Municipal engagement is shifting from one-way translation to two-way conversation. Residents increasingly expect to ask questions in their language, receive timely answers grounded in official sources, and participate live or asynchronously with confidence that their voice is heard. For clerks, the change is not primarily about adopting new platforms; it is about converting legal and ethical obligations—accessibility, accuracy, transparency—into operational routines and artifacts that are visible to residents.

This paper proposes a resident-centered model that treats multilingual engagement as a managed service spanning live meetings, asynchronous portals, text and voice channels, and records publication. We define service levels (SLOs) for language access, bind conversational outputs to canonical URLs, and insist on exportable logs and open formats so conversations become part of the public record. A layered architecture integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with guardrails for disclosure, privacy, and auditability.

We emphasize governance over novelty. Controls include per-user identity, no shared admin accounts, immutable log retention, community-informed glossaries, and dated corrections notes. Procurement clauses require vendors to provide open artifacts (captions, transcripts, prompts, traces) and to support change-freeze windows during marquee meetings. Training focuses on room-specific golden paths and short drills that teach recovery, not just operation.

The final sections provide a 24‑month roadmap and three scenario outlooks. The thesis is simple: when multilingual engagement is observable, reversible, and attributable, AI assistance scales inclusion without sacrificing trust. The outcome is a more welcoming city hall—one that meets residents where they are, in the language they choose, across the channels they use.