About Us

What Is This Site All About?

Public Trust Now is an independent, nonpartisan initiative focused on ethical leadership, democratic self-governance, meaningful public engagement, and public trust in local government.

For the foreseeable future, our work is focused on the City of Santa Clara, California.

We examine public decisions through the lenses of ethics and public trust, report our findings to the community, encourage informed public dialogue, and work with residents to develop morally imaginative solutions that better serve the people of Santa Clara.

Why Santa Clara Matters

Twenty-five years ago, Santa Clara became a national model for ethical local government.

City leaders, residents, commissioners, and staff worked together to build an award-winning ethics program centered not merely on rules or legal compliance, but on values, public trust, democratic participation, and ethical leadership.

The underlying idea was simple but ambitious:

A community should be able to identify the values it shares, publicly articulate them, and intentionally organize its institutions and public life around living those values together.

At the time, much of this remained theoretical.

Santa Clara became one of the places where those ideas were tested in practice.

The goal was never simply to create rules.

The goal was to help create a civic culture where ethical leadership, meaningful public engagement, democratic self-governance, and public trust became part of the City’s everyday life.

That work drew upon many influences, including the Jesuit educational tradition, the resurgence of “common good” thinking in philosophy and public life, and Jim Wallis’ vision of politics as “the discourse of our common life.”

One passage from Wallis’ The Soul of Politics became especially influential:

“We’ve all seen how politics can reflect our worst values of selfishness, greed, divisiveness, fear, and power. Yet we long to see how politics could reflect our best values of compassion, community, diversity, hope, and service. Reconnecting politics to our best values is now the most important task of political life.”

Santa Clara’s ethics work attempted to take that challenge seriously.

The Law Is the Floor, Not the Ceiling

One idea profoundly shaped the philosophy behind Santa Clara’s ethics work.

In 1992, shortly after becoming Executive Director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Dr. Thomas Shanks attended a lecture at Hastings College of the Law given by California Supreme Court Associate Justice Ming Chin.

Justice Chin began by holding up a thick volume of California’s ethics laws governing attorneys.

Then he asked the audience:

“If you followed every ethics law in this book, would that make you an ethical lawyer?”

The room fell silent.

Finally, Justice Chin answered his own question:

“No, it would not. The law is the floor, not the ceiling, when it comes to ethics.”

That distinction became central to Santa Clara’s ethics philosophy.

Breaking the law almost always damages or destroys public trust, as Santa Clara saw in the Anthony Becker perjury case and the Civil Grand Jury leak investigation.

But cities do not earn public trust simply by obeying the law.

No city stands up at the end of the day and proudly announces:

“We followed the law today.”

That is an expectation, not an achievement.

In some cases, even fully legal conduct can seriously damage public trust. Independent expenditures, for example, may comply with campaign finance law while still creating the appearance — or reality — that powerful interests exercise disproportionate influence over public decision-making.

To earn public trust, democratic governments must do far more than simply follow the law.

They must strive to act at their best in their dealings with one another and with the public:

  • honestly,
  • fairly,
  • transparently,
  • respectfully,
  • courageously,
  • and in ways that demonstrate genuine stewardship of the public’s money and the public's trust.

How Santa Clara's Ethics Program Began

The origins of Santa Clara’s ethics program were surprisingly simple.

One day in the late 1990s, Councilmember Aldyth Parle walked into Dr. Shanks’ office and said:

“On the Council, we talk about ethics all the time, but we never talk about it as ethics.”

At the time, the City’s ethics ordinance was largely a list of prohibitions periodically reviewed, updated, and returned to a file cabinet.

“There must be a better way,” she said.

That conversation became the beginning of Santa Clara’s groundbreaking ethics program.

Council Member Parle soon had herself appointed chair of the City’s Ethics Ordinance Committee — a broad public committee that included representatives from City commissions, Council members, residents, staff, and community participants.

Instead of beginning with rules and punishments, participants began with a different question:

When we are at our best earning the public’s trust, how do we act?

Over time, City officials, commissioners, staff, and residents answered that question together.

The resulting Code of Ethics & Values described Santa Clara at its best as:

  • Ethical,
  • Professional,
  • Service-oriented,
  • Fiscally responsible,
  • Organized,
  • Communicative,
  • Collaborative,
  • Progressive.

Within those values were more specific commitments:

  • Honesty,
  • Respect,
  • Fairness,
  • Dependability,
  • Integrity,
  • Moral courage,
  • Accountability,
  • Treating people with dignity.

The goal was not perfection.

The goal was to create a shared civic language describing what trustworthy government should look like in practice — both publicly and privately, individually and organizationally.

Drawing heavily from the groundbreaking character education work of Brother Steve Johnson, S.M., at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Dr. Shanks adapted for cities and public institutions methods originally developed with teachers and students.

Brother Steve helped pioneer values-based consensus ethics codes in schools by asking educators, students, and communities not simply what rules they wanted to enforce, but what values they wanted to live and what those values “looked like” and “did not look like” in everyday practice.

Santa Clara adapted those same ideas for public life.

The people expected to live the Code helped write it.

That changed everything.

Instead of ethics being experienced as rules imposed from above, the Code became something participants collectively created, debated, refined, and ultimately owned together.

The process was consensus-based.

For nearly two years, committee members worked through disagreements word by word, value by value, behavior by behavior.

From the beginning, Dr. Shanks told participants that when the work was finished, each person in the room would be asked individually whether they could live with every word in the document. If even one person said no, the committee would continue working.

At the final meeting, every participant answered:

“Yes, I can.”

For many involved, it was one of the most powerful civic experiences of their lives.

What made the process work was not simply the mechanics of consensus.

Participants learned to stay in difficult conversations long enough to truly listen to one another, understand the concerns underneath disagreement, and keep working together until people felt heard and respected well enough to move forward together.

Consensus did not emerge from pressure or force.

It emerged from participation, reflection, mutual respect, shared ownership, and a commitment to the best interests of the community.

City line staff later became deeply involved after some employees expressed concern that they hade been left out of the ethics conversations. Working with City Manager Jennifer Sparacino and Deputy City Manager Carol McCarthy, Dr. Shanks helped create a “Make It Real Committee” made up of line staff from throughout the organization.

Those employees became critical contributors to translating ethical values into everyday organizational practice.

For many City employees, ethics stopped being an abstract policy and became part of how the City understood itself and its responsibilities to the public.

Ethics as Everyday Practice

From the beginning, the larger goal was to help integrate ethical reflection, values-based decision-making, respectful dialogue, and public responsibility into everyday organizational and civic life.

Over the years, Dr. Shanks and his colleagues at the Markkula Center helped develop practical ethics frameworks designed to make ethical reflection accessible and usable for ordinary people, organizations, and public officials confronting real-world problems.

Among the best known were:

To help keep ethics in mind, Dr. Shanks encourages people to spend five or ten minutes each day in reflection — either at night while winding down for bed or in the morning over a cup of coffee — taking stock of the previous day.

The goal is not guilt or perfection.

The goal is building the habit of ethical reflection into everyday life — both to celebrate a day well lived and to identify stumbling blocks and the skills needed to keep them from happening again.

The “Five Questions” became widely used in workshops, classrooms, organizations, and community programs — and even appeared on coffee mugs.

They asked:

  • Did I practice any virtues today — honesty, respect, integrity, courage, compassion?
  • Did I do more good than harm?
  • Was I fair, treating people equally except where need or merit required otherwise?
  • Did I respect people’s rights and fulfill my responsibilities as a human being, professional, and public servant?
  • Was my community better because I was part of it?
  • Was I better because of my community?

These questions translate major ethical traditions — virtue ethics, justice and fairness, rights and responsibilities, consequentialist thinking, and the common good — into practical daily reflection.

The goal was to make ethics practical and helpful.

Not just for philosophers or lawyers, but for students, residents, managers, healthcare workers, teachers, public officials, and ordinary people trying to live and lead responsibly within families, communities, and institutions.

What Happened?

Over the past decade, successive Councils and senior City leaders weakened, dismantled, ignored, or abandoned much of Santa Clara’s ethics infrastructure — often without public discussion, resident participation, or voter approval.

City leaders eliminated or weakened major parts of the City’s ethics and public trust framework, including independent ethics advice, ethics training efforts, public engagement programs, campaign ethics initiatives, and the public accountability system.

Many City leaders increasingly reduced ethics to legal compliance, treated it as a political weapon, or dismissed it as optional rather than foundational to trustworthy democratic governance.

At the same time, City leaders repeatedly rejected calls for independent ethics oversight, argued incorrectly that the Governance and Ethics Committee adequately performed that role, and limited meaningful public participation by moving much of the real decision-making into staff processes and Council subcommittees before the public was invited to comment.

Between 2022 and 2024, three Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury reports documented serious concerns about governance, ethics, leadership, and public trust in Santa Clara.

Among their findings:

  • The Council majority “vote in a manner that is favorable to the team.” — Unsportsmanlike Conduct, 2022
  • Council behavior reflected “deep divisions, rivalry, and routine disrespect” that damaged governance and public trust. — Irreconcilable Differences, 2024
  • The City and Stadium Authority “relinquished its power to the 49ers over the last decade” while “taking a passive role in its oversight duties.” — Outplayed, 2024

Taken together, the reports described more than a few bad choices or Council disagreements.

They described the erosion of an ethical civic culture Santa Clara City officials and Senior staff had once worked hard to build.

Why Public Trust Now Exists

Santa Clara now faces a series of decisions that will shape the City’s governance, civic culture, accountability, and public trust for decades.

Those decisions will affect:

  • residents,
  • neighborhoods,
  • public participation,
  • elections,
  • future leadership,
  • and whether Santa Clara rebuilds the kind of ethical civic culture it once worked hard to create.

PublicTrustNow exists because democratic self-government depends on informed, engaged residents willing to participate in those decisions before they are made for them and without them.

We believe ethical government is possible.

We believe public ethics is not merely about avoiding scandal or following the law.

Public ethics is about how governments responsibly handle conflicts of interest, institutional pressures, competing obligations, difficult decisions, power, accountability, stewardship, their communities, and public trust.

At its best, ethical public leadership explains not only:

  • What decision was made, but:
  • Why it was the right thing to do for the people,
  • How competing interests and harms were considered,
  • What values guided the decision,
  • How the process strengthened public trust and democratic legitimacy, or needed to change to do better the next time.

About Dr. Tom Shanks

Dr. Thomas Shanks is a Stanford-trained social scientist and communication scholar, a Jesuit-trained ethicist and educator, and an ethics consultant specializing in public policy, public trust, organizational development, and executive leadership.

He was a Jesuit for thirty-two years and spent twenty-five years as a faculty member, administrator, and ethics leader at Santa Clara University.

For more than thirty years, Dr. Shanks has worked as an ethics consultant, educator, facilitator, and advisor in virtually every sector of society, including local government, higher education, healthcare, nonprofit organizations, community organizations, and corporations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Dr. Shanks founded Santa Clara University’s undergraduate Department of Communication in 1985 and later served as department chair and Senior Associate Dean of Arts & Sciences.

He was also a founding member and chair of the governing board of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, served as the Center’s Executive Director from 1992 to 1999, and later continued there as Director of Business Ethics & Public Policy Programs and Senior Fellow.

From 1998 to 2015, Dr. Shanks served as Santa Clara’s on-call professional ethicist through Thomas Shanks Consulting and later The Ethics Company.

In 1999, the San Jose Mercury News named Dr. Shanks one of the “Millennium 100,” approximately one hundred people over the past 100 years who "helped to make Silicon Valley what it is today."  The newspaper wrote:

“As Executive Director (of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University) from 1992-1999, Shanks elevated the Center into the region’s standard bearer for teaching the value of ethical conduct – not only in high technology, but also in the health industry, government, banking, public service and other disciplines.”

Much of the ethics and public trust work described on this site emerged from collaborations with Santa Clara residents, City officials, staff members, educators, students, community leaders, and colleagues over several decades.

Public Trust Now is, in part, an effort to honor the many people who worked hard to make Santa Clara a model for ethical local government — especially Aldyth Parle, Jennifer Sparacino, Carol McCarthy, and the generations of residents, staff members, commissioners, and public officials who believed ethical leadership and public trust mattered.

As Aldyth Parle often urged Dr. Shanks:

“Stick with it.”

And he did.

And he is.

What Happens Next

Santa Clara now faces a series of decisions that will shape the City’s civic culture, governance, accountability, and public trust for decades.

Those decisions will affect not only City Hall, but residents, neighborhoods, elections, public participation, and the kind of community Santa Clara becomes.

The City can continue reducing ethics to legal compliance, limiting meaningful public engagement, and weakening independent oversight.

Or it can rebuild the deeper culture of ethical leadership, democratic participation, public accountability, and public trust that earlier generations of residents, staff members, commissioners, and public officials worked hard to create.

Public Trust Now exists because democratic self-government depends on informed, engaged residents willing to participate before decisions are made for them and without them.

What kind of City will Santa Clara choose to become?

That decision ultimately belongs to the people of Santa Clara.