The floor, not the ceiling: Moving beyond California’s SB 707 to build real public trust
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COMMENTARY | Key provisions of the state’s Brown Act came into effect this summer, but it should be seen as just the first step on the path to building more trust.
Earlier this summer, key provisions of California's Senate Bill 707, known as the Brown Act, came into effect.
Local public agencies across California are understandably now focused on implementing the new mandates of two-way remote participation, accessible web pages and expanded language translations.
Meeting these new legal stipulations is a significant effort. For stretched city clerks, IT departments and public engagement teams, simply checking these boxes by the deadline is a major achievement. However, while meeting the provisions of the law is now a legal necessity, focusing solely on the legal baseline of the legislation risks missing the opportunity to build real public trust.
The Trust Gap
Opening the digital door is a necessary first step to increasing access, but a portal is not a relationship with residents and stakeholders. Recent research reveals a gap between the efforts of public agencies and the lived experience of the communities they serve.
Across North America, fewer than two in five community members believe their views actually influence local decisions. Even more concerning, 60% believe decisions are already made before a public consultation even begins.
Public appetite for participation remains strong, but while people are showing up, filling out forms and logging into remote meetings, many often leave feeling unheard. This disconnect does not stem from a lack of skill or willingness among public sector engagement experts. Instead, it happens when the connection between public participation and the final outcome remains invisible.
True trust is not built by the technology that lets a resident participate, it’s built by what happens after. When community input disappears into a black box, public skepticism grows. To narrow the trust gap, public bodies must shift their focus from managing the logistics of input to fully engaging people in the process, which includes communicating how their input impacted decisions. Participants need to know their time was respected, their input was weighed and the engagement was meaningful.
Closing the Loop
This is where public agencies can build on their workflows by using engagement data to close the feedback loop. When a public comment is received, whether via a remote stream, an email, an online platform, or an in-person workshop, it shouldn’t exist in isolation. By capturing and analyzing participation data at scale, agencies can transform hundreds of scattered comments into clear, actionable insights.
Instead of spending weeks manually sorting through spreadsheets and notebooks, modern AI-driven data tools allow teams to quickly identify key community themes and geographic trends across large sets of qualitative data.
This efficiency returns valuable time to staff, who can focus on strategic questions: What matters most to this neighborhood? Who is missing from the conversation? How can this feedback directly improve the project layout or budget?
More importantly, a structured approach to engagement data enables true traceability. It allows an agency to provide the community with a clear line of sight from input to outcome.
When the public can see a direct summary of what was heard, what changed because of their feedback, and, just as importantly, what could not change and why, the entire process becomes defensible and transparent–and builds trust with members of the community.
Moving to Visible Impact
Far from being hesitant about modern tools, 93% of engagement practitioners see genuine potential in AI to analyze feedback at scale, identify patterns across complex datasets, and improve accessibility and coordination across complex engagement programs.
The willingness to embrace modern technology is already there, agencies simply need the connected systems to support it, which hopefully legislation like that in California prompts.
Strengthening accessibility and translation requirements ensures that a more representative mix of voices can join the conversation. But the ultimate goal of public engagement is to make better decisions and deliver projects with confidence and trust. So, when implementing new requirements, we must ask ourselves a critical question: are we treating compliance as the ceiling of community engagement or the floor?
By using data to close the loop, public institutions can show residents that their participation is meaningful, not just a legal formality. This legislative action is a great reminder that officials are making legislative changes not just to comply with the law, but to transform community consultation into the trust-building mechanism it’s meant to be.
Alexandra Albert is community engagement practice lead at Open Point.
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