Local government affects Texans more directly than almost any other level of public life, yet much of what cities, counties, transit agencies, and special districts do remain buried in dense budgets and hard-to-access public records. Artificial intelligence has generated plenty of hype, but Charles Blain argues that its most promising civic use may be helping ordinary people understand what the government is doing with their money. He says better tools can make local government more transparent, more understandable, and more accountable.
Blain is the founder of Local Insights AI. He created the service after building a series of data tools to support his own reporting and realizing they could help citizens, journalists, and policymakers follow the government more effectively.
During a Houston Metro contract investigation, Blain filed a public records request, received “bucket loads of information,” and nearly gave up after finding little of use. Before deleting the files, he ran them through an AI system to see whether it could flag anomalies. “It immediately flagged the contract,” he says. That led him deeper into a story involving a contract that had grown from roughly $215,000 to about $4 million with little scrutiny. The contract was later canceled. “Had I not put that out, it would have just passed by and nothing would have changed,” he says.
The experience convinced him that AI could give individual citizens some of the same investigative capacity once reserved for major newsrooms. “It gave me resources as a citizen journalist that most people don’t have, or didn’t have before,” he says.
Local Insights now pulls together local budgets, tax rates, campaign finance data, agenda items, court information, jail data, business records, property records, and public information tools in one place.
Blain describes the platform as a way to turn dense, fragmented public data into something people can actually use. Users can look up their address and see the jurisdictions that govern them, compare property tax rates across nearby entities, examine agenda trends, track campaign finance overlaps, and set alerts for contracts or items that meet certain thresholds. “The idea is that you can just go to it, get information, and you know the answer,” he says.
Blain says AI can help citizens make sense of responses to their public information requests of local governments, as well as denials, and exemptions that often discourage people from pushing further. “We’re in a really interesting time where citizens finally have the ability to maybe not meet the government toe to toe, but we have resources where they can match them to a certain extent,” he says.
Blain believes that civic technology should not be reserved for government efficiency alone. Citizens need tools too. “We all need to collectively hold the government accountable,” he says. Local government may be the most important level of government in daily life. Making it easier to understand may be one of the most practical uses AI has yet found.
Want the news delivered straight to your inbox?
The top news stories covering Texas government will be delivered to your inbox weekly