Community Spotlight: Mayor Jim Dodge, Orland Park: Repairing an AI Phone Assistant After Resident Feedback
Jim Dodge took office as mayor of Orland Park, Illinois, in April 2025. He defeated incumbent Keith Pekau in the April 1, 2025 election with 57% of the vote. The 2020 census recorded 58,703 residents in the village, which is about 25 miles southwest of Chicago in Cook County, with a small portion in Will County.
Dodge is the first person in Orland Park history to serve as village clerk, village trustee, and mayor. He became village clerk in 1989 at age 26, making him the youngest official in village history. During that first campaign, he knocked on the door of every voter in a village of about 23,000 residents. He was appointed trustee in 1996 and served on the Village Board until 2021, when he did not seek reelection.
He returned to public life in 2025, citing political division in the village. He ran with the Orland Park for All slate and received major support from local police and fire unions. At his swearing-in, he said he would work with all seven board members, build stronger ties with school districts, the library, the township, and neighboring communities, and meet with every village employee. The village operates under a council-manager system, with the village president serving as mayor.
In late August 2026, the village launched Humphrey, an AI assistant built by Citibot and named after John Humphrey, Orland Park's first mayor. It answers questions about village services, permits, meetings, and events in more than 70 languages, 24 hours a day. Residents can access it on the village website and through the village's main phone line. It also helps staff track service requests.
Dodge said technology can help improve public services at a reasonable cost. More than 80% of village staff already use AI at work or in their personal lives. He emphasized that AI won't replace village employees, citing the police department as an example. With staffing increases becoming harder to sustain, he said the village needs to find ways to operate more efficiently.
In September 2026, Humphrey handled 2,687 calls. Of those, 71% were transferred to a village department. Sentiment analysis rated 91% of calls neutral and 6% negative.
Several residents reported trouble reaching staff. One resident called four times without reaching a person and raised the issue at the October 5 Village Board meeting. Another spent about two hours trying to get information about an October 3 event at Centennial Park before going in person to Village Hall.
Director of Information Technology Tad Spencer said the system could not transfer callers to the operator or the Parks and Recreation Department because of problematic phone numbers. The village paused Humphrey on phone calls and is working with its phone vendor so call handling can resume. Dodge attributed the failure to the phone system and said resident feedback helped technicians locate it.
The village also put Google Gemini into use for staff in October. Spencer said it answered 97% of staff questions that month and lets the village store old data more cheaply. He said the previous system cost $85,000 a year to maintain.
In November, the Village Board approved a $43,200 contract with Deerfield-based Zion Cloud Solutions to monitor and improve the platform. The one-year agreement begins in January and covers 40 hours of work per month. Spencer said the village hopes to reduce the proportion of negative calls when Humphrey returns to the phone line.
Free Cybersecurity Assessments and Exercises for State and Local Governments
Fractional Source and Sourcewell Ventures are expanding their cybersecurity pilot to state and local governments, offering free assessments and exercises to help agencies prepare for cyber incidents.
QUICK HIT NEWS
Union County, Pennsylvania, added data protection language to every county job description after a March 2025 ransomware attack exposed Social Security and driver’s license numbers. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights recommended the change. Employees must limit their access to personal and health data to the minimum necessary under HIPAA and report potential security incidents to the privacy officer. Annual cybersecurity training is now a condition of employment for all positions.
A coding error in the software that calculates how many ballots to print left some Chicago precincts short on November 3. Total ballot counts were correct for every precinct, but in some split precincts the counts for different ballot styles were swapped. Chicago has 1,291 precincts, and 491 of them are split. At two Logan Square precincts, certain ballots ran out around 9 a.m., causing problems for at least four hours. The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners apologized and said its IT department has added safeguards.
Maryland is building its first technical acquisition team to change how state agencies buy technology. The Department of Information Technology is hiring a senior director of technology acquisitions, along with user experience researchers, product managers, and software engineers. Agencies will describe the operational problem first and check whether an existing state system can meet the need before making a new purchase. Agencies submitted more than 1,700 technology requests worth more than $500 million in fiscal year 2026.
Ohio and Louisiana are using volunteer cybersecurity professionals to help public agencies prepare for and respond to cyber incidents. Ohio's Cyber Reserve, established in 2019, recruits specialists from the public and private sectors, while Louisiana operates its program through the State Guard. Ohio assigns multiple volunteers to key roles to maintain coverage, while Louisiana compensates volunteers activated under state orders. Both states rely on legislative support, clear responsibilities, and volunteer recognition to sustain their programs. At least nine states have established or are developing similar initiatives.
FOR THE COMMUTE
Energy Readiness and Defense Innovation (Fed Gov Today)
Dale Marks, assistant secretary for energy, installations, and environment at the Department of War, argues that the department should manage installation and operational energy as one effort built around the warfighter. He describes an evaluation that narrowed a field of more than 100 drone vendors and tested selected capabilities with operator feedback across several scenarios. Marks says the department will accept more acquisition risk up front to reduce risk for warfighters later. He also wants to cut bureaucracy and give industry more predictable demand.
RESOURCES & EVENTS
📅 Is Your Agencyʼs Messaging System Audit-Ready? (Virtual - November 17, 2026)
This webinar will show state, local, and education organizations how to prove who sent a message, who had access, and whether they had proper safeguards in place. Savi Chakraborty, senior product and partner marketing manager for the public sector at Twilio, will join Dan Lohrmann, senior fellow at the Center for Digital Government. They will cover audit logs, role-based permissions, and static IP controls that close security gaps without replacing existing systems. Attendees will receive a checklist to assess messaging systems and set priorities before the end of 2026. Details →
📅 North Carolina AI and Cybersecurity Symposium 2026 (Raleigh, NC - December 15, 2026)
This free symposium at the Raleigh Convention Center is open to public sector attendees only and will begin with a recorded message from Gov. Josh Stein. Noelle Russell, founder and chief AI officer of the AI Leadership Institute, will deliver the keynote on securing an agentic workforce through zero trust. Sessions will cover the rapidly evolving threat landscape, the State AI Accelerator, building an AI-ready public workforce, and a tabletop exercise on the first 72 hours of a ransomware attack. Details →
📊 Report Spotlight: Beyond Website Compliance (Adobe)
This paper explains why an accessible website doesn't guarantee accessible content when agencies deliver benefits, notices, forms, and court records as PDFs and scanned files. Updated Department of Justice Title II rules require state and local web content, including many documents, to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA by April 26, 2027, for entities serving 50,000 or more people and by April 26, 2028, for smaller entities. More than one in four U.S. adults lives with a disability, according to the CDC. The paper recommends automated tagging paired with human review, accessibility checks built into publishing, and clear ownership and staff training.
INSIGHT OF THE WEEK
Preliminary 2025 results from the National Crime Victimization Survey, run by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, show violent victimization fell 25%, from 9.9 to 7.4 per 1,000 people. That figure excludes simple assault. Aggravated assault fell 31%, and robbery fell 27%. The property victimization rate fell 19% to 111.2 per 1,000 households, with motor vehicle theft down 30% and burglary and trespassing down 25%. The survey counts crimes that were never reported to police, and its trend matches FBI data showing several years of decline. BJS fully switched to a redesigned survey in January 2025 and cautions that the new estimates cannot be compared directly with earlier ones. Final figures are expected next year.
