Guest Column

Costa Mesa needs an AI action plan

By Jenn Tanaka

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Jenn Tanaka

This fall the Costa Mesa City Council will consider adopting the city’s first-ever Climate Action and Adaptation Plan (CAAP). Sadly, the Planning Commission’s first peek at the draft this summer was a bit of a letdown. The draft CAAP estimates that state policy reforms will do most of the work, with state-level measures accounting for much of the projected emissions reductions through 2045. The impact of our local action, although meaningful, will seemingly be more modest.

But there is a different global issue barreling into town, and this time Sacramento won’t be doing the heavy lifting for us. Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving even faster than climate change. And Costa Mesa does not appear to have a comprehensive citywide plan for it.

It should. Because the benefits – and dangers – of AI technology are very real.

On the plus side, so much of what makes city government feel broken reduces to a compute problem. Potholes can linger for months because the city lacks the manpower to proactively look for problems. Paperwork like building permits can take forever if the city’s limited planning staff must first wade through a byzantine municipal code line-by-line.

At the same time, hiring more city staff to address these problems isn’t easy. City labor costs have continued to rise, while declining vacancy rates mean fewer salary savings to offset those expenses. Costa Mesa got a taste of that earlier this year. As staffing costs rose and vacancy-related salary savings declined, passing a balanced budget required freezing 14 vacant positions and making other operational reductions.

AI tools provide a rare opportunity to maintain, or even improve, city services without adding headcount. AI-enabled databases could predict when infrastructure is likely to fail and assign crews to do preventative maintenance. AI chatbots, fluent in the municipal code, could provide fast, reliable and always-on support to residents and business owners alike. In other words, if deployed well, AI could help the city escape the cost/services squeeze I wrote about this spring.

But integrating AI tools into City Hall presents significant risks, too. Many of those tools rely on external cloud infrastructure, creating important questions about how sensitive city data is stored, retained, shared or potentially used to improve underlying models.

Additionally, the AI market is young, it moves fast and it massively rewards scale. A vendor that gets a head start today could end up gaining so much market share that the city could find itself with limited negotiating power down the road.

These concerns were on full display this past July when dozens of people took to the microphones at City Hall to demand the city end its contract with Flock Safety, a company that provides AI-assisted automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to police departments across the country. While defending the use of Flock’s technology, the Costa Mesa Police Department (CMPD) didn’t just tout its benefits. It went so far as to say that “no alternative ALPR vendor has replicated Flock’s […] network” and that “loss of access to [the Flock network] would represent a significant reduction in the Police Department’s investigative capabilities.” In other words, CMPD’s own assessment indicated that it had developed significant reliance on Flock’s network and believed the alternatives it evaluated could not provide equivalent capabilities.

That level of reliance can weaken a customer’s negotiating leverage when seeking additional contractual protections.

Worse, there is no reason to think this asymmetry won’t repeat as more AI tools are folded into city systems. The worst-case scenario would be that, after these issues compound and residents feel increasingly helpless, they demand the city pull the plug on AI tools altogether.

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So what is the solution? One promising path forward came from Councilmember Andrea Marr, who suggested at the July meeting on Flock that the city develop broader policies governing technology, AI and data privacy. It’s a great idea. Not only would it create a community-driven framework for talking about these new tools, it would also give the city real bargaining power when sitting across the table from AI vendors. It is one thing for the city to tell such vendors that residents have amorphous anxieties about AI products. It is another for the city to adopt procurement requirements that require AI vendors to meet defined standards before the city enters into a contract. It flips the negotiating table, and it transforms city departments – and, by extension, their residents – from being term-takers to term-makers.

But I think the city should do more than set down some guidelines. It also needs an action plan, which would determine how AI could be integrated in the future, what departments get those capabilities first and how staff should use generally available AI tools in the meantime. While Costa Mesa wouldn’t be the first city in the nation to adopt an AI action plan – New York City, for example, rolled out a full AI Action Plan back in 2023, and several other cities have done so since – it could help put Costa Mesa at the forefront of municipal AI planning in Orange County.

And that alone may be reason enough to get started. In uncertain times, the greatest gift the city can give their residents is leadership. Advancements in AI aren’t slowing down. It will either be something done to us, or done by us. We should choose the latter and quickly.

Jenn Tanaka is a Costa Mesa resident and the principal writer at the Goat Hill Rodeo.