Ask Menlo Park a question about trash pickup at 11 p.m. on a Sunday, and you used to just wait until Monday. Not anymore.
The city just launched a new tool for that: the Menlo Park AI chatbot, named Laurel, answers questions about city services around the clock. Residents type a question into the chat window on the city’s website. Laurel pulls the answer from the city’s own records, so nobody has to dig through PDFs or sit on hold.
What the Menlo Park AI Chatbot Does
Laurel takes its name from two local landmarks: the laurel tree native to the area, and Laurel Street, where City Hall sits. The name is a nice touch. The real value is simpler. Parents can check summer camp deadlines at night. Renters can ask about parking permits on a lunch break. Business owners can track down a form without waiting for office hours.
Closing the Language Gap
The bigger win is language access. Laurel answers questions in more than 70 languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Tagalog. Menlo Park has a large Spanish-speaking population. A city hotline that only runs in English during business hours leaves many residents guessing. A chatbot that speaks their language, any time of day, closes a gap that a front-desk clerk working a 9-to-5 shift simply can’t.
City spokesperson Kendra Calvert said Laurel is “performing well” in early testing. The city built the tool on the Citibot platform. It costs roughly $9,900 a year for the core web chat feature. Multilingual support adds $2,100, and an accessibility scan that checks the city’s digital tools against screen readers adds $6,500. That’s a modest line item for a tool built to field thousands of routine questions that would otherwise land on city staff.
Staff time savings matter here too. Every question Laurel answers on its own frees up a city employee for something else. Smaller cities run lean. Even a few extra hours a week lets staff focus on the complicated cases that actually need a human.
Menlo Park’s move fits a wider pattern. Local governments are turning to AI to close service gaps, not to replace judgment calls. Cities have taken a similar approach with AI tools that are cutting housing permit wait times in half. Automation clears the routine work, so staff can focus on the decisions that need a real person.
Tools like Laurel work best alongside efforts to get everyone online in the first place. California’s rural broadband expansion is tackling that same access problem from a different angle.
Menlo Park says wider integration with Apple, Google, and other everyday apps is still ahead. For now, residents get a simple upgrade: a city hall that answers back, in their own language, whenever they need it.
Original reporting: The Almanac
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