Exercise 1: Email Your City Council
Writing to an elected official sounds simple until you sit down to do it. Who do you even contact? What ward and district do you live in? Does that matter? This exercise walks you through the whole process — and uses AI at each step to make it easier.
By the end, you'll have a draft email addressed to the right person, ready to send.
Step 1: Find your ward and district
Heads up — this step may not work perfectly, and that's the point.
Golden organizes its city council by both wards and districts. Figuring out which one you're in requires matching your specific address against boundary maps — the kind of geospatial lookup that AI struggles with even when it can see the city's website. The information exists online, but it's often buried in PDFs, map tools, or structured data that AI can't easily parse.
Try the prompt below and see what happens. You might get a confident, correct answer. You might get a confident, wrong one. This is one of AI's genuine weak spots: complex information retrieval that requires reasoning about geography or official records rather than finding text on a page.
Use this prompt — paste your address into the field and send it to an AI tool with web browsing:
Prompt
Go to https://www.cityofgolden.gov and help me find out which city council ward and district I live in. My address is [your address].
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot can all browse the web when you give them a URL. Try it — then read on.
When that doesn't work — reframe the question
If AI gave you a wrong answer, a vague one, or just admitted it couldn't figure it out, try a different approach. Instead of asking AI to look up your ward and district, ask it to tell you how to find it yourself:
Prompt
I live in Golden, Colorado and need to find out which city council ward and district my address falls in. I tried the city website but couldn't figure it out. Can you tell me where to find a ward and district map or lookup tool — either on https://www.cityofgolden.gov or somewhere else?
This is a useful shift in strategy. When AI can't reliably retrieve a specific fact, ask it to point you to the right resource instead. "How do I find X?" often works when "What is X?" doesn't — because AI is better at knowing where information lives than at reading boundary maps or official records accurately.
Why not just ask AI who your council member is?
You could ask an AI assistant "who is my Golden city council member?" and it might give you a name. But it also might be wrong — and confidently so.
AI models have a training cutoff date. Everything the model knows was frozen at a specific point in time — often 6 to 18 months before you're using it. Elections happen. Council members change. If you ask an AI about local government officials without giving it a current source, it's working from memory that may be months or years out of date.
Giving it a website URL tells it to look up the actual current information rather than guess from training data. This is one of the most practical habits you can build with AI: when accuracy matters, point it at a source.
Step 2: Find your rep and draft your email
Now put AI to work on two things at once. Select your ward and district and pick a topic — the AI will look up your current council member on the city website, then draft an email to them in a single pass.
This is multi-step reasoning in action. You're asking the AI to do two things in sequence: (1) look up a fact from a live source, and (2) use that fact to complete a task. A single well-constructed prompt can handle both — you don't need to break it into separate conversations.
Prompt
Go to https://www.cityofgolden.gov and find the current Golden City Council members for [ward and district]. Once you have their name and contact email, draft a brief, respectful email from me to those council members about [topic]. Address them by name, use a warm but professional tone, and end with a specific ask. Keep it under 200 words.
Once you have a draft, review the name and email the AI found — spot-check them against the city website to make sure they're current.