Eureka council approves AI guardrails, weighs long-delayed pay raise

Eureka drew a hard line on two questions that affect both trust and the public checkbook: how city staff can use artificial intelligence, and whether elected officials should finally get a raise after nearly four decades.

The city’s AI policy, Policy 1.14, bars employees, contractors and third parties working for the city from feeding personal, confidential, restricted or protected information into AI systems. Any AI-generated material must be reviewed, tested and fact-checked before it is used, and the policy says AI cannot make decisions. Final decisions must stay with a human, and staff must disclose when AI significantly contributes to content or structure.

That matters because the tools Eureka is trying to manage are already familiar to many offices, including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Finance Director Lane Millar told the council those are the kinds of generative systems the policy is meant to cover, and he warned that future “agentic AI” tools could do more than draft text and begin acting more autonomously on a user’s behalf. The city’s own summary said the policy is only a first step and will likely be revised as the technology changes.

Councilmember Kati Moulton pushed the city toward the most cautious reading of that future, saying she did not believe city leaders should be using AI at all. The council also raised concerns about accuracy, privacy, bias and transparency, the same risks that have made artificial intelligence a political issue in public administration far beyond Eureka.

The other question on the table was money, and it has been frozen for a long time. Eureka’s monthly stipend for council members has been stuck at $500 since 1988, while the mayor has received $625. The city charter provision was ratified on June 7, 1988. Because Eureka is a charter city, any pay increase would require a charter amendment and voter approval, which means the issue is headed to the November 2026 ballot if the council’s plan moves forward.

At an April 7 special meeting, the council directed staff to draft an ordinance to place the pay question before voters. City Attorney Robert Black called the current salaries “truly out of date” and noted that California Government Code section 36516 would allow a city of Eureka’s size to pay council members up to $950 a month, a 90% increase over the current stipend. He also pointed to the 2023 state law SB 329, which raised salary caps for general-law city councils.

Moulton suggested a phased, inflation-based approach could reduce the political stigma of voting for a raise and make local office more accessible to working-class residents. For Eureka, the two debates land in the same place: tighter rules on how city government uses new technology, and a public vote on how much accountability should cost.