Is Santa Clara Moving
in the Right Direction?

87%

Said "Yes" in 2008

40%

Said "Yes" in 2024

The City of Santa Clara once led California in local government ethics.

The Santa Clara Code of Ethics & Values, Behavioral Standards, and comprehensive training programs, all adopted in 2000, were groundbreaking, award-winning, and nationally recognized.

Santa Clara was a role model for many cities tired of win-at-all-costs, crush-the-competition City Council campaigns — and the dysfunction that too often followed them onto the Council dais.

Of all the program's accomplishments, the most important was that residents trusted the City—in large part because they had been involved every step of the way in creating the first consensus-based, integrity-focused code of ethics and values in California.

They also had first-hand experience of the sustained effort City staff had made to integrate ethics and values into the culture of City Hall. The 2008 survey showed residents rated all city services as 9 or above on a 10 point scale.

Ten years into the program, 87% of residents said the City was going in the right direction.

By 2024, that number had dropped by more than half — to 40%.

What happened? And what, if anything, has the City learned?

Levi's Stadium Changed Everything

In 2009, Santa Clara reached an agreement to bring the 49ers to town.

In 2010, voters approved Measure J — 14,628 to 10,505, in a city of 116,000 — to build a new stadium.

The 49ers spent $4.3 million promoting the measure.

A new Stadium Authority, separate and distinct from the City, was created to own, build, and run what became Levi's Stadium on behalf of the people of Santa Clara.

People were told that the Stadium Authority, as a separate entity, would be better able to protect — and contribute to — the City's general fund.

Since 2011, the City Council, City Manager, and City Attorney also serve as the Santa Clara Stadium Authority (SCSA) Board, Executive Director, and Agency Counsel.

Other City staff also had Stadium Authority positions.

The Stadium Authority reimburses the City for their time.

The Council and the Stadium Authority meet concurrently: Same people. Same room. Same agenda document — different agenda.

Confused? Welcome to Santa Clara City Government. We'll discuss Santa Clara's decision-makers throughout this site. It's important to know the key players and what they are up to. Let's do a little test — no wrong answers. Please play along.

So, it's a Tuesday night at Santa Clara City Hall. You find this meeting underway. What are you looking at? (Click one button. No answers are recorded.)

Which Santa Clara City Government Group Is This?

City Council

Stadium Authority

Depends on the Agenda Item

When We Talk About "Government"

On this site, "government" means the people making decisions on behalf of the public — the City Council, City Manager, City Attorney, and other senior officials, acting as individuals and as the city organization.

In Santa Clara, those same individuals may act as the City Council at one moment and the Stadium Authority at the next.

Understanding who is acting, and under which set of responsibilities, is essential to understanding how Santa Clara is governed today.

This complicated structure can make city government feel distant — as if decisions are being made by people disconnected from the everyday realities of the community they serve.

When that happens, trust begins to erode, and people start to feel that city government is something done to them, rather than by them and for them.

Trustworthy government communicates something different. Good government should feel like a group of neighbors — first among equals, supported by professional staff — making decisions with the wisdom, experience, and moral maturity to do the right thing, earning trust because their decisions align in practical ways with the City's core values.

It Worked.. Until It Didn't

For more than a decade, Santa Clara’s ethics program worked.

It worked because it was built around two clear goals:

earning public trust
creating a high-functioning, ethical workplace

The Code of Ethics & Values defined what ethical leadership looked like in practice — not just in principle — and applied to everyone in City service.

The City defined ethics simply: it is how the City organization, its officials, and its staff act when they are at their best earning the public's trust. The Code prescribed how City government--and all its officials and staff--ought to act every day to earn public trust.

Public trust meant one thing: the people's confident reliance that their government works hard, in public and in private, solely to advance the best interests of the people of Santa Clara--never putting personal, private, or special relationships ahead of the people.

To earn that trust, the City organization committed to a set of practical ethics skills: identifying who had the most to gain or lose from a decision, recognizing an ethics issues, applying good governance guiding principles, acting with courage, and communicating the reasons behind decisions.

If the City made an ethics mistake, the City would identify the stumbling block and the skills needed to overcome it, so that the City didn't keep making that mistake. It was a positive, practical way to build public trust.

Strong leadership, ongoing training, and an engaged public made the ethics standards real and part of everyone's job responsibilities.

The program worked because City government made ethics and public trust priorities.

Then it didn't.

Beginning around 2008 — and accelerating after long-time City Manager (CM) Jennifer Sparacino and her Deputy CM Carol McCarthy retired — priorities changed.

The program wasn't ended by a single decision. It was dismantled piece by piece.

Quietly.

Without a public vote. Without explanation.

By the time most residents noticed, there was little left to save — only public trust to rebuild.

Ten Years Without Ethics:
How It Happened & What It Cost

Taking Ethics for Granted

Santa Clara began dismantling its ethics program in large part because successive City Councils took it for granted.

When the 49ers came to town, they bedazzled the Council with celebrity, possibility, and the promise of new revenue.

Some members of the Council were so committed to the idea that they often sounded more like 49er employees than the public's representatives.

City priorities shifted — and when ethics and public trust were no longer among them, Dr. Shanks left after the 2014 election. He had been the City's on-call ethics consultant for 17 years.

But calling it a shift in priorities does not honor the full truth.

Ethics Never Made It Through the Gate

The 49ers announced their plans to build in Santa Clara in 2006. By 2009, negotiations were well underway — a full year before voters approved the Stadium with Measure J.

Dr. Shanks had grown increasingly concerned about the ethics issues surfacing throughout those discussions. He believed the Council was ignoring most of them.

So in 2009 — and again in 2010 and 2011 — he submitted proposals to Senior Staff for a special initiative: an Ethics Impact Report, to be produced each time staff brought a Council recommendation involving the 49ers.

The proposal called for training staff to identify ethics, core values, and public trust issues as they emerged in ongoing negotiations, and to suggest ways those concerns might be addressed.

Staff would not make decisions — they would flag areas of concern. Not to block the stadium, but to protect public trust and assure ethics problems and solutions were part of the Council's deliberations.

As Dr. Shanks wrote at the time: "Few decisions have the potential to impact public trust as much as Stadium decisions."

The proposal was rejected in 2009, and again in 2010 and 2011 — without public discussion, behind closed doors.

A Decision "Someone" Made

In retrospect, those rejections reveal something more troubling than political intrigue.

At some point in those early negotiations — whether the decision was made by Council, Senior Staff, the 49ers' representatives, or their consultants and lawyers — someone or some group chose to exclude ethics analysis from the stadium process entirely.

It was not an oversight.

The proposals were specific, concrete, and submitted multiple times.

They were rejected.

The Stadium Authority: A World Without Ethics

Those decisions had consequences that compounded over time.

Contracts written or negotiated without ethics guardrails or ethics analysis were predictably less fair, less transparent, less beneficial, and less protective of the public's rights and the City's fiduciary duties.

The Stadium Authority was designed as a separate and distinct legal entity to protect the General Fund and the City from Stadium losses.

It was not meant to exempt the Stadium Authority, the Stadium, the Tenant, or the Tenant's owners from the ethics requirements the City imposes on vendors, contractors, and lobbyists.

It also does not remove the fiduciary duties the Stadium Authority, like the City Council, is sworn to uphold: the duties of care, loyalty to the people, impartiality, transparency, accountability, and responsibility for the public trust.

What has emerged, especially since 2020 and the 49ers dominance of the City's political life, was less a civic institution than its own world, operating by a different code or no code:

a world where winning is the only standard that matters,
where confidentiality serves power rather than the public,
where success is measured only by the bottom line,
and where accountability is treated as an obstacle rather than an obligation or an opportunity.

The Pull Toward Chaos

The danger now is to Santa Clara's governance system as a whole.

When ethics infrastructure, as weak as it currently is, covers only half of a city's responsibilities — and is entirely absent from the other half — the result is not equilibrium. Systems without guardrails do not hold steady. They regress.

The ethics vacuum at the Stadium Authority does not stay contained there; it pulls against the standards that govern the rest of City Hall.

Without renewal and reinforcement, even the ethics culture that once made Santa Clara a national model will tend toward entropy — not with a dramatic collapse, but with a quiet drift toward a city where no one is minding the store.

What "Minding the Store" Looks Like

Public decisions always involve cost, efficiency, and legality.

The law is the floor.

Once a decision is on solid legal footing, the harder and more consequential work begins: identifying who has the most to gain or lose — and then examining the decision through multiple ethics lenses. An ethical decision-making process asks, "How does this decision...

...honor the law and its purpose?"
...affect all those with a stake in the outcome — and who bears the costs?"
...treat the different groups involved fairly and on the merits?"
...protect individual rights and fulfill the government's fiduciary duties?"
...advance the best interests of the public it serves, rather than private, personal, or special interests?"

Until, perhaps, the last time staff was asked to study an Independent Ethics Commission, they have consistently avoided their duty to examine those questions and make a good-faith recommendation to Council.

The Cost of Ignoring Ethics

The Civil Grand Jury found that the 49ers outplayed the City's negotiators and ran a long game to reduce their property taxes. That is what ignoring embedded ethics issues costs. In Santa Clara's case, we can put a number on it: $6 million — and counting. [link to $6 million analysis]

That was the cost of the California Voting Rights Act lawsuits in 2017 and 2018.

Good public decisions involve more than legal compliance. '

The law is the floor.

...honor the law and its purpose?"
...affect all those with a stake in the outcome — and who bears the costs?"
...treat the different groups involved fairly and on the merits?"
...protect individual rights and fulfill the government's fiduciary duties?"
...advance the best interests of the public it serves, rather than private, personal, or special interests?"

Ten Years Without Ethics Analysis

Despite its hands-off approach to ethical leadership and public trust, Santa Clara has created, perhaps inadvertently, a once-in-a-generation defining moment for ethics and public trust. It's going on right now.

At a time when the City is preparing for global events like the World Cup and managing hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure projects, it has also launched four major efforts—all at once:

A comprehensive Charter review
A rewrite of the Ethics Code
Consideration of an independent Ethics Commission
And a time-sensitive decision to turn full-year operational control of the Stadium, both NFL and Non-NFL seasons, and all City revenues, over to the team for the next 27 years (the Stadium "Put Right")

Each of these decisions could reshape how the City governs itself--and each has the potential to change the City's direction for the better, or to continue down the unethical slippery slope the City is on.

Taken together, they will determine whether Santa Clara strengthens, weakens, or destroys ethical leadership, good governance, and public trust for decades to come. The stakes are that high.

A New Issue: Money, Power, & Self-Governance

What Is Self-Governance?

Self-governance means the people are in charge of their own government — not just in theory, but in reality.

Among other things, the people decide:

what issues matter
what information is available
who represents them
and the culture of City Hall

What Self-Governance Requires?

Self-governance depends on a few essential conditions:

Candidates can communicate with voters on a reasonably level playing field
Voters hear multiple perspectives
The City provides neutral forums and reliable, accessible information
Elected officials demonstrate independence of judgment, impartiality, and accountability, disclose conflicted relationships

When those conditions are met, elections reflect the will of the people.

What Has Changed

In Santa Clara, those conditions have shifted.

Since 2020, the 49ers — the City’s largest private partner and Levi's Stadium tenant— have contributed than $10 million to 49er PACs to pay for independent campaign expenditures supporting selected candidates and opposing others.

This spending is legal.

Its effects on self-governance are devastating.

In a city where virtually all candidates accept a voluntary campaign expenditure limit of about $29,000, outside expenditures of $1 million or more per race fundamentally change the environment in which voters make decisions.

How That Affects Self-Governance

At that scale:

Messaging can be tested, refined, and repeated across thousands of voters
Digital and mail campaigns dominate what voters see and hear
Opposing candidates cannot respond at the same level
The agenda — what issues matter, and how they are framed — is shaped by the Team's PACs, not by the people.

At the same time, the City has eliminated the very programs that once supported informed voting:

No candidate forums aligned with the City’s Code of Ethics & Values
No nonpartisan, City-sponsored voter education
Fewer shared spaces for residents to hear and compare viewpoints
Public input limited to brief statements at formal meetings
Communication increasingly flows in one direction

This is not just more campaigning.

It is a fundamentally different decision-making environment.

What This Means

A $1 million campaign is not a larger version of a $29,000 campaign.

It creates a different information and persuasion system.

One designed to shape what voters see, hear, and ultimately decide.

With effectively unlimited resources, PACs can construct a decision-making environment whose sole purpose is to elect preferred candidates and defeat others.

By contrast, Santa Clara’s earlier Vote Ethics program was designed to create a very different environment — one focused on fair, issue-based information that helped voters make independent judgments.

That environment no longer exists.

The City's Responsibility

The City cannot control independent expenditures.

They are legal.

But the City is responsible for how — if at all — it responds to their effects.

That responsibility includes:

Providing neutral forums for candidates and public discussion
Ensuring access to reliable, balanced information
Supporting meaningful public participation
Protecting the integrity of the decision-making process

This is not about regulating speech.

It is about preserving the conditions that make self-governance possible.

The City's Response

Since 2020, the City’s response has been silence.

No public effort to address the effects of large-scale independent expenditures
No sustained discussion of the implications for self-governance
No visible action to strengthen the conditions for informed voting
No discussion of the conflicts of interest Stadium Authority Board members have and the weakening of public trust every time they vote on 49er issues without disclosing the conflicts.

At the same time, five of seven Council/Stadium Authority seats have been filled by candidates supported by these expenditures.

The ethical questions raised by that reality have not been publicly addressed.

Why This Matters Now

Santa Clara is not just facing difficult decisions.

It is facing decisions that will shape who controls the direction of the City — and how those decisions are made.

That is why self-governance is not an abstract concept.

It is the goal of Santa Clara's democracy--and it is under siege.

A Defining Moment for Santa Clara

A comprehensive Charter review
A rewrite of the Ethics Code
Consideration of an independent Ethics Commission
And a time-sensitive decision to turn full-year operational control of the Stadium, both NFL and Non-NFL seasons, and all City revenues, over to the team for the next 27 years (the Stadium "Put Right")

Taken together, they will determine whether Santa Clara strengthens, weakens, or destroys ethical leadership, good governance, and public trust for decades to come. The stakes are that high.

What the Numbers Show

See for Yourself

What Happens When Ethics Is Missing

Four Decisions That Will Shape Santa Clara's Future

Comprehensive Charter Reform?

Will the Charter embed a best practices ethics infrastructure, good governance and public trust protections—with assurances of real public engagement—and apply them equally to the City, the Stadium Authority, all other authorities where the City Council exercises power, and other City public/private partnerships?

Or will ethics remain optional, leaving both vulnerable to the whims and shifting political allegiances of whichever City Council is in power?

Independent Ethics Commission?

Will the City create an independent Ethics Commission with full authority over both the City organization and the Stadium Authority, with real independence, resources, staffing and best practices to succeed with ethics and public trust training, advice, enforcement, and oversight?

Or will it establish a weak body, an ethics "program"—or continue with no meaningful oversight at all?

We hope the City's consultant will share the research result that shows the most effective ethics commissions were established by citizen ballot initiatives or referenda.

Universal Ethics Code?

Will Santa Clara restore and strengthen its values-based Code of Ethics & Values—and apply it to City and the Stadium Authority?

Or replace it with a minimal compliance code—or none at all—leaving the Stadium Authority and the City without meaningful standards?

Stadium "Put Right" for the People?

A one-time Stadium "put right" decision to transfer operational control to the 49ers—for both NFL and non-NFL events—and give the 49ers all the revenue from all sources for the next 27 years.

Will the 49er-PAC majority approve what the team wants or get independent analysis of benefits and liabilities and decide for the people?

Can the people believe what their 49er PAC supported Stadium Authority Board members will tell them?

Before debating that question, we suggest everyone read the March 18, 2025 Keyser Marston initial high-level analysis of the 49ers economic impact study.

We were surprised to find this report and astonished when we could only find it as an attachment to the August 2025 City updated response to the 2024 Outplayed report.

Pressing Questions: People Want to Know

As we prepared this site, we closely reviewed how the City is approaching these decisions.

What we found raises serious questions — questions the people of Santa Clara deserve to have answered.

Why are these decisions being handled separately?

Taken together, they will shape Santa Clara’s system of ethics, governance, oversight, accountability, and public trust for years to come. Why not approach them as a coordinated effort?

Why take all of this on at once?

These major decisions are being made in a year when the City is also hosting the Super Bowl, FIFA World Cup matches, managing hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure projects, and running its

Does the City have the capacity to do this well — or is speed taking priority over quality?

Or has this work effectively been outsourced to a consultant with no demonstrated experience in values-based ethics codes or independent ethics commissions — selected through a limited process, with little public input, and without clear consideration of Santa Clara’s own nationally recognized ethics model?

Is ethical leadership a priority?

In 2008, former Palo Alto City Manager Jim Keene said:
“Building and sustaining an ethical organization is one of the key responsibilities of public sector leaders.”
Do Santa Clara’s leaders agree? If not, what is the purpose of these efforts?

Why was the ethics consultant process changed?

After approving a standard public process, why did the City delay for months, then use an informal approach limited to law firms, and select a consultant who was not independent?
And why move from “reviewing” the Code of Ethics to potentially replacing it?

Why limit the Charter Review Committee?

Why restrict it to updating language while excluding governance reforms — especially those related to ethics and oversight?
Shouldn’t core ethics protections be part of the Charter, not left to future councils?

Why is the Stadium Authority excluded?

Why are ethics reforms, oversight structures, and governance improvements being designed to exclude the Stadium Authority — one of the City’s most consequential public entities?

What happened to the Stadium “Put Right”?

The proposal to transfer long-term operational control of Levi’s Stadium has gone quiet.
Has it been abandoned — or simply deferred?

Two Questions That Can Change Everything

Every major decision is evaluated for cost, efficiency, and legality.

But two questions are almost never asked:

THE ETHICS QUESTION: Why, if at all, is this the right thing to do for the people of Santa Clara?
THE PUBLIC TRUST QUESTION: How, if at all, will this decision build public trust?

When these questions are ignored, even legal and efficient decisions can fail the most important test:

Does the public believe that decision-makers are acting solely in the public’s best interest?

That belief is necessary for public trust.

Now, with so much at stake, these questions are even more important. They have the power to change the City's future--if the public engages, insists, and prevails.

Four Decisions Will Shape What Happens Next

Now the same City Council that made the ethically questionable decisions we listed above faces four decisions that present a genuine opportunity to rebuild public trust — perhaps the most significant opportunity in a generation.

But the 49er PAC majority and senior City staff, who have enabled them for the past three years, are approaching these decisions the same way they have approached ethics, accountability, and public participation since they were elected in 2020: hire a consultant they control, structure the process to limit public input, and reach a predetermined conclusion.

The window to change that outcome is open at this moment in mid-March 2026. It will not stay open long.

Why Public Trust Now

For four years, residents have complained. Three Civil Grand Jury reports have documented ethics and governance failures. An ethics expert has been raising the alarm publicly since 2022. The City's own survey shows 60% of residents believe Santa Clara is going in the wrong direction.

Nothing changed. If anything, the complaints and reports have only sped up what we can only describe as an anti-ethics and anti public trust agenda.

We hope there is another explanation: gross incompetence,

Someone realized the easiest way to stop ethics complaints is to eliminate the ethics code — so they are replacing Santa Clara's comprehensive, values-centered Code with a follow-the-law compliance document, drafted behind closed doors by a law firm.

Someone realized the more they rejected an independent ethics commission, the more the Civil Grand Jury would keep recommending one — so now they are studying it, asking questions that cities of every size have already answered, until they can say: we studied it, and it's just not right for Santa Clara.

That is what this site does. Here is what we promise:

We will be fact-based. Our analyses ask what a reasonable person would conclude with access only to what the public can access: what does this document actually say, and what does it mean for public trust? We follow the evidence. We correct errors when we find them.

We will cover what is happening — the ethics code revision, the ethics commission study, the Charter Review — through an ethics lens, so residents are informed about what their government is doing, or failing to do.

We will tell you what the documents mean — not just what they say. Grand Jury reports, contracts, meeting transcripts, public records. Translated into plain language, analyzed for their ethics and public trust implications.

We will create space for genuine democratic dialogue — because the City has been steadily removing opportunities for residents to speak to their government, much less to one another. That space needs to exist somewhere.

We will not tell you what to think — but what to think about, how to think it through, and how to turn thought into practical and effective action for the common good.

We will be honest about what we don't know — and rigorous about what we do.

The Bulldozer Is Already In the Yard

Twenty-five years ago, a long-time Santa Clara resident on the ethics ordinance committee pulled Dr. Shanks aside after one of the committee meetings. He didn't want Dr. Shanks to be disappointed if other residents didn't respond to the request to participate in the ethics development process.

"You've got to understand," he said. "Santa Clara residents won't respond to City Hall unless there's a bulldozer with the City's name on it in their front yard. It's already knocked down the fence and it's on its way to the front door. Then they'll respond."

After working on this site for the past five months, we believe that bulldozer has arrived. It has already knocked down your front fence, and it's on its way to your front door. There is no time to lose.

The people are the only force with the political power to change a city's direction. Thomas Jefferson understood what this moment requires:

Whenever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

Article II Section 1 of California's Constitution makes it law:

All political power is inherent in the people. Government is instituted for their protection, security, and benefit, and they have the right to alter or reform it when the public good may require.

The public good needs your attention. Public Trust Now is here to help.

What You Can Do

Santa Clara was once a role model for ethical leadership and public trust. Residents can help the City become that again. Here's how to start.

Is Santa Clara Moving in the Right Direction?

87%

40%