The City’s research showed that public trust in Santa Clara was strongest when five other public perceptions were also at their highest levels.

1. The Right People Are at the Table

Decision-making begins by identifying who should be involved.

Major decisions should include:

• Elected decision-makers, Senior staff, and other appropriate staff
• Relevant Council committees with the time and expertise to examine issues in depth
• External experts
• Independent perspectives
• Affected stakeholders
• And the public.

For complex or high-impact decisions, like the Charter Review, the City often hires consultants, or creates structures that match the importance of the issue, including specialized or ad hoc committees or commissions selected through a fair process.

In a City of Trust, public engagement is built into the process early enough to influence outcomes. The public is informed throughout the process, and invited to weigh in before the final decisions are made. When appropriate, the City holds study sessions with public input, and may hold additional meetings separate from the final vote so Council and staff have the opportunity to think about what the public has said. This is one way come up with stronger solution and show deep regard for what the public thinks.

• Understand the issues
• Provide input early in the process
• Influence outcomes
• Identify solutions that may be stronger, do more good and less harm.

5. The Essential Commitments

These are the defining characteristics of a City of Trust:

• Decisions are guided by shared core values and ethical decision-making
• Independent oversight and real accountability ensure the public’s interests come first
• Public participation is meaningful—people are heard and their input makes a difference
• Leadership sets the tone at the top, building a culture of integrity and trust
• Ethics is taken seriously across the organization—so that doing the right thing is expected, supported, part of everyday life, celebrated, and reinforced at every level.

6. A Public Trust Revolution?

The public trust problems Santa Clara is facing are both unique to the City and familiar to communities everywhere.

Public Ethics Is Widely Misunderstood

Most cities do not develop strong public ethics competency unless forced to by scandal or crisis. Part of the problem is that public ethics is widely misunderstood. Many people treat ethics as personal morality—something learned at home involving honesty, kindness, or obeying rules. Governments often reduce ethics to legal compliance, disclosure forms, or avoiding obvious corruption.

But public ethics is not primarily about choosing between right and wrong. It is about responsibly handling conflicts among competing obligations, interests, pressures, and public responsibilities in ways that preserve the public’s trust.

The hardest public decisions rarely involve clear right and wrong choices. More often, decision-makers must choose between:

• Competing public goods
• Fairness and efficiency
• Short-term needs and long-term consequences
• Bad options and worse ones
• Individual Rights and the common good
• Conflicting obligations owed to different groups of people
• Different ways of meeting decision-makers’ fiduciary duties to the public

Those are ethical judgment problems, not simply legal problems.

That is why ethical decision-making requires skill, self-awareness, transparency, meaningful public engagement, independent advice, and systems designed to challenge bias and improve judgment.

Santa Clara’s Unique Governance Environment

Santa Clara’s current decision-making environment makes the challenges especially difficult.

The City is approaching four major decisions that will shape governance, ethics, public accountability, and control of public resources for years to come. Those decisions will occur within an environment shaped by three Civil Grand Jury reports documenting ethics and governance failures; the rise and decline of a once nationally recognized ethics program; weakened or ineffective checks and balances; polarized politics; and widespread disagreement about what ethical leadership and public trust require in practice.

Levi’s Stadium and the Stadium Authority

At the center of many of these pressures is Levi’s Stadium and the Stadium Authority.

Unlike a privately owned stadium, much of the money generated through Stadium Authority operations flows back into maintaining and improving the facility itself: stadium operations, upkeep, turf replacement, public safety costs over the threshold, capital reserves, future equipment replacement, and even tens of millions of dollars reserved for eventual demolition decades from now. In many private stadium arrangements, those obligations would largely belong to the team itself.

The result is a governance environment where public decision-makers oversee a billion-dollar public asset tied to a powerful private tenant with strong financial interests in nearly every major Stadium Authority decision.

At the same time, political action committees associated with the 49ers have spent millions of dollars in independent expenditures to influence Santa Clara elections and help shape the City Council majority. Those expenditures also affect the broader information environment surrounding Stadium Authority issues and public understanding of the City’s relationship with the team.

Whether or not any individual vote is improperly influenced, the combination of concentrated political spending, major financial interests, and repeated Council decisions favorable to the tenant creates significant public trust concerns and makes democratic accountability nearly impossible.

At the same time, the City remains constrained by agreements negotiated years ago under circumstances that multiple Civil Grand Jury reports later criticized. Those agreements continue to shape the City’s options today.

A Weakened Ethics Environment

These structural pressures interact with human and organizational ones.

Ethical concerns may be minimized, treated as political attacks, or applied selectively rather than consistently. Decision-makers may interpret information in ways that protect existing decisions, relationships, or institutional interests. Contrary evidence or uncomfortable analysis may receive limited attention. Senior leadership has not consistently reinforced an organizational culture where ethical decision-making, moral courage, and public trust responsibilities are expected, supported, practiced, and rewarded.

In that kind of environment, “go along to get along” can become easier than asking difficult questions, challenging assumptions, slowing down flawed processes, taking a principled stand, or insisting on stronger public trust standards.

None of these pressures alone determine outcomes.

But together, they create a uniquely difficult environment for public decision-making—one unlike that faced by most California cities.

That is why Santa Clara’s next decisions matter so much.

Santa Clara once demonstrated that ethics and public trust can become part of everyday government practice—not merely aspirational language, but practical skills, expectations, systems, and habits reinforced throughout the organization.

It can do so again.

If Santa Clara chooses to rebuild that kind of culture, the City can again become a role model, a learning community, and a demonstration site for ethical local government.

The Choice for Santa Clara

People are more willing to participate, cooperate, and serve when they trust the integrity and intentions of those leading the City. Public trust makes it easier to solve difficult problems, build lasting partnerships, reduce conflict, and govern effectively. It makes public service more effective, more satisfying, less stressful, and more joyful—for both the public and the people serving it.

That is the promise—and the challenge—of becoming a City of Trust.

What kind of City will Santa Clara choose to become?

Ultimately, that decision rests with the people of Santa Clara. They are the only ones with the political power to change the City’s direction—and to insist on a government worthy of the public’s trust.