In this three-part series, we'll take a closer look at these efforts and the impact made.
Marin County
Place: 1st
Population category: 250,000 to 499,999
Marin County earned a first-place spot in this year’s survey for its thoughtful and innovative applications of technology. The county is no stranger to doing hard and innovative things without breaking the bank. Marin’s Digital Accelerator initiative is a perfect example of this sort of ingenuity. The grassroots effort was launched to remove unnecessary bureaucracy and improve services delivered through the Community Development Agency. The 90-day sprint was facilitated by a group of experts across the regional government and focused on tailoring the existing Infor system into a single source of truth, and tools that improve how county websites are built and accessed.
Artificial intelligence is also playing a part in government service delivery with the implementation of a new workflow that allows the Department of Finance to examine historic land deeds to collect property tax classification errors. The work was completed in only two weeks at a cost of around $40 but has yielded significant savings in staff time while improving accuracy.
In late 2025, the Health and Human Services Department created an automated data integration pipeline framework to replace the fragmented, manual data processes used to extract information across siloed systems. The changes have resulted in greater efficiency, better accuracy and improved service to constituents.
Where cybersecurity is concerned, Marin has taken an aggressive approach to protecting its systems following a substantial incident at the Marin Housing Authority. It has since invested in new capabilities including incident response and cyber recovery planning, cybersecurity training, multifactor authentication, cloud and endpoint security, and more.
Placer County
Place: 6th
Population category: 250,000 to 499,999
IT in Placer County, Calif., is focused on supporting technology initiatives across county agencies and departments through a collaborative governance and business relationship management model. One way the county is supporting these partnerships is by integrating business relationship management responsibilities into the assistant CIO role to support ongoing engagement. This change enabled IT staff to align with departments in solving challenges and securely modernizing technology.
Placer has modernized its digital experience by implementing Invoice Cloud, a fully integrated online payment platform, to support residents’ self-service access. And the usage metrics indicate its impact: Nearly 58 percent of billed customers have registered for online access. The county also created a secure and automated Custody Information and Reentry Support System, replacing a manual process that relied on shared drives and spreadsheets to manage custody data. County officials within Information Security Services are strengthening security and disaster preparedness across departments and with third-party vendor partnerships.
The county’s AI strategy is led by the IT Department and governed through the IT Steering Committee, enabling departmental AI adoption following a proposal review process to ensure the use case is feasible and compliant with security standards. AI implementations include an AI-powered public assistant, “Ask Placer,” and a transcription platform called Closure AI for the District Attorney’s Office. The county is adopting the Snowflake AI Data Cloud as a unified data platform to reduce silos and enable faster insight for decision-makers.
*The Digital Counties Survey is conducted by the Center for Digital Government, part of e.Republic, Industry Insider — California's parent company.
