3. INDEPENDENT ETHICS COMMISSION STUDY
Santa Clara’s City Council twice rejected the 2022 Civil Grand Jury’s recommendation to establish an independent ethics commission.
Then, in its official response to the 2024 Civil Grand Jury report Irreconcilable Differences, the Council unanimously agreed to hire a consultant and move toward creating one.
That consultant was supposed to be hired by October 2024.
The hiring did not occur until spring 2025.
Why the Grand Jury Recommended a Commission
The Grand Jury’s findings in both reports pointed to the same core problem:
A governing body making decisions affecting major financial interests while lacking effective, timely, and independent oversight.
The reports also documented conduct that further eroded public trust, including:
- Attacking or disparaging residents who criticize Council decisions
- Open hostility between councilmembers during public meetings
- Failure to follow established public-meeting protocols
- Repeated small-group meetings among councilmembers — including 57 meetings in groups of two or three — raising concerns about transparency and open-government compliance
When a governing body cannot effectively police itself, the standard solution in public ethics practice is independent oversight.
Who Is Designing the Commission
The City hired the same employment defense attorney who is currently drafting the replacement ethics code to design the study process for the commission.
That choice raises an obvious question.
Employment defense attorneys are trained to protect organizations from liability and defend officials when complaints arise. Their professional lens asks:
Was a law violated? Can the city defend itself?
Ethics oversight asks a different question:
How do we prevent problems, promote ethical leadership, and strengthen public trust before violations occur?
Those are different professional frameworks.
An ethics commission is not primarily a legal defense system. The most effective commissions focus on:
- prevention
- advice to officials
- ethics training
- building a culture of ethical leadership
- and only secondarily on enforcement
Designing such a system normally requires ethics expertise, not litigation defense expertise.
The Process Also Limits Public Input
The process being used to study the commission gives City staff and department heads multiple opportunities to shape the options before they reach the Council.
The public, by contrast, is expected to comment only after those options are largely developed.
If the goal is to rebuild public trust, that sequence raises an obvious question:
Why would the public be invited to participate last, rather than first?
What Kind of Commission Will Result?
An ethics commission can either become:
- a narrow enforcement body designed to handle complaints after problems occur, or
- a broader ethics infrastructure designed to prevent problems and strengthen public trust
The design choices made during this study will determine which path Santa Clara takes.
Residents should be asking a simple question:
What kind of ethics commission will emerge from a process designed this way?
→ Read: The Answers Were Already There — What Santa Clara’s Council Could Have Known, and What Its Ethics Consultant Should Have
→ Related: How the Ethics Code Consultant Was SelectedIndependent Ethics Commission Study — The five members of the 49er PAC majority voted twice to reject the 2022 Civil Grand Jury’s (CGJ) recommendation to establish an independent ethics commission to hold Santa Clara City government accountable for failures to follow the City’s Code of Ethics & Values and failures to fulfill the fiduciary duties all public officials accept when they are elected, appointed, or hired.
response to the 2023 Grand Jury report Irreconcilable Differences — to hiring a consultant by October 2024 and establishing an Independent Ethics Commission. The consultant wasn’t hired until spring 2025, months past that commitment. It’s worth asking why the Grand Jury recommended an independent commission after documenting what it found. The answer is in the findings themselves: a council that consistently voted in ways that favored a special interest over the public, that dismissed accountability recommendations, and that operated without effective, timely, or independent checks. A body that cannot police itself needs an external body that can. That is the entire logic of an independent ethics commission. Two questions the City applies — or should apply — to every significant process and decision: Why is this the right thing to do? and How will it build public trust? If anyone on staff had asked those questions before designing this process, would they have built it this way? The process was designed to give staff and department heads multiple opportunities to shape the consultant’s options and recommendations — before the full Council sees them, and long before the public does. The public gets one hearing, late in the process, after the range of options has already been filtered through City management. For a body whose entire purpose is independent oversight of those same officials and managers, that design is not an oversight — it is a choice. The consultant selection compounds the problem. After rejecting the commission twice, staff — not council — designed the RFQ, chose who received special invitations, and selected the winner. Special invitations went to law firms. Ethics consultants received none. Joanne Spear — who holds both legal credentials and substantial ethics consulting experience — was not invited. Neither was any university ethics center. The consultant selected is the same employment lawyer who reviewed the ethics documents and produced a replacement compliance code rather than a review. Her firm’s primary practice is defending cities and their officials against the kinds of claims an ethics commission would investigate. Hiring someone well known to staff is not inherently wrong — familiarity is a legitimate factor in any professional engagement. But no ethics expertise was invited to compete. There is a deeper problem the process hasn’t touched at all. The council members who will vote on this commission’s structure have, by their own words in the July 2023 discussion, little understanding of what an independent ethics commission actually does. They focused almost entirely on enforcement — fines, penalties, investigations. What they did not discuss is what the field’s research shows drives the most durable improvement in ethical governance: prevention. Advice. Training. Building an ethical organizational culture. Identifying the pressures and stumbling blocks that cause good people to make bad decisions — and building the skills to overcome them. Santa Clara did exactly this work in its first years under the 2001 Code, and the results showed in the survey data. None of that institutional knowledge appears to be informing this process. What kind of commission will emerge from a process designed by staff, shaped by management, and guided by a consultant whose professional life is defending the officials the commission would oversee? → Read: The Answers Were Already There — What Santa Clara’s Council Could Have Known, and What Its Ethics Consultant Should Have [link]