What $10 Million in 49ers Political Spending Has Bought in Santa Clara
Across three election cycles, independent expenditure committees funded by the team have spent $10 million to elect the Council that now decides every dispute between the team and the city. We look closely at one race in 2022 to understand what money buys in 2026.
10 million dollars.
That is how much political action committees, funded by the San Francisco 49ers, have spent across three election cycles — 2020, 2022, and 2024 — to elect candidates they wanted on the Santa Clara City Council and to defeat the candidates running against them. The money went through “independent expenditure” committees, which can spend unlimited amounts of money on campaign expenses in any election — as long as they do not coordinate directly with the candidates or their campaigns.
To date, this money has secured the elections of five (of seven) seats, a super majority, on the Council and the Stadium Authority, a “separate and distinct” legal entity designed to protect the general fund. But the decision-makers for this separate entity are the Mayor and City Council; the Executive Director is the City Manager; Agency Counsel is the City Attorney. These two Boards meet concurrently in the same city council meeting. During a meeting, It is often difficult to tell which of their two hats these people are wearing.
The “Level the Playing Field” Program That Does the Opposite
Before 2020, the City established its Voluntary Campaign Expenditure program, where candidates would pledge to spend no more than a fixed amount ($29,600 for district elections in 2026) on the campaigns they would run. The City intended this program to level the playing field so those who did not receive financial support from deep pocketed developers and wealthy donors could compete with those who did.
Here is another consequence of the Council and Staff’s decision to ignore ethics issues and to dismantle the ethics programs that made the City a national model from 1998 to about 2013: the voluntary expenditure program is now unfair and imposes a burden on the opponents of 49er candidates.
The reason? Independent expenditures don’t count toward the cap. Opponents can spend only $29,600; 49er candidates can spend the same amount of money on their candidate-led campaigns, and then stand back and watch as the 49ers PACS conduct independent campaigns of such magnitude that the opponents’ message is almost completely lost.
This is the fourth consecutive election where the City has conducted this fundamentally unfair and harmful program. On April 7, 2026, the Council approved the spending limits for 2026 as a consent item that is designed to have no discussion, unless someone pulls the item out of the consent calendar. No one did.
Nothing gets onto a Council/Stadium Authority agenda without approvals from Senior Staff. The same is true for the consent calendar. Ultimately the City Manager signs off on the agenda.
The chart below shows what the asymmetry looks like in a single race. In the 2022 District 3 election, the team’s committees spent $1,125,142 against Christian Pellecchia — $684,173 supporting his opponent Karen Hardy, and $440,969 attacking Pellecchia directly. Both candidates had signed Santa Clara’s voluntary spending pledge, limiting their own campaigns to about $29,000. Only one of them faced opposition from a million-dollar outside committee.
Five Spending Campaigns
- 2010 — Building the stadium. The team spent $4.3 million on Measure J, the ballot measure that created the Stadium Authority and gave them permission to build Levi’s Stadium on Santa Clara public land. And lease The stadium opened in 2014.
Disputes between the team and the city over rent, revenue sharing, and operating costs began almost immediately and have produced lawsuits and tens of millions of dollars in disagreement ever since. Every one of those disputes is decided, eventually, by the Santa Clara City Council, sitting as the Stadium Authority Board. - 2018 — Keeping the election system small. The team and team owner Jed York personally spent $630,000 to defeat Measure C. Measure C would have changed Santa Clara’s elections from six small districts back to three larger districts. The team opposed it for a specific reason: in small districts of about 12,000 registered voters each, $1 million in independent expenditure spending can reach every voter many times. In larger districts, the same money would be spread thinner and would be less effective. By defeating Measure C, the team kept the small-district system in place — the system in which its later spending on candidates would work best.
2020, 2022, and 2024 — Electing the Council. Once the stadium was built and the election system was set, the team began spending heavily to elect candidates to the Santa Clara City Council. The candidates the team’s money supported also serve on the Stadium Authority Board — meaning they decide every dispute between the city and the team. Across three election cycles, the team’s committees have spent approximately $10 million in this way.
The chart below shows what that spending looks like in a single race. In the 2022 District 3 election, 49ers-funded committees spent $1,125,142 against Christian Pellecchia: $684,173 supporting his opponent Karen Hardy, and $440,969 attacking Pellecchia directly. Pellecchia, who had signed Santa Clara’s voluntary spending pledge, was outspent by 38 to 1. Both candidates’ own campaigns were limited to the same legal budget. Only one of them faced opposition from a million-dollar outside spending committee.
# Two Voters, Same Neighborhood, Different Elections ### How $10 million in 49ers political spending across three election cycles has shaped Santa Clara’s City Council — and what residents can do about it before 2026. — The headline number is **$10 million.** That is how much money committees funded by the San Francisco 49ers have spent across three election cycles — 2020, 2022, and 2024 — to elect candidates they wanted on the Santa Clara City Council and to defeat the candidates running against them. The money was spent through “independent expenditure” committees, which can spend any amount in any election as long as they do not coordinate directly with the candidates they are helping. In a city where each Council candidate is allowed to spend only about $29,000 of their own campaign money on a district race, the 49ers’ $10 million has been spent against opponents who, by law, could each spend only a tiny fraction of that. Each of these spending campaigns made the next one possible. Here is how the sequence built up over fifteen years. **2010 — Building the stadium.** The team spent $4.3 million on Measure J, the ballot measure that gave them permission to build Levi’s Stadium on Santa Clara public land. The stadium opened in 2014. Disputes between the team and the city over rent, revenue sharing, and operating costs began almost immediately and have produced lawsuits and tens of millions of dollars in disagreement ever since. Every one of those disputes is decided, eventually, by the Santa Clara City Council, sitting as the Stadium Authority Board. **2018 — Keeping the election system small.** The team and team owner Jed York personally spent $630,000 to defeat Measure C. Measure C would have changed Santa Clara’s elections from six small districts back to three larger districts. The team opposed it for a specific reason: in small districts of about 12,000 registered voters each, $1 million in independent expenditure spending can reach every voter many times. In larger districts, the same money would be spread thinner and would be less effective. By defeating Measure C, the team kept the small-district system in place — the system in which its later spending on candidates would work best. **2020, 2022, and 2024 — Electing the Council.** Once the stadium was built and the election system was set, the team began spending heavily to elect candidates to the Santa Clara City Council. The candidates the team’s money supported also serve on the Stadium Authority Board — meaning they decide every dispute between the city and the team. Across three election cycles, the team’s committees have spent approximately $10 million in this way. The chart below shows what that spending looks like in a single race. In the 2022 District 3 election, 49ers-funded committees spent $1,125,142 against Christian Pellecchia: $684,173 supporting his opponent Karen Hardy, and $440,969 attacking Pellecchia directly. Pellecchia, who had signed Santa Clara’s voluntary spending pledge, was outspent by 38 to 1. Both candidates’ own campaigns were limited to the same legal budget. Only one of them faced opposition from a million-dollar outside spending committee. [CHART: Hardy vs. Pellecchia campaign finance comparison] — ## What the chart shows The disadvantage Pellecchia faced was not just about being outspent. It was about being shut out of entire categories of campaign work that his $29,600 budget could not pay for at any level. The chart shows seven categories where Pellecchia spent zero — not because he chose to, but because his budget made spending impossible. He had no paid campaign manager. He had no polling to tell him which messages were working. He had no produced videos. He had no television commercials. He had no professional opposition research firm assembling material about Hardy. He had no public relations firm placing stories or pitching reporters. The committees attacking him had all of those. The digital ad ratio is the single most damaging fact. Pellecchia’s small Facebook and Google ad budget put his message in front of each District 3 voter about twenty times during the campaign. The outside committees, with their YouTube ads, Facebook ads, programmatic ads, and geo-targeted ads, put their messages in front of each voter more than seventeen hundred times. Most of those seventeen hundred exposures were attacks on Pellecchia. By Election Day, the average District 3 voter had been exposed to attacks on Pellecchia roughly eighty-five times for every one time they had seen a message from Pellecchia himself. Stanford economist Roger Noll, in an interview with the *San Francisco Chronicle* during the 2022 cycle, named the principle at stake: *”You really need some degree of symmetry in the information flow to voters, and that is what’s being perverted in this case.”* He meant that for an election to be fair, voters need to see something close to the same amount of information about each candidate. When one side is heard from eighty-five times more than the other, voters are not really choosing — they are responding to what they have been shown. ## The pattern across three cycles Pellecchia did not lose a fair race that happened to go the other way. He lost a race that was structured against him from the start by the spending wall he had no way to climb. Across the three election cycles since 2020, the 49ers’ committees have spent against candidates in about eleven contested Santa Clara council races. The team’s preferred candidate has won eight of those races. The three losses share an important feature: in each one, the candidate running against the team’s choice had something unusual going for them. **In 2020,** Kathy Watanabe defeated Harbir Bhatia, the team’s preferred candidate in District 1. Watanabe was already a sitting Council member with years of relationships across her district. Voters knew her independently of the campaign spending. **In 2022,** Mayor Lisa Gillmor defeated Anthony Becker by 776 votes despite a massive 49ers-funded campaign against her. Gillmor had served in city government for decades and had citywide name recognition that no campaign of attack ads could erase. She was also helped, in the final months of the race, by the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury’s 2022 *Unsportsmanlike Conduct* report, which found that the Council majority — including Becker — tended to vote in ways favorable to the 49ers. The report gave voters a sworn outside confirmation of what Gillmor had been arguing all along. **In 2024,** Kelly Cox defeated both Anthony Guerra and Anthony Becker in District 6. Cox was an assistant dean at Santa Clara University’s School of Engineering, the former chair of the city’s Parks and Recreation Commission, and the endorsed candidate of Mayor Gillmor. Becker, the incumbent the team had funded in 2020, was on trial for perjury for leaking a confidential Civil Grand Jury report to the 49ers. His continued candidacy split the team-aligned vote between himself and Guerra — the new candidate the team had chosen to replace him. Cox won with 53.3% of the vote in a three-way race. None of these wins came from ordinary challengers prevailing on the merits of their ideas. Each winner had something that took years to build — or that arrived at exactly the right moment — and that no campaign budget can create: Watanabe’s incumbency and the constituent relationships that go with it, Gillmor’s decades of citywide name recognition combined with the Civil Grand Jury’s 2022 report confirming her central argument about the Council majority, Cox’s institutional credentials and the mayor’s endorsement. **That is the structural problem the chart documents. The spending wall is not impossible to climb. But it can only be climbed by candidates who already had significant standing in the community before they ran, or who got an independent verification of their case from outside the campaign itself.** A qualified resident running for the first time, without an existing public profile and without an independent body validating their critique, has no realistic path against $1 million in opposition spending — no matter how good their ideas are or how hard they work. ## How the committees have changed The 49ers’ political spending has not used the same structure across cycles. Looking at the actual names of the committees in the City’s campaign finance disclosure system, three different approaches have been used. **2020 — One direct committee.** Just one committee did all the spending, and its name said exactly what it was doing: *”Citizens for Efficient Government & Full Voting Rights, supporting Bhatia, Park, Jain & Becker & opposing Watanabe, O’Neill, O’Keefe & Mezzetti — City Council 2020.”* It was sponsored personally by Jed York. The committee’s name listed every candidate it was helping and every candidate it was attacking. Total spending: about $3 million. **2022 — Six committees with community-sounding names.** Six separate committees did the spending, each with a name designed to sound like a group of local residents organizing on their own: *”Santa Clara Community Leaders Supporting Anthony Becker for Mayor,”* *”Frustrated Santa Clarans Opposing Gillmor for Mayor,”* *”Santa Clara Neighbors Supporting Karen Hardy,”* *”Concerned Citizens Opposing Christian Pellecchia,”* and similar for the District 2 race. The names suggested grassroots community support. But the disclosure filings show that all six committees were sponsored by DeBartolo Corporation and its affiliated entities, including the Forty Niners Football Company LLC. None were actually organized by community members. Total spending: about $4.5 million. **2024 — Four committees with plain names.** Four committees did the spending, one per race, and the community-organization branding was dropped. The names just said what the committees did: *”Committee to Support Gonzalez and Oppose Chandra,”* *”Committee to Support Park and Oppose O’Neill,”* *”Committee to Support Jain and Oppose Kertes,”* *”Committee to Support Guerra and Oppose Cox.”* The District 6 committee was originally filed as just *”Committee to Oppose Cox”* — pure attack on Cox, no positive Guerra message at all — before being amended after Becker’s indictment made the team’s continued backing of Becker too uncomfortable to maintain. Total spending: about $2.4 million. The changes show that the 49ers have been adjusting how they run their political spending operation. The same money funded different kinds of structures in each cycle — first direct and obvious, then disguised as community organizations, then stripped down to plain functional names. What was constant across all three cycles was the source of the money and the people the spending was meant to elect. ## How the 49ers explained their spending The 2020 committee’s invocation of *”Full Voting Rights”* in its name was not random. It was a direct reference to a lawsuit. In 2018, a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge ruled that Santa Clara’s old at-large election system — where every resident voted for every Council seat — illegally diluted the votes of Asian American residents. The lawsuit was brought by Wesley Mukoyama and was supported by the Asian Law Alliance and other civil rights organizations. The judge ordered Santa Clara to switch to district-based elections. The 49ers’ spokesman in 2020, Rahul Chandhok, explained the team’s $3 million campaign spending as a continuation of that civil rights work. He told reporters that former Congressman Mike Honda had personally asked the team to support the candidates: *”The honorable Mike Honda requested our support in bringing fair, balanced and diverse representation to Santa Clara, and to ensure we continue to protect the civil and voting rights of all Santa Clarans. We are proud to answer his call.”* The team had also spent that $630,000 in 2018 to defeat Measure C — which would have re-consolidated the new districts. They explained that spending the same way: defending the voting rights structure the lawsuit had won. Whether that explanation is credible depends on what one observes about the candidates the 49ers funded once they were elected. The Council members elected with 49ers money voted to drop the city’s legal appeal of the voting rights case — consistent with the team’s stated framing. They also voted to fire the City Attorney who had pursued the litigation. They voted to fire the City Manager who had defended it in court. They have voted, in patterns the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury described in its 2022 *Unsportsmanlike Conduct* report, in ways favorable to the team. And they now sit as the Stadium Authority Board, which decides every financial dispute between the city and the 49ers. In December 2020, City Attorney Brian Doyle warned the Council on the record that the campaign-spending pattern posed real legal risks. As reported by the *Silicon Valley Voice*, Doyle said: *”There is plenty of pay-for-play that goes on by indirect means. The public has a right to know whether you are giving money to a company that spent $3 million on your campaign.”* The Council majority that Doyle had just warned subsequently fired him. ## Why this matters now Three Council seats are open in the November 2026 election — including the mayor’s seat. Mayor Gillmor and Councilmember Watanabe are the two Council members who consistently vote against the current majority. Whatever the 49ers’ political committees plan to spend in 2026 has not yet been fully disclosed in campaign filings. There is every reason to expect spending at the same scale as 2020 through 2024, using whatever operational lessons the team has drawn from the most recent cycle. If the 49ers’ record holds at its three-cycle success rate of about 73%, two of the three open seats will go to candidates the team prefers. That is enough to maintain — and possibly strengthen — the current 5-to-2 majority. A 6-to-1 Council would have no consistent dissenting voice at all. Every decision affecting the team — the stadium, the lease, the operating disputes, the development around the stadium, the city services the team uses — would be decided by a body in which no Council member is structurally positioned to ask hard questions. The form of democracy will continue. Names will be on the ballot. Votes will be counted. Results will be certified. But the substance of self-governance — voters making informed choices among candidates whose ideas they have had a fair chance to hear — has been replaced by a different process: a process in which the candidate the outside spending prefers is the candidate most voters will have heard from. The voter’s role has been narrowed to ratifying a verdict that was largely shaped before the voter ever opened a mailer. ## What residents can do Three things are open to Santa Clara residents now, and only now: **Speak up at the Charter Review meetings.** The City Council is currently writing changes to the City Charter, the city’s foundational legal document. Many of the protections that would actually constrain the kind of spending described in this article — stronger disclosure requirements, contribution limits, conflict-of-interest rules for Council members who also serve on the Stadium Authority Board, and clearer definitions of when independent expenditure spending counts as coordination with a campaign — could be added to the Charter now. Once the Charter Review’s scope is closed, those protections cannot be added again for another ten years. The Charter Review is the single most important opportunity Santa Clara residents have to change the structure that has produced the current Council. **Insist that the Independent Ethics Commission be real.** The Council is also designing a new Independent Ethics Commission. A commission without an independent budget, without the power to compel testimony, without authority over the Stadium Authority, and without protection from being dissolved by future Councils is not really independent — it is a body the Council can ignore or shut down at will. Public Trust Now will continue to track the design of the proposed commission and report whether what is being delivered matches what would actually work. **Pay attention to who is running in 2026 — and recognize the spending pattern when it appears.** The 49ers’ political spending operation has now been running for fifteen years. Its patterns are known. Residents who recognize the pattern early, name it publicly, and support candidates who have a real chance of running against it have the best chance of changing the outcome. — The chart at the top of this article shows what $1.1 million bought against $29,600 in a single Santa Clara City Council race. It is not an abstract example. It is what already happened in 2022, what happened on similar scales to candidates in 2020 and 2024, and what is poised to happen again in 2026 unless something changes. Santa Clara’s own *Code of Ethics and Values* states the standard clearly: *”The proper operation of democratic government requires that decision-makers be independent, impartial, and accountable to the people they serve.”* That standard cannot be met when most decision-makers were elected with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in outside spending against their opponents — spending whose only legal protection is the technical absence of formal coordination with the candidates it was designed to elect. The structure can be changed. The Charter Review is the moment.[CHART: Hardy vs. Pellecchia campaign finance comparison]
What the chart shows
The disadvantage Pellecchia faced was not just about being outspent. It was about being shut out of entire categories of campaign work that his $29,600 budget could not pay for at any level.
The chart shows seven categories where Pellecchia spent zero — not because he chose to, but because his budget made spending impossible. He had no paid campaign manager. He had no polling to tell him which messages were working. He had no produced videos. He had no television commercials. He had no professional opposition research firm assembling material about Hardy. He had no public relations firm placing stories or pitching reporters. The committees attacking him had all of those.
The digital ad ratio is the single most damaging fact. Pellecchia’s small Facebook and Google ad budget put his message in front of each District 3 voter about twenty times during the campaign. The outside committees, with their YouTube ads, Facebook ads, programmatic ads, and geo-targeted ads, put their messages in front of each voter more than seventeen hundred times. Most of those seventeen hundred exposures were attacks on Pellecchia.
By Election Day, the average District 3 voter had been exposed to attacks on Pellecchia roughly eighty-five times for every one time they had seen a message from Pellecchia himself.
Stanford economist Roger Noll, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle during the 2022 cycle, named the principle at stake: “You really need some degree of symmetry in the information flow to voters, and that is what’s being perverted in this case.” He meant that for an election to be fair, voters need to see something close to the same amount of information about each candidate. When one side is heard from eighty-five times more than the other, voters are not really choosing — they are responding to what they have been shown.
The pattern across three cycles
Pellecchia did not lose a fair race that happened to go the other way. He lost a race that was structured against him from the start by the spending wall he had no way to climb.
Across the three election cycles since 2020, the 49ers’ committees have spent against candidates in about eleven contested Santa Clara council races. The team’s preferred candidate has won eight of those races. The three losses share an important feature: in each one, the candidate running against the team’s choice had something unusual going for them.
In 2020, Kathy Watanabe defeated Harbir Bhatia, the team’s preferred candidate in District 1. Watanabe was already a sitting Council member with years of relationships across her district. Voters knew her independently of the campaign spending.
In 2022, Mayor Lisa Gillmor defeated Anthony Becker by 776 votes despite a massive 49ers-funded campaign against her. Gillmor had served in city government for decades and had citywide name recognition that no campaign of attack ads could erase. She was also helped, in the final months of the race, by the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury’s 2022 Unsportsmanlike Conduct report, which found that the Council majority — including Becker — tended to vote in ways favorable to the 49ers. The report gave voters a sworn outside confirmation of what Gillmor had been arguing all along.
In 2024, Kelly Cox defeated both Anthony Guerra and Anthony Becker in District 6. Cox was an assistant dean at Santa Clara University’s School of Engineering, the former chair of the city’s Parks and Recreation Commission, and the endorsed candidate of Mayor Gillmor. Becker, the incumbent the team had funded in 2020, was on trial for perjury for leaking a confidential Civil Grand Jury report to the 49ers. His continued candidacy split the team-aligned vote between himself and Guerra — the new candidate the team had chosen to replace him. Cox won with 53.3% of the vote in a three-way race.
None of these wins came from ordinary challengers prevailing on the merits of their ideas. Each winner had something that took years to build — or that arrived at exactly the right moment — and that no campaign budget can create: Watanabe’s incumbency and the constituent relationships that go with it, Gillmor’s decades of citywide name recognition combined with the Civil Grand Jury’s 2022 report confirming her central argument about the Council majority, Cox’s institutional credentials and the mayor’s endorsement. That is the structural problem the chart documents. The spending wall is not impossible to climb. But it can only be climbed by candidates who already had significant standing in the community before they ran, or who got an independent verification of their case from outside the campaign itself. A qualified resident running for the first time, without an existing public profile and without an independent body validating their critique, has no realistic path against $1 million in opposition spending — no matter how good their ideas are or how hard they work.
How the committees have changed
The 49ers’ political spending has not used the same structure across cycles. Looking at the actual names of the committees in the City’s campaign finance disclosure system, three different approaches have been used.
2020 — One direct committee. Just one committee did all the spending, and its name said exactly what it was doing: “Citizens for Efficient Government & Full Voting Rights, supporting Bhatia, Park, Jain & Becker & opposing Watanabe, O’Neill, O’Keefe & Mezzetti — City Council 2020.” It was sponsored personally by Jed York. The committee’s name listed every candidate it was helping and every candidate it was attacking. Total spending: about $3 million.
2022 — Six committees with community-sounding names. Six separate committees did the spending, each with a name designed to sound like a group of local residents organizing on their own: “Santa Clara Community Leaders Supporting Anthony Becker for Mayor,” “Frustrated Santa Clarans Opposing Gillmor for Mayor,” “Santa Clara Neighbors Supporting Karen Hardy,” “Concerned Citizens Opposing Christian Pellecchia,” and similar for the District 2 race. The names suggested grassroots community support. But the disclosure filings show that all six committees were sponsored by DeBartolo Corporation and its affiliated entities, including the Forty Niners Football Company LLC. None were actually organized by community members. Total spending: about $4.5 million.
2024 — Four committees with plain names. Four committees did the spending, one per race, and the community-organization branding was dropped. The names just said what the committees did: “Committee to Support Gonzalez and Oppose Chandra,” “Committee to Support Park and Oppose O’Neill,” “Committee to Support Jain and Oppose Kertes,” “Committee to Support Guerra and Oppose Cox.” The District 6 committee was originally filed as just “Committee to Oppose Cox” — pure attack on Cox, no positive Guerra message at all — before being amended after Becker’s indictment made the team’s continued backing of Becker too uncomfortable to maintain. Total spending: about $2.4 million.
The changes show that the 49ers have been adjusting how they run their political spending operation. The same money funded different kinds of structures in each cycle — first direct and obvious, then disguised as community organizations, then stripped down to plain functional names. What was constant across all three cycles was the source of the money and the people the spending was meant to elect.
How the 49ers explained their spending
The 2020 committee’s invocation of “Full Voting Rights” in its name was not random. It was a direct reference to a lawsuit. In 2018, a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge ruled that Santa Clara’s old at-large election system — where every resident voted for every Council seat — illegally diluted the votes of Asian American residents. The lawsuit was brought by Wesley Mukoyama and was supported by the Asian Law Alliance and other civil rights organizations. The judge ordered Santa Clara to switch to district-based elections.
The 49ers’ spokesman in 2020, Rahul Chandhok, explained the team’s $3 million campaign spending as a continuation of that civil rights work. He told reporters that former Congressman Mike Honda had personally asked the team to support the candidates: “The honorable Mike Honda requested our support in bringing fair, balanced and diverse representation to Santa Clara, and to ensure we continue to protect the civil and voting rights of all Santa Clarans. We are proud to answer his call.”
The team had also spent that $630,000 in 2018 to defeat Measure C — which would have re-consolidated the new districts. They explained that spending the same way: defending the voting rights structure the lawsuit had won.
Whether that explanation is credible depends on what one observes about the candidates the 49ers funded once they were elected. The Council members elected with 49ers money voted to drop the city’s legal appeal of the voting rights case — consistent with the team’s stated framing. They also voted to fire the City Attorney who had pursued the litigation. They voted to fire the City Manager who had defended it in court. They have voted, in patterns the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury described in its 2022 Unsportsmanlike Conduct report, in ways favorable to the team. And they now sit as the Stadium Authority Board, which decides every financial dispute between the city and the 49ers.
In December 2020, City Attorney Brian Doyle warned the Council on the record that the campaign-spending pattern posed real legal risks. As reported by the Silicon Valley Voice, Doyle said: “There is plenty of pay-for-play that goes on by indirect means. The public has a right to know whether you are giving money to a company that spent $3 million on your campaign.”
The Council majority that Doyle had just warned subsequently fired him.
Why this matters now
Three Council seats are open in the November 2026 election — including the mayor’s seat. Mayor Gillmor and Councilmember Watanabe are the two Council members who consistently vote against the current majority. Whatever the 49ers’ political committees plan to spend in 2026 has not yet been fully disclosed in campaign filings. There is every reason to expect spending at the same scale as 2020 through 2024, using whatever operational lessons the team has drawn from the most recent cycle.
If the 49ers’ record holds at its three-cycle success rate of about 73%, two of the three open seats will go to candidates the team prefers. That is enough to maintain — and possibly strengthen — the current 5-to-2 majority. A 6-to-1 Council would have no consistent dissenting voice at all. Every decision affecting the team — the stadium, the lease, the operating disputes, the development around the stadium, the city services the team uses — would be decided by a body in which no Council member is structurally positioned to ask hard questions.
The form of democracy will continue. Names will be on the ballot. Votes will be counted. Results will be certified. But the substance of self-governance — voters making informed choices among candidates whose ideas they have had a fair chance to hear — has been replaced by a different process: a process in which the candidate the outside spending prefers is the candidate most voters will have heard from. The voter’s role has been narrowed to ratifying a verdict that was largely shaped before the voter ever opened a mailer.
What residents can do
Three things are open to Santa Clara residents now, and only now:
Speak up at the Charter Review meetings. The City Council is currently writing changes to the City Charter, the city’s foundational legal document. Many of the protections that would actually constrain the kind of spending described in this article — stronger disclosure requirements, contribution limits, conflict-of-interest rules for Council members who also serve on the Stadium Authority Board, and clearer definitions of when independent expenditure spending counts as coordination with a campaign — could be added to the Charter now. Once the Charter Review’s scope is closed, those protections cannot be added again for another ten years. The Charter Review is the single most important opportunity Santa Clara residents have to change the structure that has produced the current Council.
Insist that the Independent Ethics Commission be real. The Council is also designing a new Independent Ethics Commission. A commission without an independent budget, without the power to compel testimony, without authority over the Stadium Authority, and without protection from being dissolved by future Councils is not really independent — it is a body the Council can ignore or shut down at will. Public Trust Now will continue to track the design of the proposed commission and report whether what is being delivered matches what would actually work.
Pay attention to who is running in 2026 — and recognize the spending pattern when it appears. The 49ers’ political spending operation has now been running for fifteen years. Its patterns are known. Residents who recognize the pattern early, name it publicly, and support candidates who have a real chance of running against it have the best chance of changing the outcome.
The chart at the top of this article shows what $1.1 million bought against $29,600 in a single Santa Clara City Council race. It is not an abstract example. It is what already happened in 2022, what happened on similar scales to candidates in 2020 and 2024, and what is poised to happen again in 2026 unless something changes.
Santa Clara’s own Code of Ethics and Values states the standard clearly: “The proper operation of democratic government requires that decision-makers be independent, impartial, and accountable to the people they serve.” That standard cannot be met when most decision-makers were elected with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in outside spending against their opponents — spending whose only legal protection is the technical absence of formal coordination with the candidates it was designed to elect.
The structure can be changed. The Charter Review is the moment.