Pico Rivera Considers AI-Assisted Budget Software — Efficiency or Over-Reliance on Automation?
- Whittier 360 News Network
- Oct 11
- 4 min read
By Rebecca Canales
Whittier 360 News Network
October 14, 2025 = Pico Rivera
The City of Pico Rivera is preparing to modernize the way it builds its budget—replacing spreadsheets and Word documents with a cloud-based system called ClearGov, a platform that uses artificial intelligence to draft portions of the city’s budget narrative and forecast expenditures. City staff say the move will streamline work and improve transparency. Skeptics warn it could make the city dependent on automation and distance residents from the human judgment behind local fiscal priorities.
A Five-Year Contract Worth $203,532
Under the proposal scheduled for Tuesday’s City Council meeting, Pico Rivera would approve a five-year agreement with Massachusetts-based ClearGov Inc., totaling $203,532.The system will be funded from the city’s accumulated technology-surcharge revenues, with two optional one-year extensions in years four and five.
The software would begin implementation this fiscal year, with full use planned for the 2026-27 budget cycle.Modules include:
Operational & Personnel Budgeting
Capital Budgeting
Digital Budget Book, an online version of the city’s budget for the public to view.
Why the City Wants Change
According to the staff report, city employees now build the award-winning biennial budget by hand—compiling data from Tyler New World, Excel, Word, and Adobe. While the process works, it is labor-intensive, creates version-control headaches, and limits collaboration among departments.
Officials say ClearGov will:
Centralize data entry on one secure platform,
Reduce human error,
Allow multiple departments to work simultaneously, and
Automatically format the final budget book for print and web publication.
The purchase is being made through the BuyBoard cooperative contract #692-23, which lets cities piggyback on pre-bid pricing instead of running their own lengthy procurement.
Where Artificial Intelligence Enters the Process
ClearGov markets an AI feature called FirstDraft ™, which can automatically generate the first draft of narrative sections in a city’s digital budget book. Using the data already entered by staff—department goals, revenues, expenditures—the AI produces text that explains trends, achievements, and fiscal challenges. City employees are expected to review, edit, and approve every passage before publication.
The company also advertises machine-learning forecasting tools that identify spending trends and project future revenues using historical data. While these features can save staff time, they also introduce questions about oversight and accountability.
The Debate: Convenience vs. Control
Efficiency Gains
Supporters in city management circles say ClearGov can cut budget preparation time by 30 to 50 percent, eliminate repetitive data entry, and create more consistent formatting. For a city of Pico Rivera’s size, that could translate into staff capacity for other financial or service-delivery work.
Trust and Transparency Concerns
Critics, however, worry that AI-generated narratives could shape the story of the budget in ways staff do not fully notice. AI models sometimes invent or misstate facts if the training data or prompts are incomplete—a phenomenon known as “hallucination.” Others raise philosophical concerns: should a machine draft the words that describe a community’s values, needs, and priorities?
“Residents expect the city’s budget message to come from real people who understand the community,” one local resident told Whittier 360 after reading the staff report. “If AI writes it, even partly, who is responsible for what it says?”
Vendor Dependence and Skill Retention
ClearGov hosts all data in the cloud and charges an annual subscription. That setup ensures automatic updates but also ties the city’s budgeting process to a single vendor. If ClearGov were sold, shut down, or went offline, city staff might need to rebuild manual workflows—a challenge if long-time employees have retired and newer staff have never produced a budget from scratch.
Technology contracts typically contain data-ownership clauses, guaranteeing that the city retains all information in exportable formats, but few municipalities regularly test those provisions in practice.
Balancing Innovation With Accountability
Pico Rivera’s decision reflects a broader movement toward “digital governance” across Southern California. Nearby cities have adopted similar systems, arguing they make government more transparent by publishing interactive online budgets. Still, transparency depends not just on technology but on how clearly data and narratives are explained—and whether residents trust the process behind them.
The council’s agenda lists the change under its strategic priority of “Fiscal & Organizational Sustainability – Create a City government built to adapt to change.” Adapting, though, will require new policies on data verification, human review of AI outputs, and long-term continuity planning.
Recommended Questions for Residents to Ask
To ensure accountability as the city adopts this technology, residents of Pico Rivera may wish to ask their councilmembers and staff:
Data Ownership: Does the city fully own and control all budget data and narratives generated by ClearGov?
Human Oversight: Will city employees review every AI-generated sentence before it is published?
Transparency: Will the public be told when text was drafted by AI rather than a human author?
Security & Privacy: How is financial data protected in the cloud, and who can access it?
Continuity Plan: If the vendor goes offline or the internet fails, can the city still build and approve a budget manually?
Skill Retention: Will staff maintain training in traditional budget preparation to preserve institutional knowledge?
Cost Escalation: What are the renewal rates after the five-year term, and what happens if ClearGov raises prices?
Public Benefit: How will residents actually interact with the new “digital budget book,” and will it be easier to understand than a PDF?
Final Word
Modernizing city budgeting can make government more efficient and transparent—but only if the people who oversee it remain in control of the narrative and the numbers. As Pico Rivera joins the growing list of cities bringing AI into the budgeting process, the question becomes not just how the software works, but who ensures it continues to serve the public interest.
Comments