Politics in Santa Clara has always been intimate and personal. It’s a small town where people know one another. It’s hard to hide agendas very well. Too many folks are watching.
You get the sense of an agenda, only modestly hidden, when you look hard at a charter review proposal that the Santa Clara City Council is due to consider Tuesday night.
Heeding longtime custom, it is more or less a done deal. It was discussed at a closed session recently. The notion is to appoint a charter review committee to look at district elections and the compensation of council members. A change would need voter approval.
Comparatively speaking, this is unfolding at light speed: The seven members of the council are elected citywide now. And the agenda item talks about district elections in vague terms of “recent legislation and trends in other cities.”
Four years ago, the council was challenged legally on its current method of election. You can make a reasonable case that citywide elections make it harder for minorities to be elected.
“The district scenario seems to be the gold standard for providing greater representation,” Mayor Jamie Matthews told me. “Our time has come to look at this.”
Some people in town, however, see another purpose behind the charter review, one linked to blunting criticism of the new big kid in town, the San Francisco 49ers.
The 49ers have come under withering criticism for their plans to acquire youth soccer fields and turn them into VIP parking. Noting the spate of drunken fights at Levi’s Stadium, the council has also talked about cutting off beer sales at halftime.
The three female council members — Lisa Gillmor, Debi Davis and Teresa O’Neill — have challenged the 49ers’ current operations, asking for more screening of drunken fans before they enter.
Polling residents
Here’s where a strange coincidence enters the picture. At the same time as this idea of district elections has caught fire, a poll has been probing Santa Clarans about their city government.
A Santa Clara resident I know wrote down several of the questions, which dealt with lengthening term limits from eight years to 12 years, the merit of district elections, and development policies.
One question asked for reaction to the argument that election changes would prevent political “dynasties.” That seemed directed at Gillmor, whose father, Gary, was a longtime council member.
Were the 49ers behind the poll? I couldn’t get a comment from the team’s political consultant, Ed McGovern. The 49ers’ senior manager of corporate communications, Roger Hacker, told me by email: “We don’t comment on general political issues.”
(Notably, the 49ers did not deny a link with the poll. And none of the questions recorded by my source dealt with the team, which you might expect from other sources.)
Anyone who has ever drawn lines for political districts knows boundaries matter. It is possible to draw a district on Santa Clara’s west side that would include two or even all three female council members.
If the latter scenario happened — and it’s far from a certainty — only one would survive in the 2016 elections. Like I say, Santa Clara politics is intimate. There’s nothing more personal than a shiv in the back.
Contact Scott Herhold at 408-275-0917 or sherhold@mercurynews.com. Twitter.com/scottherhold.
