Kid Candidates and AI Audits: News From the States | U.S. News Decision Points

A 14-year-old high school freshman is on Vermont’s gubernatorial ballot. The Iran War’s supply-chain disruptions mean less fluoride in drinking water for millions in the D.C. area. Iowa House Republicans consider using artificial intelligence to find government savings. A billboard backlash in Washington.

As we mention here regularly, Decision Points primarily focuses on national and international news. But we also occasionally deliver a roundup of local, regional or under-the-radar news with a political dimension – something unusual or interesting, or that may illustrate a broader trend.

Our guiding principle is that the definition of politics includes how a society organizes itself to allocate finite or scarce resources, manage internal disagreements and blunt external threats.

Here’s this week’s look ‘round.

A 14-year-old high school freshman in Vermont will be the first under-18 candidate for governor to be on the state’s general election ballot, according to The Associated Press. Dean Roy got his spot by creating his own political party, the Freedom and Unity Party.

“The state constitution sets no minimum age for gubernatorial candidates, requiring only that candidates have resided in the state for four years,” the AP noted.

“I don’t expect necessarily to win,” Roy told the AP. “What I do expect is to start the movement, and get more young people to come in behind me and say, ‘Yeah, we also want to make change.’”

“I know it sounds crazy, a 14-year-old running for governor, but honestly, look at the people in charge right now,” the self-described centrist said in a post on his campaign’s Instagram page. “They’ve been doing this forever and things still aren’t working.”

Could the war with Iran lead to more cavities just outside the nation’s capital? Turns out, it might!

That’s because the conflict has disrupted supplies from a major producer of fluoride in Israel, NBC 4 reported. As a result, millions of people in Maryland’s Montgomery and Prince George’s counties will get a lower concentration of the tooth-preserving mineral.

WSSC Water, the water utility for the two counties, has announced it reduced fluoride levels “from 0.7 milligrams per liter, the optimal level for preventing cavities, to 0.4 milligrams per liter at its Potomac and Patuxent Water Filtration Plants on Tuesday afternoon,” NBC 4 said.

“This is a temporary adjustment driven solely by supply availability,” WSSC Water Director of Production Ben Thompson said in a statement. “We remain committed to maintaining safe, high-quality drinking water and will restore optimal fluoride levels as soon as supply conditions stabilize.”

Republicans in the Iowa statehouse are looking into spending $1.4 million to create a publicly accessible tool to assess the spending and revenue of some counties and school districts using artificial intelligence, the Iowa Capitol Dispatch reported.

The Iowa House Government Oversight Committee recently heard from Tyler Technologies Senior Account Executive Mark Welch. Tyler is a software company focused on the public sector.

“The AI model would be able to provide an overview of where these public entities are spending their money, and areas for potential savings,” the Dispatch reported. “Welch said the analysis would include recommendations for areas where governments could find between 10% and 28% in savings by finding areas where services are duplicated, where a government is paying more than similarly situated peers for a service, or identifying funding for services that do not align with a community’s priorities.”

The organizers of an annual 12K run in Spokane, Washington, have taken down a billboard advertising the event because of a backlash that turns on the meaning of the word “race,” The Spokesman-Review reported.

The offending text? “OUR CITY OUR RACE.” (In smaller print, the billboard included the Bloomsday logo and the date of the run.)

“Commuters driving south on Ash street could see the sign over the weekend, and some took to social media to share their shock, saying the sign was ‘tone deaf’ and had racially exclusive undertones,” the newspaper reported.

The outlet quoted Lilac Bloomsday Association spokesperson Bethany Lueck as saying, “We recognize that language can be interpreted in different ways. With that in mind, we’ve decided to update the billboard as the celebration of the 50th Running of Bloomsday campaign continues.”

Was the sign tone deaf? Or did people overreact? Over to you, readers!