California Government Code Section 54953.4.(e)
2026 Update
On September 18, 2026, the Governor signed into law emergency legislation SB 1187, formally repealing the language translation requirements of SB 707.
As a result, NDC is not planning to update this site with future American Community Survey data (which are updated annually).
The 2024 one-year and 2020-2024 five-year ACS data remain available below, if you are interested in looking up the data for your city.
Please contact us at info@NDCresearch.com if you have any questions about this or if you are interested in updated data for your jurisdiction.
Original Language
California Government Code Section 54953.4(e), also known as SB 707, establishes teleconferencing and remote public meeting requirements for eligible legislative bodies. Under the legislation, “applicable languages” are defined as languages identified in the most recent American Community Survey that are spoken by at least 20% of the applicable population, provided that at least 20% of those speakers in the city or county speak English less than “very well.”
“Eligible legislative body” means any of the following:
- A city council of a city with a population of 30,000 or more.
- A county board of supervisors of a county, or city and county, with a population of 30,000 or more.
- A city council of a city located in a county with a population of 600,000 or more.
To see if your agency meets the law’s definition of “Eligible legislative body,” simply enter your city name in the search box below. If the new rules apply to your city, at the top of the information box that appears it will say “New Requirements Apply” and (also in red) it will list the applicable language(s).
Some cities are just barely within or just barely outside of the statute’s criteria, so the language data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey are also provided in the information box for your information.
To protect against potential plaintiff lawyers using this to search for litigation targets, there is a limit of 10 searches per user in any given 10-minute window.
