Local leaders in Snohomish County are experimenting with direct democracy in order to figure out how the county government should use artificial intelligence, or if it should at all.
For three weekends this spring, a “civic assembly” of 29 randomly selected county residents met to study and debate the thorny ethical issues at the heart of AI. Then, they wrote policy proposals.
The group ended up with a set of 35 recommendations spanning themes like transparency, accountability, privacy, environmental impacts and human oversight. Snohomish County councilmembers say they plan to take the group’s recommendations seriously and will consider adopting them into law.
What is a civic assembly?
The goal of a civic assembly is simple: Put ordinary citizens in charge of making difficult policy decisions for their government.
“We have such polarized politics, I think a lot of people are really looking for those opportunities where they can learn about something, discuss it in good faith with other people in their communities, and have a tangible impact on government,” said Jillian Youngblood, who directs Civic Genius, the nonprofit that facilitated the Snohomish assembly.
The Snohomish County civic assembly on AI was prompted in part by reporting from Cascade PBS and KNKX. The series, published last year, used public records to explore how local city government workers in Washington had experimented with ChatGPT for a variety of tasks, including responding to constituent emails, writing speeches and even drafting policy.
The reporting raised questions about transparency and caught the attention of elected leaders in Snohomish County.
“That was, like, the most interesting story I’ve read in the last several years,” said Snohomish County Councilmember Nate Nehring, who sponsored a resolution supporting the civic assembly.
Nehring said he sees AI as a tool that could potentially make government more efficient. But he is also wary of the risks.
“It will just be helpful as an elected official to know where the public is at in terms of their expectations,” Nehring said.
Civic assemblies are more common in Canada and parts of Europe but are still rare in the United States, according to Youngblood.
This is the first civic assembly on AI that Youngblood is aware of. Many local governments across the country still lack concrete AI policies, and she said the recommendations produced by the Snohomish assembly could serve as a blueprint for other communities.
Many participants came into the assembly with strong views for or against AI. Some said they didn’t want the county to use AI at all. Others saw it as a tool for efficiency and said their government would get left behind if officials did not embrace it.
To finalize the policy recommendations, the participants had to find common ground on a host of rapidly evolving issues, from data centers to deepfakes.
It wasn’t an easy task.
‘Why are we here?’
Assembly participants met in a modern, airy classroom at Washington State University’s Everett campus. It felt a bit like jury duty, or maybe summer camp; during the first weekend, facilitators led the group in a game of “telephone” to help break the ice.
Thousands of Snohomish County residents had received letters in the mail inviting them to participate. Of those who responded, the final members were chosen to be demographically representative. The group included a police officer in training, a retired engineer, a social worker, a tech worker and a teacher. Participants were paid $500 for their time.
“We’re all on totally different learning curves here, I know folks who came in not sure what an LLM [large language model] was, and then there are folks here who are AI professionals and everything in between,” Youngblood told the group during the first weekend. “You’re all bringing knowledge and experience that we need to come up with good recommendations here. No one has irrelevant experience.”
Jessica Rhodes, a behavioral specialist at an elementary school, said she wanted to take part because she is “very against AI.”
“I’m very against what it’s doing to our environment, and I think that as a nation we are getting way too ahead of ourselves,” Rhodes said.
Some participants had a more optimistic view. Dhruv Raithatha, a software engineer, said he used AI every day for his work. He hoped his technical background could help the county use AI to become more efficient.
Others were more conflicted.
“I think there’s strong feelings on both sides,” said Alexandrea MacIndoe, a communications and development worker. “I have some feelings that it's somewhat inevitable.”
The civic assembly began with presentations from AI experts in tech, law and government. Participants took notes and asked the panelists questions. (I also spoke with the group and took questions about my previous reporting on local cities’ use of ChatGPT.)
The participants then broke into small groups to learn about how Snohomish County is already using artificial intelligence. Its list of AI tools included the cloud-based resource planning system Oracle Fusion ERP; Microsoft Copilot; Flock Safety license plate reader cameras; and Microsoft Azure Speech AI for employee training.
Some participants were surprised by what they saw. “Why are we here if they’re already using this s***?” one said while looking over the list.
(To protect participants’ privacy and allow for candid debate, Cascade PBS and KNKX agreed to not use participants’ names when describing the small group discussions.)
One group was especially surprised to see that the county uses an AI tool called Cora to assist 911 operators. Humans still answer 911 calls in Snohomish County; the Cora tool helps them determine what to ask during calls. But the participants said they were still worried about the prospect of AI replacing operators entirely.
“In an emergency, it feels like you’d want to trust a human mind to do it,” one said.
“There could be implicit bias,” another added.
During a break, participant Hillary Moralez said she was frustrated that the county already used so many AI services.
“They made a lot of decisions where I don’t think that we had any input,” Moralez said. “I’m really hoping what we can do is push the needle towards better transparency, and we can really push the needle towards accountability.”
A new type of engagement
Many of the civic assembly members had never been involved in local government before. Mackey Guenther, a facilitator with Civic Genius, said that is part of what makes this model special.
“It really forces them to find compromise,” he said. “It’s just not something you see in a city council meeting, public comment session or something like that.”
Guenther used to work for the City of Edmonds, soliciting feedback on planning updates. He said traditional models of public engagement often self-select for people who are already involved in politics. Often, older, retired homeowners are overrepresented, while younger working families without much time on their hands are absent. The civic assembly — which compensated people for their time and provided childcare — is much more representative, he said.
“Traditional ways of hearing from people don’t work,” said Doug Linkhart, president of the National Civic League, an organization that works to make democracy more participatory and effective and that supported the Snohomish project. “Our concept is that if you get a demographically representative random set of individuals who become more educated about an issue, that you’ll get input on a decision that could be useful to the public.”
Civic theatre
On the second weekend of the assembly, participants acted out imagined scenarios related to AI issues in an exercise called “civic theatre."
In one, participants played the role of a 911 caller dealing with a heart attack and an obtuse AI phone operator system that didn’t seem to understand the severity of the situation. In another, they acted out a concerned citizen confronting an elected official in a tense public meeting over the impacts of new data centers.
Milka Pantelic, the facilitator who led the exercise, said the goal was to help people understand other perspectives — and see the value in their own.
“They’re experts in their own life, they’re experts in being citizens,” Pantelic said. “So even if someone doesn’t know anything about AI, they’re still worthy of a voice.”
The participants then came up with recommendations based on what they had experienced. They wrote down ideas and posted them on walls around the classroom so others could attach sticky notes with feedback.
One group proposed that the county should stop using an AI system if an audit finds it has an error rate higher than 15%. Some felt that threshold was too high and that an error rate closer to 5% would be more appropriate. There was also debate over whether county employees should be required to disclose using AI to respond to an email, or restricted from using AI for emails entirely.
Other issues were easier to agree on.
“I’m really liking the fact that pretty much everybody hates AI calls,” Hillary Moralez said. “That’s like the biggest thing I’ve seen, is everyone’s like, ‘I never want to talk to a robot.’”
Moralez described herself as a bit of a Luddite; she is deeply concerned about AI. But she said that, over the course of discussions, she had been able to find common ground with the more pro-AI participants in the assembly.
“I know a lot of people don’t share some of my more radical opinions, but we’ve all been able to have really respectful dialog,” Moralez said.
An independent process
Some participants said they felt constrained by the narrow scope of the assembly. Jessica Rhodes said she wished the facilitators had allowed the group more time to discuss issues like the environmental impact of AI data centers.
“They have been very dismissive about our environmental concerns, and every time someone brings up a concern they’re like, ‘Well we’re talking about this subject, so let's get back on point,’” Rhodes said.
Youngblood, with Civic Genius, said the facilitators had to balance keeping conversations on track with allowing people to express themselves freely, protecting everyone’s time and focusing on what the county controls directly.
Rhodes said she and a few other participants broke off and wrote a list of environmental policy recommendations for the county on their own time. After some back-and-forth, facilitators agreed to include them as a separate appendix in the final report.
Throughout the assembly, participants heard presentations from a variety of AI experts, including law and IT professors from the University of Washington, AI company leaders and even the former prime minister of Norway.
The assembly’s list of speakers did not, however, include any Snohomish County employees. Several participants questioned why they weren’t able to hear directly from the people they were supposed to be writing policy for.
“I think it would have been nice if we had had county staff able to participate,” said Councilmember Nate Nehring, adding that he had recommended sending staff from the county’s IT department to the event.
In an emailed statement, Snohomish County Communications Director Kari Bray said that while there are county staff who have “been working to thoughtfully approach the use of AI, the Executive did not have them participate in the assembly in order to protect the independence of the process,” referring to the civic assembly.
Final recommendations
By the third weekend, some participants said their views on AI had evolved.
Raithatha, the software engineer, said speaking with peers had helped him see that the positive effects of AI are just factor.
“I think my thought process has grown to incorporate all the other social and other equitable aspects that I didn’t come in originally thinking about,” Raithatha said.
Hillary Moralez said she now understand how AI could be helpful for accessibility services like translation.
“I initially went in hoping I could basically just stop everything, which I understand is completely not an option. But what it really did was help me to better understand other people’s thoughts and usages and processes,” Moralez said.
On the final day of the civic assembly, participants voted on which recommendations to formally pass on to the county.
Participants voted anonymously on their phones. Each recommendation needed at least 80% support to pass.
Snohomish County Councilmember Jared Mead, who cosponsored a resolution supporting the civic assembly, showed up to watch the vote.
“Some of the ideas are probably going to be crazy and unimplementable and all of the things, but some of them are going to be awesome ideas that we could not have thought of,” Mead said.
After several hours of voting, the group passed 35 recommendations with strong support. Several dozen recommendations that received less than 80% but more than 50% were still included in the final report as having received “broad support.”
The participants recommended that county staff disclose if AI is used to respond to constituent emails. They also recommended that the county ensure that humans always make final decisions, clearly tell residents whenever they are interacting with an AI communications system, and give residents legal recourse if their data is leaked.
The group also recommended the creation of a new AI “human oversight board” composed of independent technical experts, community members and county employees.
As AI evolves, new issues will likely emerge that the assembly didn’t have time to consider, said participant Mhindra Lukka, and the oversight board will be important to ensuring that accountability work continues after the assembly is over.
“We want the board to classify each system based on the risk, and also come up with the auditing and reporting strategy,” Lukka said.
One recommendation that did not clear 80% was that the county should “utilize AI as a tool for employees, not as a means of replacing an entire department or position class.” It received 79% of the vote.
Participant Jessica Rhodes said there was a lot of debate about that recommendation.
“The reality is, we can’t feasibly justify making employers retain every single employee that they have while also paying for this new artificial intelligence system that does the job of all their employees,” Rhodes said.
A group from the civic assembly will present the final report to the Snohomish County Council on July 8.
After voting wrapped up, participants exchanged numbers, took a group photo and said goodbye. After three weekends of sitting in a room talking about AI, everyone was ready to go home. Some said they were still wary of the county’s commitment to taking their recommendations seriously. Others said they felt optimistic.
Theo Moriarty, a middle school teacher, said he hopes this will inspire other jurisdictions in Washington to form their own civic assemblies.
“There isn’t a lot of trust in America for government and corporations — especially government and corporations working together,” Moriarty said. “This sort of thing, and the resolutions from it, I think could go a long way to forming a baseline of trust.”
