Join host Will Jarvis as he sits down with Jamie Christensen, founder of Civic Vanguard, a local government software company focused on geographic information systems. Jamie shares his nearly 30-year journey in GIS and local government technology, discusses how AI is enabling a reimagined "digital counter" experience for citizens interacting with their local governments, explores the misaligned incentives in government software procurement and how AI is disrupting legacy vendor lock-in, and outlines his vision for agentic AI tools that orchestrate GIS workflows across localities nationwide.

• 00:00 - Introduction and Jamie Christensen's background in GIS and local government technology
• 02:47 - How AI and LLMs are transforming spatial information and the ability to get answers
• 05:30 - Founding Civic Vanguard: Reinventing the local government "counter" experience with AI
• 10:05 - What's gone wrong with state and local government software: misaligned incentives and vendor lock-in
• 12:50 - How AI disrupts legacy software economics: lower costs, easier migration, faster innovation
• 16:50 - Free tools and lead magnets: Civic Vanguard's Compass product and no-cost implementation model
• 20:30 - Building trust and empathy with local government clients through content and partnership
• 23:30 - Why founder-led companies are best positioned to navigate the AI transition
• 25:45 - Civic Vanguard's growth plans: expanding beyond Virginia and building agentic GIS tools
• 28:15 - Where to find Jamie Christensen online and closing thoughts

Join host Will Jarvis as he sits down with Robbe Demey, a statistician at Valuebase visiting from Belgium, to explore why property tax matters from both philosophical and economic efficiency perspectives. The conversation covers the Georgist case for land value taxation, the dire state of property tax in Belgium where valuations haven't been updated since 1975, and the persistent challenge of vertical equity in mass appraisal models. Robbe Demey also dives into how cross-validation and ensemble modeling techniques are pushing the frontier of property tax assessment, and what it would take to fix property tax across Europe.

• 00:00 – Introduction and welcome with Robbe Demey, a Valuebase statistician visiting from Belgium
• 01:30 – Why property tax matters: the philosophical fairness argument and economic efficiency of land value taxation
• 03:50 – Natural resources, property rights, and the philosophical case for taxing land versus labor and capital
• 06:00 – Land, violence, and the Georgist proposal for peace through fair resource distribution
• 08:45 – Land reform lessons from Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Asia — and why land value tax is a better mechanism
• 11:20 – The state of property tax in Belgium: outdated 1975 valuations, second-toilet quirks, and government secrecy
• 14:30 – What it would take to fix Belgian property tax through courts, better valuation, and public support
• 16:30 – EU tax policy, VAT coordination, and why property tax works best at the local level
• 17:30 – Vertical equity in property tax: why mass appraisal models systematically overtax low-value and undertax high-value properties
• 22:45 – Cross-validation and holdout sets: why rigorous model testing is essential and underused in the industry
• 27:15 – The frontier of mass appraisal: better locational data, ensemble models, and the wisdom of crowds approach
• 31:30 – How to fix property tax in Europe: reducing income taxes, rallying support, and convincing landlords everyone benefits

Join host Will Jarvis as he walks through practical, hands-on ways assessors can use free AI tools to improve their cost approach valuations. In this solo episode, Will demonstrates how tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and ValPal can be used to extract market depreciation from sales data, build effective age rubrics, standardize condition ratings, generate taxpayer-friendly explanations, and run ratio study checks — all with paste-ready prompts attendees can take back to their offices immediately.

• 00:00 - Introduction and overview of the session on using free AI tools for the cost approach
• 02:22 - Why the cost approach breaks down: depreciation tables, effective ages, and condition ratings
• 04:44 - How time constraints — not lack of knowledge — keep these inputs from being maintained
• 07:00 - The free AI toolkit in 2026: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and ValPal compared
• 10:15 - Ground rules for using AI safely: stripping identifiers, verifying outputs, and checking IT policy
• 13:20 - The prompt pattern every example follows: role, data, task, and proof
• 16:30 - Extracting market depreciation from your own sales in one prompt, with a live Florida county example
• 20:00 - Effective age: replacing gut feel with a written rubric and using AI vision on field photos
• 23:30 - Condition ratings: running outlier scans and drafting a standardized field guide with AI
• 26:30 - Explainability: generating plain-English cost approach explanations for property owners
• 28:00 - Closing the loop: running ratio study checks with IAAO formulas via AI
• 30:00 - The 30-minute weekly routine, common failure modes to avoid, and concrete next steps