The relatively recent introduction of publicly accessible artificial intelligence-driven chatbots (e.g., Bard, Bing, ChatGPT, Claude) have focused...
Bloustein Local Government
Atlantic City Housing Authority spent nearly $500K on leadership consultants
ATLANTIC CITY — The Atlantic City Housing Authority spent nearly a half-million dollars on two administrative consultants over the past year and...
Pfeiffer Op-Ed: What state and local governments should do about generative AI
How can we take advantage of the technology without harming the public? Society is often slow to appreciate that technological innovations have both...
‘Not a perfect process’: How did the two versions of NJ’s budget differ?
As the process to craft New Jersey's state budget came to a chaotic close last month, rumors swirled about what needed to be done to ensure that the...
‘Secretive’ N.J. governments would be even less transparent under proposed laws, some say
Tucked in desk drawers and filed away in email inboxes in every local and county office in New Jersey are government secrets. To find them, news...
Marc Pfeiffer Participates in Eagleton Podcast on the Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence
Marc Pfeiffer, Assistant Director, Bloustein Local (CUPR), Doctor Lauren Goodlad, and Senator Andrew Zwicker discussed the impact of Artificial...
Gov. Murphy vetoed a 20-year service pension bill for police and firefighters. Here’s why
A bill to allow police officers and firefighters with 20 years of service to retire early with a reduced pension, regardless of their age, was...
Your tax dollars at work. The 2023 budget details for Warren County’s biggest towns.
Warren County municipalities had until April 28 to set their spending plans for 2023, including general fund budgets covering the costs of public...
Some NJ officials will no longer have to disclose their addresses. This is why
Legislation removing address disclosure requirements for New Jersey local elected officials cleared its second major hurdle Thursday. What the...
Can NJ Fix Its Messy School Funding Formula?
It’s a complicated situation. New Jersey’s school funding formula, which is supposed to equally provide all students with the chance to get a good...
Recent Products
AI in Local Government, Helpful or Harmful?
Chatbots are software programs that use natural language processing to have conversations with people. Also called conversational agents, they can answer questions, provide recommendations, and complete tasks. Leading companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, and...
TECH UPDATES: What Municipal CAOs Need to Know, Part 1: Tech Fitness and Cyber Hygiene
There are two basic elements of technology that every municipality must have. Most places already do this, but it doesn’t hurt to highlight them. The first is an expert to advise you and your governing body on technology issues. As with other experts you hire—a police...
Monitoring summertime indoor overheating and pollutant risks and natural ventilation patterns of seniors in public housing.
Abstract Indoor heat and air pollution pose concurrent threats to human health and wellbeing, and their effects are more pronounced for vulnerable individuals. This study investigates exposures to summertime indoor overheating and airborne particulate matter (PM2.5)...
First, Do No Harm: Algorithms, AI, and Digital Product Liability
The ethical imperative for technology should be "first, do no harm." But digital innovations like AI and social media increasingly enable societal harms, from bias to misinformation. As these technologies grow ubiquitous, we need solutions to address unintended...