02-09-2026 - Agenda Packet City Council - Regular Meeting

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: Polco founded by former Air Force officers who, after working in data and Al roles at top tech companies (Google and Amazon), returned to the public sector with a mission to use technology and data to improve communities around the country. The company's expertise lies in integrating innovative resident engagement technology with large data sets, providing government leaders with a comprehensive understanding of both their resident needs and their programs. Recently, Polco's Al takes this further, by not only providing customers with the information and insight, but now also helping analyze data to draft grant applications and much more. POICO Polco was founded in 2015, NRC in 1994. The combined tearn has been working in the local government spare for 32 years- Polco has 28 employees working from 10 states, our headquarters are in WI: 1241 John Q Harrimons Drive, STE 203 Madison, WI 53717 In 2019, Polco acquired National Research Center (NRC), the largest provider of standardized scientific local government surveys in the country, which had amassed a local government performance data set of thousands of communities over 30 years. NRC's founders and key leaders are still with Polco doing advanced data and survey science. Polco, now together with NRC, is working with more communities than either was prior. In 2021, Polco co-founded GPAL along with University of Wisconsin Madison and Stanford. GPAL is a government performance data and analytics consortium that brings together not only NRC's historical survey data but also virtually every other relevant public sector data set into a ready -to -analyze cloud -based data warehouse. The breadth and depth of that data allows more confident predictions of community trajectories and the ability to begin to isolate the impacts of policies, programs, and contextual factors to answer seminal questions about government performance.This data is now made available to jurisdictions through Polco's Track product. In 2022, Polco acquired Balancing Act, the developer of simulation based engagement technology. Beyond traditional surveys and polls, Balancing Act simulations present constituents the actual tradeoffs their governments face when developing balanced budgets, housing plans, carbon plans, and more. BA also uses budget data to provide constituents their taxpayer receipts. In 2023, Polco began development of Polly, a secure LLM-agnostic multi -agent RAG Al infrastructure to accelerate the breadth, depth, speed, and ease with which Polco could deliver data, analytics, reports, and other critical government workflow elements to public employees. In 2024, Polco doubled down on Al building an Array of Al Agents for public sector operations. Polco's mission remains the same: bring communities together around their most important issues through informative transparent engaging communications, use that and other data together in concert to help leaders make great data informed decisions, and thereby demonstrate great outcomes, accountable governance, build trust, re -energize civic agency, and improve constituent quality of life. NRC FqPAL t�Viscc i�v 1 uarvenily alan ltl lCt ZA polco.us 5 66