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County officials say outreach boosted Riverside County budget participation to nearly 30,000
Summary
Riverside County officials described a 2024 outreach campaign — plain-language Budget 101 materials, a multilingual survey, evening workshops in every district and community partnerships — that they say increased reported engagement from 17 attendees to roughly 24,000 survey responses plus in-person and telephone comments.
Riverside County officials say a targeted outreach campaign for the 2024 budget process vastly increased public participation, moving from just 17 people at budget hearings to nearly 30,000 total engagements.
An agency official said, "We are home to about 2,400,000 residents," and noted that the county’s size and diversity — about 50% Latino and roughly 35% who speak Spanish at home — required measures beyond traditional online notices. The official and county staff emphasized access barriers such as limited internet and unfamiliarity with smartphones as key reasons for the prior low turnout.
"This campaign was specifically designed to make community participation simple, accessible, and most importantly, meaningful," a staff member said, describing how the county worked with the county CEO’s office, communications and budget teams to shape questions that reflected community priorities. The county also produced a plain-language "Budget 101" guide intended to translate technical financial information into clear terms.
County staff said they used earned media — local news outlets, community publications and radio — and partnered with community organizations to expand reach. "Tollett Legal Center started distributing these hard copies of the survey at their local workshops, at their local office locations throughout the county," a staff member said; staff reported 968 Spanish-language survey responses by the close of the survey.
Officials reported almost 24,000 survey responses overall, plus about 500 in-person comments and input gathered through a telephone town hall. A committee member summarized the outcome: the number of people commenting rose "from 17 to almost 30,000 people." That committee member added that the community’s top spending priorities — health services, human services, public safety and transportation infrastructure — largely mirrored the county’s existing budget allocations.
The Board of Supervisors had tasked the executive office with developing the outreach campaign while the budget was being developed. County officials said the program is intended to continue: "It's gonna become an annual thing that we do every single year here in Riverside County," the committee member said.
The county presented the effort as a shift from one-way communication to two-way conversation, with evening workshops in every board district and Spanish interpreters at sessions. County staff said the county plans to keep the campaign elements in future budget cycles to maintain higher public participation.
Next steps reported in the meeting included formalizing outreach as an annual practice; no formal motion or vote on ordinances or budget adoption was recorded in the transcript.
