The Thinking Behind Public Trust Partners

We’re building something Santa Clara hasn’t seen since 1998 — when the city came together to identify shared values and build an ethics code that exceeded legal minimums and won national recognition. That work created a community of trust. We need to do that work again.

A Community of Practice Bridges Divides

Public Trust Partners is not another partisan echo chamber, where we take pot shots at one another. It is a community of practice — a place where Santa Clara residents of all perspectives work together to restore ethical leadership, good governance, and public trust in our city.

A community of practice is a space where people with different beliefs and values can:

• Listen to one another — really hear perspectives different from our own
• Share and test ideas — propose solutions, challenge assumptions, dialog about different approaches
• Learn together — reaching consensus about practical strategies for ethical governance that work for everyone
• Take collective action — organize around shared concerns despite our differences and act to make things better
• Be hard on ideas, soft on people — engage in vigorous dialog and even debate without personal attacks

The Three Rules

These guide everything we do here — from challenging ideas to supporting one another:

• Golden Rule — Treat others as you want to be treated.
• Diamond Rule — Treat others as they want to be treated.
• Titanium Rule — Treat others the way you treat the people you love when you are at your best.

Imagine the City we could build if we were all striving to be at our best every day.

What We Do Together — and How This Will Grow

What we do together:

• Document and discuss governance issues as they unfold, from multiple perspectives
• Challenge each other’s ideas respectfully — even strongly — without vilifying people
• Develop shared knowledge about our city’s charter, ethics codes, and decision-making processes
• Build practical tools and strategies that help all residents hold leaders accountable
• Support each other in speaking up and staying engaged, regardless of political alignment

What you see here reflects the ideas of a few people as we get started. A community of practice learns and grows organically. New leaders will emerge. Our approaches will develop. We will keep moving toward being at our best every day — just as we advocate for ongoing ethics development among city officials and staff.

About Partisanship

Some people believe this must be a partisan website. It is not. We are, however, passionate advocates for ethical leadership and public trust. We will:

• Question any leader who has fallen over a stumbling block — as we all do. One thing we have in common: we all fall over stumbling blocks and are not always at our best.
• Advocate for skills to overcome those obstacles.
• Celebrate leaders who serve as role models.
• Challenge decisions that do not appear to be in the public’s best interests — regardless of their political alignment.

If you are not convinced, we’d say, “Good for you.” Some distrust is healthy in a representative democracy. Distrust keeps us focused. It helps us be alert to any behavior that is less than us at our best.

The problem is when distrust turns into lack of trust. That’s the problem in Santa Clara now. The people are not seeing any action to indicate that the City is moving in a new, more positive direction.

The City has many projects underway. Staff is doing a remarkable job on so many fronts. But ethical leadership and public trust have not been priorities for at least ten years. Every City decision involves ethics because every decision has the potential to influence the lives of some 130,000 people for good — or not for good. Every decision where the ethics issues are ignored weakens the decision and weakens public trust.

The City can do better.

About Our Own Blind Spots

We all have blind spots and biases we cannot see. We are open to constructive criticism. If you see something here that doesn’t seem fair, email Dr. Shanks directly at drshanks@publictrustnow.com.

This kind of self-examination is part of the work. We have written about what happens when leaders cannot see what everyone else can — and the same question applies to us. Read: When Leaders Can’t See What Everyone Else Can →

Why We Believe This Can Work

Dr. Shanks has spent much of his 30-year consulting career working with groups to find consensus, as he did with Santa Clara from 1998 to 2001. The more divided the group, the more compelling the work of providing the rules and practice for reaching agreement. Santa Clara has the chance to become a role model for this kind of discussion.

Safe, Respectful Participation

You participate using a PEN name — a pseudonym like Soccergrad or Reader25 — to protect your privacy. The Community Standards set clear boundaries: robust debate of ideas is welcome; personal attacks, snark, insults, and unfair judgment are not. If boundaries are crossed, we will work with participants through a repair process to restore respectful dialogue.

The Goal: Rebuilding Public Trust

Few people in city government — elected officials, appointees, or staff — treat ethical leadership and public trust as a current responsibility. Ethics is treated as an add-on, an optional extra, or something we all learned as children and don’t need to revisit.

“Well, we are all adults. We’ve been making ethical decisions since we learned what they were as children. I don’t need ethics training — they’re the ones on the other side who need training.”

The fact is, no one learns public ethics at home. No one learns to recognize conflicts of interest at home. In public life, everyone needs to unlearn some of the ethical behavior we learned at home.

In that world, returning a favor to someone who has done something nice for you is a virtue. Helping a friend’s son or daughter get a city job feels like loyalty — of course you would, that’s what friends do. In private life, those instincts are admirable. In public life, they are conflicts of interest.

The easiest way to damage or destroy public trust is to take action that seems to give unfair preference to someone with whom you have a personal or professional relationship — especially to deep-pocketed donors to whom you feel you owe your election.

The Preamble to the Santa Clara Code of Ethics & Values says it clearly:

“The proper operation of democratic government requires that decision-makers be independent, impartial, and accountable to the people they serve.

“The City of Santa Clara has adopted this Code of Ethics & Values to promote and maintain the highest standards of personal and professional conduct in the City’s government.

“Because we seek public confidence in the City’s services and public trust of its decision-makers, our decisions and our work must meet the most demanding ethical standards and demonstrate the highest levels of achievement in following this code.”

Please take a look at the Community Standards → we will use on a daily basis as we begin our deliberative democracy adventure.