A county procurement office is writing RFP language for a new AI vendor contract and wants public-records obligations to actually be enforceable. What approach best achieves that?

Enforceability comes from contractual terms, not informal assurances, because a contract creates a legal obligation the county can hold the vendor to and cite in disputes, audits, or public-records requests. Writing governance and records-retention requirements directly into the RFP and resulting contract language means the obligation exists in writing from day one and survives changes in vendor personnel or county staff. A verbal assurance from an account manager carries no binding weight; account managers change roles, and spoken commitments are not evidence the county can point to later. Marketing materials describing a general commitment to transparency are promotional language, not contractual terms, and they typically include no specifics about retention periods, formats, or county access rights. Waiting until an actual public-records request arrives to figure out what the vendor must provide is reactive rather than governed, and it risks discovering, only when residents are already asking, that the vendor's system was never built to retain or produce the needed records. A scope caveat: contract language still needs to be specific about retention duration, format, and access mechanisms, since vague contractual language can be nearly as unenforceable as no language at all. A concrete operational check is to have county counsel review the records-retention clause before the RFP is issued, confirming it names concrete deliverables rather than general commitments.