Among the thousands of workers at Maine’s nearly 500 municipalities, Sandra Fournier has a particularly difficult job — she serves as town manager for three communities at once.
Mapleton, Castle Hill and Chapman, located 20 miles from the Canadian border in Aroostook County, share a unique arrangement. They retain distinct identities, ordinances and policies but pool their administrative resources into one municipal government that Fournier describes as “bare bones.”
As the state’s population ages and contracts, fewer people are running for office or working in administrative roles. That means the burden often falls on the few people willing to wear multiple hats at once.
Fournier said she’d be hard pressed these days to accomplish her many duties without the help of artificial intelligence.
“Nobody wants to be in the office 50, 60 hours a week. I mean, we love what we do, but we want to have a healthy balance and a family life too,” she said in an interview this month. “ChatGPT really helps mitigate a lot of that for us.”
Fournier is increasingly leaning on AI programs like ChatGPT, a large language model chatbot developed by OpenAI, to help carry out the functions of governing. She uses it to develop policies, polish ordinances, draft emails and manage the communities’ nearly $6 million budget.
Administrative tasks that once took hours can now be done in 15 minutes, though AI-generated work is sometimes inaccurate and always requires human review, Fournier said.
As AI’s capabilities have advanced and municipal staffing shortages have worsened in recent years, many local officials have shifted their thinking on the technology. They’re no longer debating whether they should adopt it into their work or how. They’re asking when.
More than 20 Maine communities have publicly acknowledged using the technology in some capacity so far. Only about a half dozen have codified formal policies, according to a Press Herald analysis of municipal codes. Many of these communities are smaller, rural areas facing particularly acute staffing shortages.
Some are using AI in an administrative capacity, writing everything from emails to ethics policies. Others are using it for tasks that raise potential privacy and civil rights concerns, such as tracking residents’ locations and writing police reports.
The Legislature has approved a number of laws governing how state employees and certain industries can use AI. But there are no laws for municipalities, leaving community leaders to decide for themselves how the technology will be employed — and what the safeguards should be around it.
Gov. Janet Mills created the Maine Artificial Intelligence Task Force last year to study how AI can be used and recommend how it should be regulated. In a report last October, they concluded Maine governments, industries and educators must embrace AI as “a transformative force.”
That report encouraged towns to use AI for everything from communicating with citizens to enhancing “core business functions,” but notes potential harms, including election fraud and misinformation campaigns.
Brian McDonald, information technology director at the Maine Municipal Association, has advised dozens of local governments on how to use AI and draft policies. It’s an especially tricky area, he said, because of how rapidly the technology is evolving.
“We say ‘Oh, it saves me a lot of time,’ but how does that equate to some type of positive outcome?” McDonald said. “There isn’t a lot of understanding about what the pitfalls or potential civil rights or other litigation risks might be.”
Policing and public safety
In October, the Lewiston Police Department installed about a dozen AI-powered roadside cameras around town. Within weeks, they were helping solve crimes — and prompting civil rights concerns.
Created by an Atlanta-based company called Flock Safety, the cameras scan and log the license plate, make and model of every vehicle that drives past. Authorities can use an array of Flock cameras to look up a vehicle’s plate number and see where it was spotted, often without obtaining a warrant.
Footage from Flock cameras can be, and often is, shared across departments that have them, which police say helps alleviate staffing shortages and solve crimes more quickly.
In Sanford last fall, police recovered a stolen vehicle in Massachusetts within hours thanks to Flock cameras in both states. In Lewiston, the cameras have located child abduction and stalking suspects just as fast, according to Lt. Derrick St. Laurent.
“This is like having an extra officer working for us,” he said. “It’s a great tool to use.”
But critics say the cameras are an unnecessarily pervasive surveillance tool. The American Civil Liberties Union of Maine has described Flock cameras and similar systems as “dragnet surveillance” that “pose a significant threat to our constitutional rights to privacy.”
Flock cameras across the country have been accessed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, an investigation by technology-focused publication 404 Media found, sometimes without the knowledge of local police.
The cameras already tiptoe around Maine law, which expressly prohibits police from using cameras to enforce traffic law or employing facial recognition technology in any capacity.
Flock says its cameras are not equipped with facial recognition, though they can detect individuals’ clothing and most aspects of a vehicle. Lewiston police can only search their cameras when working on an active investigation, according to St. Laurent, and logs the reason for each search. The department does not share its Flock data with federal immigration authorities under any circumstances, he said.
“There’s a misconception that you drive by this thing, it runs your license plate, says who you are, runs your history,” St. Laurent said. “It doesn’t give you any information like that. But it does give you the plate. And it’s pretty accurate.”
Other towns have installed more comprehensive surveillance systems that focus on more than just roadways. Houlton, for example, installed a town-wide camera network that flouted Maine law around the use of facial recognition technology. Officials there agreed to remove the cameras as part of a settlement with residents.
McDonald, with the Maine Municipal Association, said he advises towns to be cautious when integrating AI into public safety. There is little legal precedent around acceptable use of AI surveillance systems, he said, and he’d rather a Maine town not be subject to a civil rights lawsuit that could upend the entire field.
“We need to understand if this risk is worth taking or if we’re jumping on this a little early,” he said.
Policy and administration
In March, voters in Norridgewock will decide whether to adopt an ethics policy that establishes guidelines around conflicts of interest and public decorum for town officials. The policy was drafted with AI.
If adopted, town employees and officials will be barred from accepting gifts and using town equipment for personal or political gain. Residents can file complaints to the town, though the policy specifies “anonymous complaints shall not be acted upon.”
Tools like ChatGPT and Copilot provided a “skeleton” for the policy and bolstered its content, according to Town Manager Richard LaBelle.
LaBelle is a firm believer that AI integration into local government is inevitable — for better or worse. The Somerset County town of about 3,200 people was among the first in Maine to adopt a formal AI policy, and soon began using the technology to review documents and write emails. And he sees the potential of what it may do in the future.
“We have to be honest about if people are going to be replaced. And it’s a difficult conversation, but the fact of the matter is, the short answer is yes,” LaBelle said.
LaBelle, like officials in many other small towns, said he is using AI more and more to “streamline the process” of governing. Most roles in Norridgewock’s town office and others are at risk of being automated within the next decade, he said.
“Will our roads plow themselves one day? I think probably,” LaBelle said. “But is the truck going to hit the kid playing on the snowbank at the end of his driveway? That I don’t know.”
Most towns that have embraced AI use it for office work. Camden is using AI to track short-term rentals and help with property revaluations. Old Town contracted with an AI startup to track visitors’ phones at public events.
Only a few municipalities across the state have adopted public AI policies establishing safeguards around how employees can use the technology. Most emphasize human review of AI-generated content and urge employees not to put residents’ personal information into AI tools, among other provisions.
Gray was among the first Maine towns to adopt a formal AI policy and integrate the technology into its government. Kyle Hadyniak, the town’s IT director, made sure of it.
Hadyniak considers himself Maine’s “municipal AI champion.” He urged officials in Gray to be ahead of the curve. The town’s policy, which Hadyniak wrote with the help of AI, empowers employees to use AI for emails, research and presentations. Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, is now integrated into the town’s computers.
Gray has begun writing official minutes and communications for public meetings with AI, which Hadyniak said is taking the place of work that used to be done by newspaper reporters and traditional media.
Gray’s policy, like others, emphasizes human review over AI-generated content and specifies that AI should not be used to make decisions.
“I think you will always need to have humans with their judgment in the loop,” Hadyniak said.
Still, officials believe many roles in government will become redundant as the administrative capabilities of AI advance. Even public works and code enforcement may soon face the risk of automation as AI finds wider usage in unexpected ways.
In Texas, AI-powered cameras have been mounted to garbage trucks and used to scan for city code violations. AI drones are employed in Colorado to detect and monitor wildfires. In Maine, AI systems are already being used to monitor wastewater treatment, according to McDonald, with the Maine Municipal Association.
And municipalities, he said, are looking for new ways to use the technology every day.
“There will be a time before AI and a time after AI, and they will be dramatically different,” McDonald said. “Humanity has always been one bad decision away from not being here. AI is just the next opportunity for us to choose wisely.”
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Dylan Tusinski can be reached at dtusinski@pressherald.com.