PADUCAH — The Paducah City Commission discussed current and potential AI use in city government and passed a first reading of a budget for the 2027 fiscal year at a meeting Tuesday.
Eric Stuber, technology department director for the City of Paducah, presented information about AI use in local government he learned, alongside City Manager Daron Jordan, at an International Association of City Managers conference in early April. He began by making distinctions between different forms of artificial intelligence, such as generative AI, computer vision, natural language processing and behavioral AI.
“The biggest thing to understand is AI is not one thing, so when people say AI, it is a wealth of things,” Stuber said. “It’s just an umbrella term that people use. It’s about a collection of distinct technologies, techniques and systems. What Daron and I learned about at the ICMA conference is a lot of the various types of AI that is used in government.”
Eric Stuber, technology department director for the City of Paducah, presented on AI use in local government to the Paducah City Commission Tuesday, including possible new uses for the city to pursue.
Ben Overby
Stuber then discussed various government uses for AI discussed at the conference. This included uses for cybersecurity to detect viruses, scanning building plans for code compliance, recording meeting minutes and performing financial auditing. Also discussed were using AI to fulfill Freedom of Information Act requests and redactions as well as enabling Flock cameras — already in use in Paducah to detect license plate numbers — with facial recognition technology to detect missing persons.
“The biggest takeaway from that is to start small and have a purpose,” Stuber said. “Don’t introduce AI just because you want to introduce AI. Find a specific use case, make sure that it’s small, and then implement that and build off of that success. If you try to cram AI down people’s throats, it often fails, because AI is a change, and so a lot of what happens in implementing any software in technology is change management.”
Stuber said it’s also crucial to mandate human review in all AI use and to properly disclose when AI has been used for governmental purposes.
Stuber discussed the types of AI use already implemented by the City of Paducah government. Among city uses are optical character recognition AI to index documents and for Flock cameras, behavioral and natural language processing AI for email security and generative AI for meeting notes and presentations, as well as policy review.
“There are departments that are using generative AI for policy review,” Stuber said. “If you want to kind of study a policy, you can ask a generative AI — whether it’s Copilot or Chat GPT — ‘Give me a summary of this policy,’ and it will read all the text and give you a summary of that policy. You can ask it things like, ‘How would somebody interpret this policy? How would a citizen interpret this policy? How would a team member interpret this policy?’”
“AI is here, it’s coming like a house on fire,” Mayor George Bray said. “If we don’t adapt and adopt, then we’re going to be left behind. Sometimes government adopts things a little bit after the private sector, but I think that we have to stay out there as far in the front as we possibly can — to become as efficient as we can to provide our citizens with as much data as possible.”
Ben Overby
He said the next steps for the city should be to adopt an AI policy, form an AI working group and assess areas for specific use cases.
Commissioner Raynarldo Henderson asked Stuber for a potential area where the city could start considering new AI use. Stuber gave an example of the city of Reno, Nevada, including an AI utility on their website so that citizens could more easily navigate and find information.
Mayor George Bray was supportive of pursuing that usage, saying it would be “super helpful” and allow people to comb through a great amount of information much more easily. He suggested a usage that would be helpful for him is to use AI to provide meeting notes.
“AI is here, it’s coming like a house on fire,” Bray said. “If we don’t adapt and adopt, then we’re going to be left behind. Sometimes government adopts things a little bit after the private sector, but I think that we have to stay out there as far in the front as we possibly can — to become as efficient as we can to provide our citizens with as much data as possible.”
Henderson said that the city needs to make an effort to make sure it maintains its personal, human touch alongside technology advancements.
“I think it’s great, but I think one of the other challenges that we have is to make sure that AI does not replace human touch, being able to talk to somebody, a live person if they need to or want to,” Commissioner Raynarldo Henderson said.
Ben Overby
“I think it’s great, but I think one of the other challenges that we have is to make sure that AI does not replace human touch, being able to talk to somebody, a live person if they need to or want to,” Henderson said. “I get it after hours, but during the day, if you want to be able to talk to (City Clerk) Lindsay (Parish), you should be able to talk to Lindsay.”
The commission also held a first reading of a 2027 fiscal year budget ordinance. The annual operating budget estimated general fund revenue at $49,713,352, appropriations at $51,882,954 and reserves utilized at $2,169,602. Total revenue was estimated at $95,622,341, total appropriations at $116,428,475 and total reserves utilized at $21,078,342.