TL;DR

Cities are throwing legal and procedural “error codes.” I function like an OBD-II scanner: I stress-test meeting rules (public comment, invocations, viewpoint neutrality), pull the diagnostics, and flag risk early—quietly, with city attorneys—before it becomes litigation or public spectacle.

Most cities don’t fail because of bad intentions.
They fail because no one stress-tests the system before it’s put under pressure.

That’s where I come in.

I’m Chaz Stevens, and I don’t do warm and fuzzy. I don’t do politics. I don’t do performative reform. What I do—very well—is identify where municipal systems break before those failures turn into litigation, headlines, or federal court exhibits.

Municipal Code Is Just Legacy Software

I’m an old-school programmer. NASA era. Back when debugging meant reading the whole damn system, not guessing.

Municipal code is no different.

It’s legacy software written by committees, patched over decades, maintained by people who assume no one will ever run it edge-to-edge. That assumption used to hold.

It doesn’t anymore.

AI, automation, and professional pressure-testers (like me) remove institutional slack. Everything gets read. Everything gets compared. Every inconsistency starts throwing codes.

Think OBD-II, Not a Full Engine Rebuild

This work is often misunderstood, so let’s be precise.

I am not here to rewrite your charter.
I am not here to redesign your ordinances.
I am not here to “fix” your politics.

I’m the OBD-II scanner.

I plug in.
I pull the diagnostic codes.
I tell you where the risk lives.

If your system were already clean, it wouldn’t be throwing errors.

Why You Don’t See These Problems Internally

This isn’t an indictment of city staff or attorneys. It’s structural.

You can’t effectively stress-test a system you helped design. Blind spots are baked in. Incentives discourage adversarial review. And no internal memo ever says, “Here’s where we’d lose a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 claim.”

I can surface those failure modes quickly because I come from outside the system—and because I’ve already litigated, trained on, and publicly exposed them.

I’ve stress-tested invocation policies, public-comment frameworks, and CLE structures for viewpoint discrimination. In some cases, it takes minutes to identify exposure that would cost a city years.

Quiet Fixes Beat Public Theater

Here’s the part cities care about most—and should.

This work is meant to happen quietly, behind the scenes, and with your attorneys.

Because once these issues go public, they don’t stay controlled. Gadflies, pro se litigants, and opportunists take the same diagnostic output and run it straight into microphones and court filings.

That helps no one.

My first approach is always remediation without humiliation. Fix the issue. Reduce risk. Improve process. Make the city stronger without turning it into a spectacle.

That’s not leverage.
That’s risk management.

Why I Don’t Offer “Solutions as a Service”

A common suggestion is that I should also prescribe fixes—or hire former city attorneys to do so.

That misses the point and bloats the scope.

Once I start designing solutions, I inherit liability, politics, and ownership. I stop being a diagnostic instrument and become a co-author of the system. That’s not my role, and it undermines the value I bring.

Cities already have lawyers.
They need better diagnostics.

The “Catch Me If You Can” Problem

There’s a reason governments sometimes hire the people who used to outsmart them.

The system didn’t fail because it was malicious.
It failed because it was never tested this way.

My work exists to surface those truths early—when they’re cheap, fixable, and quiet.

The Bottom Line

I don’t break cities.
I show them where they’ll break if someone else tries.

You can fix it quietly with your lawyers now, or you can explain it publicly later.

Your call.

Ready to Stress-Test Before It’s Too Late?

If you’re a city attorney, risk manager, or elected official who wants fewer surprises and stronger systems, this is the work.

No theatrics.
No hostage-taking.
Just diagnostics, clarity, and control.

Stop guessing. Start testing.

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