During a Santa Clara City Council meeting last year, Councilmember Kevin Park gestured to a local business owner in the audience and read aloud from the illustrated book All My Friends Are Dead, about a dinosaur who’s still around, even though other dinosaurs are extinct.
But Park altered the text to read “All My Friends Are Termed Out.” The message was menacing. The business owner once had friends on the council. But Park was reminding the business owner that his political allies had left, or would soon leave, the council. Park’s implied threat: Who would protect the business owner moving forward?
Conflict is all too common at city council meetings in California and elsewhere. L.A’s council was discredited by federal corruption investigations and a racist tape. But it may be hard to top Santa Clara’s council for rudeness.
That’s the conclusion of an extraordinary report on the council, “Irreconcilable Differences,” produced in June by the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury. In California, such grand juries of regular citizens convene for a year to investigate local government. The Santa Clara grand jury’s report shows just how bad things can get in our city halls
This report, based on 40 interviews and four years of council meetings, finds that “several Councilmembers have turned public meetings into spectacles by displaying abusive and belittling behavior from the dais towards members of the public; by political grandstanding, pontificating, and digressing from City business; by exhibiting a serious misunderstanding of parliamentary procedures; and by performing outlandish antics, such as reading from a satirical cartoon book.”
This nasty political football is the product of actual football. The San Francisco 49ers relocated to a new home stadium in Santa Clara in 2014. But the 49ers, while winning on the field, have angered many city residents and officials. There have been disputes about stadium financing, traffic, a local soccer field that the 49ers used for parking, and the team’s financial disclosures to the city.
The 49ers responded to local criticism first with litigation, then by spending millions to unseat council members who didn’t toe the line. The 49ers now control a council majority known locally as the “49er Five.” But the team’s power in City Hall has poisoned relationships between the council, community members and city staff.
The new grand jury report is only the latest documentation of the awful dynamic. Two years previously, the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury released a report, “Unsportsmanlike Conduct,” criticizing the council’s “lack of transparency, unethical behavior, and a lack of fiduciary responsibility regarding the Stadium.” Back then, the jury identified “repeated instances of councilmembers behaving acrimoniously and disrespectfully toward each other, City staff and the public… causing severe dysfunction in the City governance.”
Typically, when a county grand jury issues a report about a city, a city council will respond substantively. But the Santa Clara City Council rejected the findings in their entirety, and attacked the 2022 grand jury in conspiratorial tones.
One pro-49ers councilmember, Anthony Becker, was indicted for leaking the report to the 49ers. At this writing, the case is still pending.
Since then, the council’s behavior has gotten worse, the 2024 grand jury report found. The council can’t follow the most basic rules of order, ignoring the gavel when the mayor tries to quiet the room. The council has spent two hours arguing over whether the mayor could send a note on city letterhead. Meanwhile, the budget goes into deficit and infrastructure languishes.
A favorite tactic of the council, and its critics, is to file Public Records Act requests, seeking records of their opponents’ conversations and communications. The city has received as many as 90 public record requests in one day, the grand jury found. The conflict produces meetings that extend well past midnight, low city employee morale, and the discouragement of volunteerism by the general public.
Some councilmembers have suggested the grand jury findings are political, or aimed at the 49ers. But the council has said it will respond to the report by September 10.
Will councilmembers change their behavior? Don’t hold your breath. The report’s most damning finding is its recitation of all the residents who have asked the council to examine its own behavior.
The council ignores these requests, the grand jury report found.
“Under current rules,” says the report, “Councilmembers have the sole authority to examine and police their behavior, a task they have proven themselves unwilling to do.”
Joe Mathews is Connecting California columnist for Zócalo Public Square and the founder of the planetary publication Democracy Local.
