Whether the settlement agreement or the initial contracts are responsible for Levi’s Stadium’s performance suffused nearly every comment of the Santa Clara City Council’s recent discussion of a civil grand jury report.
At a special meeting Wednesday night, the council responded to a civil grand jury report that claims the relationship between the city and the Forty-Niners Management Company (ManCo) — the company that manages non-NFL events at the stadium on behalf of the city — is lopsided.
The report, titled “Outplayed,” claims the contracts between the two are skewed in favor of ManCo. The meeting was the second lengthy meeting the council had to add to its calendar to address yet another grand jury report that took aim at Santa Clara politics.
Most of the back-and-forth boiled down to who bears responsibility for the current deals with the 49ers.
Mayor Lisa Gillmor, who is the only remaining council member from when the contracts were drafted, and ally Council Member Kathy Watanabe claimed that underperformance is due to the settlement agreement the majority agreed on in 2022.
“Within hours after this council majority voted [in favor of the settlement], hundreds of thousands of dollars and ended up millions of dollars, ended up in council and mayoral campaigns for people on this dais,” Gillmor said. “That is how happy they were that this council settled this agreement.”
Council Member Suds Jain kicked off the meeting by, just as he did with the previous report, “Irreconcilable Differences,” specifying the ways he believes the report is biased. Most notably, how the report fails to mention his and Council Member Karen Hardy’s involvement in opposing the stadium and Gillmor and Watanabe’s role in promoting it.
Public commentator Michele Ryan echoed Jain’s sentiments.
Many people pointed out that Gillmor signed the contracts that the civil grand jury believes are so terrible.
Council Member Kevin Park said the settlement was the only way to renegotiate the contracts to make them more equitable.
“This council did a very good job of seeing the problems prior to the settlement, putting those items into the settlement and adjusting the contracts to be beneficial to the city, something that could not have been achieved through arbitration,” he said.
At the outset of the meeting, Gillmor said she wanted to ensure she would “serve the community with dignity and authority,” so she wasn’t going to engage the “pack of lies” or the “falsehoods, fabrications, baseless statements and distortions.”
Watanabe came to Gillmor’s defense.
“She didn’t agree to corruption. None of us agreed to corruption,” she said. “We didn’t agree to wage theft. We didn’t agree to an improper living wage to the workers that were out at the stadium.”
Most of what was at issue was access to, and oversight of, the stadium operations.
City Attorney Glen Googins and City Manager Jovan Grogan, just as the previous night, suggested draft language that they asked the council to consider adopting or revising. Just as the previous report, the language carefully walked a tightrope between divided sensibilities on the council.
Many of the draft responses, chocked full of excessive verbiage, acknowledged the grand jury’s conclusions without ratifying them wholesale.
Access to financial information, an inability to hold ManCo accountable, more thorough enforcement were all sticking points of discussion. The indirect financial impact of the stadium was also a topic of interest.
Understanding the indirect economic impact through revenue such as the city’s hotel tax is important and ongoing, Grogan said. However, looking back at 10 years of such activity isn’t likely to be relevant.
“We should not look back,” Jain said. “We should look forward, and hopefully, it will inform us to better promote or encourage people to spend money here.”
Many of the grand jury’s recommendations are, in some way, already underway within the city. Grogan called many of those adjustments “complex” and “ongoing conversations.”
Council Member Raj Chahal was absent.
The next regularly scheduled meeting is Tuesday, Sept. 10 in the Council Chambers at City Hall, 1500 Warburton Ave. in Santa Clara.
Members of the public can participate in the City Council meetings on Zoom at https://santaclaraca.zoom.us/
