Things Began to Change

The 49ers came to Santa Clara looking to build a stadium, and bedazzled the Council with celebrity, promises, and financial possibilities. From the beginning, the Stadium Project raised the ethics issues that, left unresolved as they have been over the last ten years, damage public trust:

conflicts of interest or the appearance of conflict
transparency and public vs. private meetings,
use of City resources (which led to Measure J and protections if the Stadium lost money; but no protections if the Stadium made money
Stadium Authority as joint powers, but city council, manager, attorney, and finance director serving in both roles
debt and stadium financing,
land use
sweet-heart deals
many quality of life issues
The public was aware of some of these issues because as recently as 15 years ago, local media took seriously their duty to speak truth to power and to pay attention to issues of ethics and corruption.

Ethics Proposal Rejected Three Times

In 2009, the City’s ethics consultant proposed a Public Trust Impact Report — a formal process to integrate ethics into stadium decisions. Not to block the stadium but To protect public trust.

The proposal was rejected without public discussion — in 2009, 2010, and 2011. Someone in City Hall decided to leave ethical decision-making out of stadium negotiations entirely, and to exempt the Stadium Authority from the ethics standards that applied to everyone else in city government.

The Champions Left

The City Manager (Jennifer Sparacino) and Deputy City Manager (Carol McCarthy) who built the ethics program retired in 2012. Council Member Aldyth Parle, who inspired and led the Ethics Committee for its first six years, died in 2014. Dr. Shanks left in 2015 when it was clear the city no longer prioritized ethics or public trust. The consultant hired in 2015 left after the 2016 election. The last remnant — renamed “Democracy Santa Clara” — ended when the City Clerk left in 2019.

Governance Without Accountability

2019 was also the year the Council merged the monthly citizen Ethics Committee into a Council Governance and Ethics subcommittee that also handles facility naming and meets four times a year.

“Further implementation of the City’s Code of Ethics & Values program” is in its mission statement, but for the past several years, the Committee (Chair Jain, Mr. Chahal, and Mr. Park, staffed by the City Manager, City Attorney, and others) have busied themselves revising Council policies with two purposes in mind: 1.) to revise policies to reflect the change from at large to district elections, often focusing on reducing the Mayor’s power, and 2.) reducing the opportunities the public has to address its government to the 3 minute public comment and the 2 minute agenda comment. Gone now is the Policy 030 where residents could petition for items to be put on the agenda; gone also are the resident’s ability to file a complaint. re It never did that. It was never an oversight or accountability committee. The 2022 Civil Grand Jury called it ineffective.

Two Fundamentals about Ethics and Public Trust

Ethics and Public Trust are either getting better or they are getting worse. Every unethical or ethically questionable act damages public trust. One good act doesn’t “balance out” a bad act, That’s the first fundamental about public ethics and public trust. There is no steady state. Research and Santa Clara’s experience show that if you’re not actively strengthening ethical culture and public trust, they’re weakening.

The second fundamental is that no ethics program really succeeds unless there is clear leadership from the top of the organization. For 14 years, Santa Clara’s leaders didn’t just let ethics and public trust weaken — they eliminated every program, position, and process designed to identify and resolve ethics issues before and after they became problems.

What Survived, What Didn’t, What’s At Risk Now

For the City Council, all that survives of the Ethics and Values Program today is the Code of Ethics & Values and the Behavioral Standards—still on the website, but universally ignored.

For the Stadium Authority, there has never been an ethics code at all.

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Catch the current Ethics Code while you can. Instead of the ethics reform three Civil Grand Jury reports called for, City delayed hiring an ethics consultant to review the values-based (vs. rules-based) staff hired a lawyer to review integrity-based ethics code documents eight months after Council approved the hire. Signed contract in March 2024. Worked behind closed doors from March 2024 to March 2025 to replace the integrity-focused Code of Ethics & Values with a follow-the-law compliance code—much like the 1960s-era code the City rejected twenty-five years ago because it offered no guidance in difficult situations. If you’ve never heard about the replacement ethics code project, that appears to be by design: no public input requested prior to writing replacement Code, no review of previous documents, and discussion scheduled at an obscure Council committee meeting at 10 a.m. on a weekday.

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