can revise. It says machine translation is fine for wayfinding and not fine for hearing notices. It says a resident-facing system without a real human fallback is a service decision your council never approved. Where a jurisdiction reasonably differs, the templates leave room.

What is inside

• The guide. Eleven chapters: where cities and counties actually are, the principles to settle before writing anything, the legal frame in plain English, policy versus directive versus guideline, staff rules, resident-facing use, procurement and vendor vetting, records and retention, communicating with council and staff and the public, incidents, and the 90-day rollout with its annual review.
• Governance templates. Council policy in ordinance-or-resolution-agnostic format. Administrative directive. A two-page council memo in recommendation format.
• People templates. Staff acceptable use, one page, built on the three lists. Department head briefing outline. Resident FAQ. Glossary.
• Operations templates. Full scored procurement rubric with pass/fail gates. Data-handling checklist. Public-records position memo. Resident-facing AI standard with the disclosure line, the human fallback, and the translation limits. Incident response procedure. Week-by-week 90-day rollout plan. Annual review checklist.
• START-HERE. A one-page map that tells you which document to bring to which meeting.

Every template uses [BRACKETED PLACEHOLDERS] for jurisdiction-specific items and carries a "How to adapt" note. They are plain markdown, so they paste into a word processor, an agenda system, or a wiki without fighting formatting.

Who wrote it and why he can

Wayne Bridges, a public-sector solutions engineer who builds and runs AI agent systems daily. He has sat in the meetings where a jurisdiction tries to make a technology decision with incomplete information, a hard deadline, and a governing body that wants a one-page answer.

Because he operates these systems rather than reading about them, the guidance on what they do with data, where they fail, and what to ask a vendor comes from running them.

He is not a lawyer. That is stated plainly at the top of every chapter and on every template, and it is the reason the kit is built to be reviewed rather than adopted as-is.

What this is not

• Not legal advice. Your attorney reviews everything. The legal chapter is written so you can brief them efficiently, not replace them.
• Not a state-specific document. Public records acts, open meetings laws, procurement codes, and AI statutes vary enormously. The kit treats them as classes and tells you exactly where to insert your state's requirements.
• Not a product recommendation. No vendors are named. Tools change monthly; the rubric for judging them does not.
• Not a compliance program for police, health, or benefits data. Those regimes are named, scoped out, and routed to their real owners. That is the correct answer for a general policy.
• Not a finished policy. It is a draft about 80 percent of the way there. The last 20 percent is local: your charter, your state law, your council's appetite.

Who should not buy this

• Jurisdictions that have already adopted an AI policy the attorney reviewed and the governing body passed. You may still want the procurement rubric and the records position, but you do not need the policy templates.
• Anyone looking for a list of approved tools. That list is yours to build, and the rubric shows how.
• Anyone who needs a state-specific instrument out of the box, or who wants the kit to resolve whether a prompt is a record in their state. It gives you a defensible default position and the questions to settle it. Your attorney and your clerk settle it.
• Anyone hoping to skip the attorney. The kit makes that review faster and cheaper. It does not replace it.

If you are the person who got asked for an AI policy and has no time to start from zero, this is for you. Read START-HERE, open the two-page council memo, and your first meeting is covered.