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The City of Bellingham is working on a policy for how staff use increasingly powerful and ubiquitous AI tools, while also investigating whether one of its staff might have used ChatGPT to influence which company won a city contract.
A Cascade PBS and KNKX investigation of ChatGPT use by cities in Washington revealed that a Bellingham employee may have used AI to tailor contract requirements to exclude a specific vendor. Mayor Kim Lund confirmed the allegation is being investigated by an independent party and said she couldn’t discuss it further.
Lund, however, said that while the city currently lacks an official policy on using artificial intelligence programs, one is “imminent.” The document has gone through several reviews because of how quickly the technology is changing, she said.
“We’re really trying to bring it to life and make sure that staff are poised to be successful when we issue the policy,” Lund said.
Despite the lack of a policy, records released to media outlets showed that Bellingham employees, including Lund, used AI chatbots for a range of tasks, from responding to constituent emails to making social media posts and analyzing policy proposals. The cities of Bellingham and Everett were the focus of the Cascade PBS and KNKX investigation not because they were outliers, according to the report, but because they were the fastest to respond to a public records request for ChatGPT logs.
While the city strives to be transparent by releasing records, “it is also true that it can be challenging to learn something new in the public eye,” Lund said.
Despite the media attention around the topic, Lund said the amount of feedback from the public about AI usage has been limited compared to other topics, such as public safety downtown or disputed development proposals.
“We talk about AI a lot internally … but we hear significantly more in the community about many other things besides AI right now,” she said.
Whatcom County released its own generative AI policy in November 2025. The document created guardrails for staff using what some experts say are the two pillars of responsible AI use: human verification and protection of sensitive information.
Lund said the city is still committed to figuring out how to use AI tools to best serve the community. She finds AI helpful in comparative analysis. It can quickly compare differences in governance structure and policies between Bellingham and other Washington municipalities.
Development of the city’s urban forest plan, for example, was paused in 2024 due to limited staff capacity. Lund said AI could be used to refine the city’s plan based on examples from other cities.
“But there will be a lot of human subject matter experts evaluating the output of that review,” she added. “… And I think that will always be the case. There will always be a human behind the output.”
City communications director Melissa Morin said her department is exploring how AI can enhance accessibility by helping with language translation, converting PDFs so they’re usable with e-readers and creating audio descriptions of meetings for people who are visually impaired.
“We have such a strong value around wanting everyone to be able to receive our information, to interact with the city,” Morin said. “The trade-offs of devoting staff time to do that versus using this tool — it pans out in terms of the cost savings.”
A 2025 national survey of 300 state and local governments found that 45% of responding agencies use AI, while 39% use generative AI, which can create new content like text, images or videos. Lund emphasized that the AI question extends beyond small local governments.
“It’s bigger than any municipal IT department to tackle some of these ethical questions,” she said. “We need national frameworks or global frameworks for some of these really important questions.”
Julia Tellman writes about civic issues and anything else that happens to cross her desk; contact her at juliatellman@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 107.
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