Priorities Podcast

StateScoop

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Priorities Podcast

Each Wednesday, StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast explores the latest in state and local government technology news and analysis. Listen to in-depth conversations with government and industry’s top executives, and learn about trending stories affecting state and local IT leaders ranging from modernization and digital accessibility to the latest advances in generative artificial intelligence.

1D AGO

Inside North Carolina's cyber internship program

This week we’re joined by North Carolina Chief Information Officer Teena Piccione, and Bernice Russell-Bond, the state’s chief information security officer. They share details of an upcoming cybersecurity internship program hoped to create a pipeline of talent for the state government. Starting next August, 10 college students will get a chance to work for the state as part-time interns, learning on the job as they perform a broad range of cybersecurity tasks. Russell-Bond says the program will give students exposure to “all aspects of cyber,” while providing the state a reliable source of fresh talent. This week’s top stories: A pilot project in Virginia is using agentic AI to slim down the commonwealth’s regulations. State agencies are being directed to use artificial intelligence to achieve a statewide goal of reducing regulations by 25%. A new study from The Pew Charitable Trusts shows that federal broadband data used by states has several key shortcomings that should be remediated. Researchers found that broadband data is unreliable and inconsistent, making it difficult for states to plan their infrastructure buildouts. A new report from the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice found that 61% of local election officials are concerned about the cuts to election security services made this year by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Eighty-seven percent said they think state and local governments need to step up to fill the gap. New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday. For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

25 min
JUL 9

What could Texas learn from North Carolina’s flood warning system?

Over the July 4th weekend, extreme rainfall in Central Texas caused catastrophic flooding along the Guadalupe River, leaving over 100 people dead and 160 people missing. Amidst the devastation, one question remains: in an area known as “flash flood alley,” why wasn’t there a flood warning system in place? This week, the Priorities Podcast reruns an episode from last year that centered on the alerts issued in another disaster, in North Carolina. A system there uses data from stream gauges, small devices that measure the water level and discharge of rivers and streams, for flood forecasting and disaster preparedness, which helped in the response to Hurricane Helene. Top stories this week: On Monday, ranking members of Congress sent a letter to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, demanding to know why the agency hasn’t responded to their recent inquiries about how its supporting state and local election offices. Democratic leaders Rep. Joseph D. Morelle and Sen. Alex Padilla wrote that they’re seeking “urgent updates” to the status of numerous election security policies and programs available under previous administrations. A new California bill aims to address the harmful impacts of “companion” chatbots, artificial intelligence-powered systems designed to simulate human-like relationships and provide emotional support. The bill would require companies running companion chatbots to remind users that they’re talking to a machine, not a person and clearly state that chatbots may not be suitable for minors. If passed, it would be among the first laws in the country to regulate AI companions with clear safety standards and user protections. In signing the state’s two-year budget last week, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont authorized funding for the Voting Rights Act. The act offers voter protections, including legal tools to fight discriminatory voting rules in court, expanded language assistance for voters who struggle with English and a data portal to host all of the state’s election results and demographic information. New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday. For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

25 min
JUL 2

The tool helping vulnerable populations in California beat the heat

Just in time for another hot California summer, the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment this year launched CalHeatScore, a data-powered tool that’s designed to help local governments and their constituencies better prepare for levels of heat that can become health hazards. On this week’s Priorities Podcast, Walker Wieland, manager of the office’s Extreme Heat Ranking System Development Section, says that heat affects everyone, but it especially affects groups like low-income populations, the elderly and people who live in cities, who must suffer the urban heat island effect. “Extreme heat really disproportionately impacts vulnerable populations throughout California,” Wieland says. “Some examples are the very young, older adults, those that work outside for a living, those with preexisting chronic health conditions. These are the people that are most commonly more sensitive to extreme heat and ultimately end up in the emergency room.” He explains how the tool can be used by members of the public to plan their summer schedules, but also by communities to guide policies, such as the opening of additional cooling or respite centers. This week’s top stories: The Senate voted Tuesday to remove from the federal budget bill a proposed moratorium on states enforcing their own artificial intelligence laws. The ban that was championed by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., lost virtually all support before the vote. The defeat is being celebrated by states and advocacy groups as a win for state sovereignty. The Supreme Court last week ruled to protect the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes phone and internet services in rural areas and schools through a number of programs, including the E-Rate program. The fund collects billions in fees from telecommunications services and users each year to support rural broadband networks, internet for health care centers and low-income households. Taking a page from President Donald Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last week signed a bill establishing a $10 million store of cryptocurrencies that lawmakers said will position the state for economic prosperity. Two other states — Arizona and New Hampshire — have passed legislation to create their own crypto reserves, but Texas is the first to fund one with state dollars. One expert, though, told StateScoop the fund’s small size makes the move largely symbolic. New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday. For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

24 min
JUN 25

Inside report: Food bank data and the Digital Equity Act

On this week’s Priorities Podcast, the StateScoop team breaks down what the recent cancellation of the Digital Equity Act will mean for states and communities that were expecting the funding to improve connectivity, access to devices and digital skills training. Keely Quinlan explains that a recent letter — signed by 156 people representing the 140 organizations that serve communities across 39 states — asks for it to be reinstated. And StateScoop reporter Sophia Fox-Sowell offers a preview of her reporting on food banks and their use of state data. Data is important for their efforts, she explains, but access is uneven. Top stories this week: State and local governments overseeing populations of at least 50,000 people have 10 months remaining to comply with new accessibility rules, to ensure that people with disabilities of all sorts can find information and use services. Code for America has developed an AI-powered tool that helps them get organized. So far it’s being used by Salt Lake City, Utah, and the State of Georgia. A new report from the emergency tech firm Carbyne paints a troubling picture of the nation’s 911 system, highlighting a growing wave of outages and cyberattacks, along with an outdated infrastructure that threatens public safety. It shows that nearly 90% of emergency communication centers across the U.S. experienced at least one system outage in the past year caused by aging equipment or cyberattacks. In a letter last week to Commerce Sec. Howard Lutnick and Adam Cassady, acting administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, more than 140 state and local organizations asked for the Digital Equity Act to be reinstated. The letter claims the act’s cancellation could leave residents and some businesses behind on issues of economic opportunity, education, health care and online safety. New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday. For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

17 min
JUN 18

New Orleans' battle over facial recognition

Since he was named Oklahoma’s chief information officer at the beginning of the year, Dan Cronin said, he’s been evaluating how the state’s government can use its data to better take care of its citizens. Cronin, whose background is in leading digital transformation and process improvement efforts across large companies, told StateScoop that one of the challenges he faced coming into the CIO role was how to pick up where other CIOs for Oklahoma have left off. He said this process has included evaluating the state’s digital government offerings, but also taking stock of state data and how it can maximize its usefulness for residents. This process, which Cronin calls “data enablement,” involves determining how to make data more accessible and usable for making decisions and setting policy. “We've got a large amount of data in the state of Oklahoma, and so we're looking at data enablement,” Cronin said. “As we think about digital government, we understand what our citizens' needs are, how do we couple those pieces together to provide a service to them that's fast and effective and efficient, that meets their needs 24/7, and so we're trying to get that in place.” Cronin said Oklahoma is also migrating some of its old systems to the cloud. All of this work, he said, is helping Oklahoma turn its eye to the future. “Most governments have a lot of legacy applications, and so we're evaluating that,” Cronin said. “We're doing a rationalization effort to understand what's required and what's needed going forward, and really it's about the future strategy. Where do we want to be in the next couple of years?”

21 min
JUN 11

Inside New Jersey’s AI-powered ‘warm callback’ system

Years into an effort to consolidate and modernize the New Jersey state government’s call centers, humans remain an important part of the process. On this week’s Priorities Podcast, Dave Cole, New Jersey chief’s innovation officer, and Joe DeLaTorre, product manager at the New Jersey Office of Innovation, say that even after improvements to the state’s digital presence, residents said they still want to talk to a live human when it comes to sensitive questions about taxes or unemployment benefits. The state’s “warm callback” algorithm predicts how many calls must be added to agents’ queues, reducing wait times and maximizing agent productivity. “A lot of these call centers are billed per minute, so whether you're talking to somebody or they're sitting on hold, your costs are the same,” Cole says. “The problem was people needed to have confidence in the system whether they were going to wait on the line or get a call back. They needed to know that somebody was actually going to follow through.” This week’s top stories: States are picking sides as competing election integrity efforts move ahead. New York and Virginia each recently joined competing election integrity efforts, highlighting the growing weight of politics in the nation’s elections process. “I run at the speed of business, not at the speed of government,” Teena Piccione, North Carolina’s newly confirmed chief information officer, told StateScoop in a recent interview. Piccione became CIO last January and was confirmed last May. As the Atlantic hurricane season begins, at least one emergency response expert is raising concerns that federal staffing cuts at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration could hinder state and local government coordination and impede public warning systems during natural disasters. New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday. For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

30 min
JUN 4

Fountain bubble prank presented city CIO with unique technical challenge

For Stephen Dawe, the chief information officer for Opelika, Alabama, work life took an unexpected turn during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was tasked with building an IT system that could detect when detergent had been dumped into a city fountain, a recurring and costly prank kids had been pulling. Dawe says it took a lot of work, including recruiting the fire department to help his team set up an environment to create bubbles that could be photographed and used to train an artificial intelligence model. Today, the system works, he says, but even coming up with a possible solution wasn’t easy. “It was like, OK, what are we going to do to stop this? And it took probably about six months to come up with a reasonable answer to that question.” Top stories this week: Dozens of privacy advocates, along with groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have attached their names to a new campaign to change the technological standard backing mobile driver’s licenses. The campaign, titled No Phone Home, is backed by a statement that calls for identity systems like mobile driver’s licenses to adopt a technological standard that is incapable of tracking or surveilling users. A group of more than 80 national and state school and library organizations have sent a letter to House members, urging them to vote against a measure that would repeal a Federal Communications rule allowing schools and libraries to spend E-Rate funds on wireless hotspot lending by schools and libraries. As California braces for what could be another blistering summer, Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced a new digital tool to help residents stay safe in extreme heat, along with a $32.4 million investment to support local efforts to combat the state’s rising temperatures. New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday. For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.

16 min
MAY 28

How Pennsylvania is hiring employees faster

Two Pennsylvania state employees explain on this week’s Priorities Podcast how they’re accelerating the time it takes to hire new employees. Miranda Martin, director of talent management, and Harrison MacRae, director of emerging technologies, said that through a combination of process changes and technology, they’ve reduced time-to-hire from 90 days to 58 days. “Three months is just too long to compete for talent, so we got to work right away and looked at our processes and procedures and worked really hard to reduce that time,” Martin said. The state also used its ChatGPT Enterprise licenses to ensure that agencies were properly aligning their hiring needs with job classifications. Top stories this week: Washington state’s technology bureau has partnered with the University of California, Berkeley to better understand how nonprofits in the state may be exposed to cybersecurity risks. Bill Kehoe, Washington’s chief information officer, said protecting nonprofits ensures that the public will get the best from their state and local governments. Kentucky’s acting chief information officer, Jim Barnhart, has been promoted to lead the commonwealth’s Office of Technology as its statewide CIO. The promotion comes after Barnhart spent nearly two decades serving as the state’s deputy CIO. And Maine lawmakers last week urged the Trump administration to unfreeze Digital Equity Act funds that they say are essential for the state’s future. Led by Republican Sen. Susan Collins, the group said that the rural state was depending on the $35 million it was set to receive to improve access to technology and skills training. New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday. For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud or Spotify.

17 min

Each Wednesday, StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast explores the latest in state and local government technology news and analysis. Listen to in-depth conversations with government and industry’s top executives, and learn about trending stories affecting state and local IT leaders ranging from modernization and digital accessibility to the latest advances in generative artificial intelligence.

Creator

StateScoop
Years Active

2022 - 2025
Episodes

175
Rating

Clean
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Priorities Podcast

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