Revere Council OKs request for mayor to explore RFP after demonstration of revere.city AI data portal

Revere City Council members voted Nov. 10 to ask the mayor to investigate a request-for-proposal for a prototype of revere.city, an AI-driven civic data portal that its developer said can answer natural-language questions about the city budget, MBTA service, police logs and other public data.

The platform’s developer, who identified himself as Wamshipai, told the council he built the site to gather ‘‘federal, state and city level data’’ into one interface and to provide ‘‘state-of-the-art visualization charts’’ and a chatbot that returns source citations. He said the product was developed pro bono so far and estimated security implementation at around $200,000 and approximately $75,000 a year for infrastructure, adding the site comprises ‘‘50,000 plus lines of code’’ and draws from eight data resources.

Councilors said the tool could improve transparency and make the budget more accessible. Councilor Kelly said she saw the platform as ‘‘a wealth of information’’ and asked for confirmation of an up-front cost estimate; the developer said the assembled software and infrastructure would typically cost roughly $200,000–$275,000 a year but that he was offering the current prototype to the city free of charge for evaluation.

At the same time, multiple councilors pressed the presenter on provenance and accuracy. Councilor Giannino asked how data were cross-referenced and where page citations came from; the developer replied that police logs are published daily by the Revere Police Department as PDFs and that his pipeline processes those PDFs into tabular data and attaches source references. Councilor Greenway probed refresh frequencies and was told police logs update daily, MBTA feeds refresh roughly every 15 minutes and much other data (Census and annual budgets) are static.

Councilors repeatedly flagged potential limits: data drawn from aggregators such as Redfin and Zillow may not match city records, the presenter acknowledged, and some city police logs may be retained only about 90 days on the municipal site. Several councilors recommended the administration and IT department review any pilot or procurement process rather than the council making implementation decisions alone.

After discussion the council approved a motion requesting the mayor ‘‘to investigate an RFP for [a] revere.city prototype’’ for a trial period; the motion passed on a voice vote. Councilors said the intention was to refer the idea to the administration for procurement review, IT assessment and consideration of trial arrangements.

Next steps: the council’s request asks the mayor and city administration to study whether to pursue a formal RFP and to evaluate data-security needs, likely costs beyond the developer’s current offer and vendor protections required by city procurement rules.