Public trust is built when residents and other City stakeholders stay informed, ask difficult questions, expect honest answers, and work together with their local government to shape the community’s quality of life and future.

Santa Clara will soon make some important decisions about ethics and ethical leadership, governance, accountability, transparency, and the City’s direction. The decisions the City makes now will impact everyone who lives and works in Santa Clara for years to come.

The City’s scientific surveys from 2006–2008 found that public trust in Santa Clara is highest when residents experience City government at its best — when people see their government:

• Practice impeccable leadership ethics
• Conduct honorable political campaigns
• Display deep regard for what the public thinks
• Provide superb City services
• Deliver excellent quality of life.

The four major decisions now facing Santa Clara — including City Charter reform, ethics code reform, ethics oversight, and the Stadium “put right” — will directly affect each of these foundations of public trust.

As best we can determine, the City has not recently measured public trust or conducted scientific public surveys about the other five areas.

Nor, as the Civil Grand Jury found, has the City adequately surveyed employees regarding workplace culture, ethical behavior, leadership conduct, job satisfaction, or related concerns essential to job satisfaction, organizational health, and public trust.

These kinds of assessments should be conducted regularly by reputable outside organizations so the results are credible, reliable, and useful both to City government and to the public.

Throughout this site, we argue that Santa Clara needs meaningful course corrections to these and many other decisions  so they strengthen, rather than weaken, public trust.

This website is about more than criticizing current leadership, revisiting old controversies, or simply solving individual problems.  It is also not about trying to recreate the Santa Clara of 25 years ago.

Instead, reflecting honestly on both the rise and fall of ethical leadership and public trust in Santa Clara can point the way toward a broader and more hopeful vision: Santa Clara as a City of Trust.

In a City of Trust:

• Residents and government work together to strengthen public trust and civic life in small matters and large ones,
• Difficult issues are addressed honestly and constructively,
• Ethical standards are visible, meaningful, and consistently practiced,
• Accountability is seen as an opportunity to present evidence that city officials and staff fulfilled their promises and are deserving of public trust,
• Leaders work hard for the public’s best interests over all others, discuss conflicts or apparent conflicts of interest, and resolve them,
• Residents believe their concerns are heard and respected,

A City of Trust takes responsibility for its mistakes. It is a City where people can work through difficult issues honestly, ethically, intelligently, and constructively — and build a stronger future together.

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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 (p. 18).

 

                               — Jim Wallis, The Soul of Politics (1996)

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We have identified six ways residents and other Santa Clara stakeholders can help that vision become a reality.

Taken together, these efforts can:

• Improve public decisions,
• Identify ethical issues before they become larger problems,
• Surface overlooked issues and community needs,
• Encourage stronger and more courageous leadership,
• Contribute to better and more broadly-supported solutions,
• Create consensus around important civic priorities,
• Strengthen responsibility for the people's best interests,
• Improve quality of life,
• And rebuild public trust.

To remain involved with Public Trust Now (PTN), please choose one or more of the following: