York County wins Veco award for AI recycling lookup; county staff say system restored service quickly

York County accepted an achievement award from the Virginia Association of Counties and the National Association of Counties for an artificial-intelligence tool the county used to restore recycling pickup information for residents after a regional recycling pause. James Hutzer of the Virginia Association of Counties presented the award and praised county staff for quick action to restore service.

Tim Wyatt, a county IT staffer who described leading the rapid response, said the team used AI to prototype and deliver an address-matching lookup that would tolerate common misspellings and abbreviations. “No problem. Here’s a scope of work. Give this to your team of programmers and it’ll take them a week to do it and then three more weeks to implement it,” he said, recounting how an AI-generated starting point allowed staff to produce a working solution in hours. County officials said the tool was rolled out to roughly 17,000 households and has been adapted to handle two additional service needs since its launch.

Officials said the project was not purely an automated effort: staff reviewed AI-generated code line by line, engaged third-party platform vendors and stood up internal servers to integrate the solution into the county’s public-facing site. The board congratulated IT staff for using technology to close a service gap that had previously generated hundreds of citizen calls to waste services.

The award citation highlighted the county’s “from crisis to code in four hours” approach; staff said the effort combined internal data, third-party web platforms and human review to deliver repeatable outcomes for other citizen-service problems.