Council member Mike Green reports from National League of Cities on AI tools, homelessness guides and quieting railroad horns

Council member Mike Green reported to the City of West Columbia City Council on his trip to the National League of Cities summit in Tampa, Florida, summarizing several programs and tools that city staff and council members asked him to investigate, including a municipal chatbot called "CitiBot," homelessness guidance, NeighborhoodWorks housing and volunteer resources, a Chattanooga prompt library for generative AI use by staff and options for quieting railroad horns.

Green told the council that the National League of Cities was marking its 100th year in Tampa and that leaders from other municipalities have developed tools that the council may find useful. "We are feeding it the information. So it will only give the information that we feed it. And if it does not know the answer, it will say, I don't know the answer," Green said of the CitiBot-style chatbot, describing it as a way to answer frequently asked questions without routing calls to staff.

Green also described a Chattanooga initiative that maintains a prompt library of prewritten prompts to guide staff use of generative AI for tasks such as modeling water-line outages and estimating affected customers. He said the National League of Cities published a homelessness field guide with case studies on local strategies and that NeighborhoodWorks offers programs to promote affordable housing and to post volunteer opportunities that could help local recruitment of volunteers.

Green noted the city of Columbia’s use of cameras on sanitation trucks to capture images useful to code enforcement and said staff would seek more information about how those systems process data. He also described a nonbinding possibility for quieting railroad horns near residences, saying the process is not simple but that it may be feasible in some circumstances.

Green touched briefly on cemetery protections and the idea of zoning to protect abandoned cemeteries, saying he has an abandoned cemetery in his district and that municipalities might consider zoning approaches to protect such sites. He closed by highlighting riverwalk examples from Tampa and San Antonio and urging the council to consider ways to connect businesses to the Riverwalk to maximize economic benefit.

No council action was taken on the report; Green made the presentation to inform council discussion and staff follow-up.