The Charter Review Committee did admirable work — and a lot of it. But voters should judge the proposed City Charter by what it says — and what it doesn’t. So far, the “top-to-bottom overhaul” says virtually nothing about the kind of city Santa Clara wants to become, the Stadium Authority, an ethics code that rises above legal minimums, the protection of meaningful public input and engagement, or the government’s fiduciary duty to earn public trust.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!The Committee Did Its Job Admirably
The Charter Review Committee gave its final report to the City Council on June 15. The Council has until the end of July to decide what, if anything, to put before the voters on November 3, 2026.
Let’s start with thanks. Thirteen residents spent most of a year on careful, public work. This was the first full rewrite of the City Charter — Santa Clara’s constitution — in seventy-five years. They took a 1951 document that had been patched and re-patched for decades and made it clearer, better organized, and more consistent with current law. Anyone who has tried to read the old charter knows how hard that is. They earned a real thank-you.
Now it is the voters’ turn. A charter will shape the city for decades. So judge it not by the effort behind it, but by what it says — and what it leaves out.
How to Judge a Charter
You don’t need a law degree to judge a charter. The National Civic League, which has published a Model City Charter for more than a century, offers a simple test: a good charter delivers efficient, effective, and ethical government; it declares the community’s values; and it guarantees the public a real voice — and a real opportunity to influence decisions early in the process before Staff and Council workgroups have made all the substantive decisions.
Six questions provide a starting point to evaluate whatever charter the City Council puts before the voters:
- Vision — Does it say what kind of city Santa Clara is and aspires to become, or only how the government is organized and run?
- Reach — Does the Charter apply to every local government body that wields public power — or does it leave out government bodies with significant impact on quality of life and public trust?
- Authority — Are all powers and duties clearly defined and accountable to the public, and is a real accountability system outlined?
- Transparency — Does it protect the public’s right to know, to be heard, and for the public’s opinions to be valued — before decisions are made, not after?
- Integrity — Does it require an ethics code that rises far above the legal minimum and which applies to everyone in local government, including staff? Does it involve evidence-based support programs, ongoing training, independent advice, and effective oversight?
- Direction — Does it confront the governance and public-trust problems the city actually has — fiduciary duties, ethical decision-making, rebuilding public trust, fair elections, the Stadium Authority, conflicts of interest, independent expenditures, ethical procurement, etc. — all in the service of public trust and the people’s best interests.
Ask these questions of the draft charter and a pattern appears. What it changes, it changes with care. What it leaves out, it leaves out every time — and what it leaves out is the whole point.
The Santa Clara Governing Body Left Outside
Consider the question about Reach, because the answer is the clearest. Does the Charter govern every local body that wields public power? No.
The most powerful organization in Santa Clara is the Stadium Authority. It owns Levi’s Stadium and handles hundreds of millions of public dollars. It is not in the charter.
The City Manager runs it, as its Executive Director. The City Attorney is its lawyer. The City Council sits as its board. The Finance Director is its Treasurer. Yet none of those roles, and none of that money, is governed by the city’s constitution. A rewrite that calls itself comprehensive leaves the one organization that most tests the public’s trust entirely outside its walls.
Ethics, Reduced to a Training
Consider Integrity — and here the charter treats the legal floor as the ceiling. Ask what “ethics” means in this rewrite, and the answer is almost a single thing: the AB 1234 training in state ethics law that officials already take every two years. That is the legal minimum. It is what the City must do. It never asks what the City ought to do to earn public trust.
The one ethics question the committee actually debated was whether to create an independent ethics commission. It said no. That idea is genuinely divisive in Santa Clara — but not for good reasons. Few people, on the Council or off, know what an ethics commission really does, why Santa Clara needs one, and what evidence-based best practices have been developed and refined over the 50+ years of local, state, and federal ethics programs. The study the City itself ordered is unfinished. The consultant has still not answered Council’s questions, even though their answers already exist and are not hard to find.
T
But here is the part that matters. Once the commission was voted down, the rest of ethics fell away with it. The pieces no one even argues about — ethical leadership from the top, someone clearly in charge of ethics, a place to get ethics advice, rules for campaign conduct — were never taken up. Whatever was not dropped was left to the same Council that years ago took apart the city’s award-winning ethics program. One disputed idea became a trap door, and the whole subject fell through it.
And this is the same Council that, in its 2024 response to the Irreconcilable Differences grand jury report, agreed in writing that its own members “do not adhere to the City’s adopted ethical and behavioral standards.” That is not the body to which a charter should hand the whole of ethics on faith.
The Floor As the Ceiling
That habit runs through the entire document: nowhere does it ask the city to do more than the law already requires. On gifts and conflicts of interest, it points to state law and stops. On transparency, the committee discussed writing rules into the charter and then chose to leave them to some future Council policy instead. The legal minimum becomes the maximum — and a government that treats the floor as the ceiling never has to improve.
But the law is only a floor, on purpose. Open-meeting rules, public-records rules, gift and conflict limits — the state sets each as a baseline and lets cities do better. Meeting the minimum keeps a government out of trouble. It does not earn anyone’s trust.
What a Charter Is For
That is the point the draft forgets. When leaders set the bar high, a great many good people rise to meet it. When you ask only for minimum compliance, minimum compliance is what you get — enough to satisfy the law, never enough to earn the public’s trust. One clears a bar. The other keeps a promise.
A charter is a city’s once-in-a-generation chance to make that promise — to say what kind of government it means to be, and to hold itself to it. Santa Clara’s draft answers the mechanical questions and skips the human one. The Council still has time, before the end of July, to put it back: to settle not only how the city is run, but whether it can be trusted.
Honor the work. Change the charge.
