49ers Stadium Subsidy: Fireworks of a different sort

Dear Santa Clarans,


Item 7C2 from Tuesday evening's Consent Calendar got pulled for discussion. Sounds innocuous - but it actually lit up the night sky, if only briefly.

City Staff informs that it will be virtually impossible for our city to have a fireworks display at Central Park this July 4th. Not only do we not have the $65,000 it will cost, we don't even have the City Staff to supervise and conduct it.

Click the icon here for the details.

Boosters of the San Francisco 49ers' stadium subsidy have made this quite clear: It's OK for our RDA (what's left of it) to abolish its own debt deadline to subsidize the stadium, causing our city's General Fund to lose a nominal $19,500,000 over time. (See table, last page.)

But we can't afford $65,000 from that same General Fund for fireworks this year?

If these are truly the priorities of the "stadium boosters," maybe it's time for "fireworks" of a different sort.

When speaking of fiscal responsibility in Santa Clara, it ALL goes on the table - the subsidy for the San Francisco 49ers as well as our General Fund's ongoing spending patterns. Anyone trying to attack one and not the other is simply not giving Santa Clarans the whole story.

You as residents of Santa Clara can help put that discussion back in perspective. Please get involved. Contact the Mayor and City Council and tell them what you think.

Look upon it as another sort of "red glare."



Thanks and regards,
Bill Bailey, Treasurer,
Santa Clara Plays Fair

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49ers Stadium Subsidy: "Parking" $4.5M of RDA Funds

Dear Santa Clarans,


"Thank you" to the public-spirited residents who spoke in this evening's Special Meetings of the RDA and the Stadium Authority. We got the meeting materials less than 90 minutes before those two meetings – so, not a bad turnout.

We didn't win, but Councilmembers Kennedy and McLeod stood up for this very important principle: Let's not give public money to a private corporation with no signed development agreement - and with no guarantees from the San Francisco 49ers themselves. However, the vote still went 5-2 in favor of the 49ers Stadium Raid.

Summary: The "stadium boosters" on the Council are claiming that Measure J licenses them to do this - to essentially "park" RDA cash in the accounts of a private business to keep it out of the hands of the Governor. We call it "RDA Keepaway."

The rationalization? Sell the $4.5 million as being "only" for "make-ready" infrastructure - sidewalks, driveway cuts, paving, piping - which we "claim" we would do even if the stadium deal were to fall through.

You can drive a cement mixer through that argument: One doesn't need to hide funds with a third party to buy fire hydrants for Tasman Drive.

Footnote: Those meeting materials, by the way, included letters from the public on this $4.5 million giveaway - and of the 54 distinct responses I found, all 54 were AGAINST the handing over of public money to the (very) private 49ers. See here (click POST MEETING, see pages 26-96).

Thank you - everyone - for all of your support.


Bill Bailey, Treasurer,
Santa Clara Plays Fair

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49ers Stadium Subsidy: "Let's just give it to 'em right now!"

Dear Santa Clarans,


Please see the Mercury News' coverage of the Special Meeting of our RDA and Stadium Authority to be held on Monday evening:

Santa Clara's next idea to keep stadium money from state: Give it to 49ers

Do we understand this correctly? Our RDA - identically our City Council - is going to take $4.5 million in RDA cash and hand it to a stadium developer which just locked out their own NFL Players and which has not even come up with its OWN financing for the stadium?

In the bitterest of divorce actions, one spouse desperately moves assets around to conceal them from the other spouse's lawyer. Here, we're handing RDA cash over to the San Francisco 49ers simply in order to keep it out of the hands of Governor Brown.

Not only that: The Mayor himself informs that we cannot even view the text of the motion for Monday evening until Monday morning at the earliest. That's not open government, no matter what rationalization the "stadium boosters" on the Council are using this week.

If you can make it to City Hall at 7:00 pm on Monday evening, March 21st, please come and watch your city government in action.



Thanks for all of your support,
Bill Bailey, Treasurer,
Santa Clara Plays Fair

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49ers' Stadium Subsidy: A promise is a promise

Dear Santa Clarans,


The promise: The General Fund of the City of Santa Clara will take NO hits - directly or indirectly - due to the 49ers' stadium subsidy.

This evening in Chambers, "stadium boosters" - on the City Council and off - become very uncomfortable addressing that broken promise, but it's still an inconvenient fact:

• We can't subsidize the San Francisco 49ers with $21 million in bonds paid off with tax increment - unless we extend the time limit of the Redevelopment Agency.

• That extension, or SB 211 amendment, utterly reduces the passthroughs payable to our City's General Fund. We lose a nominal $19.5 million over time.
  

There's not enough money to pay our city employees what we paid them a year ago, so they are foregoing this year's increase and taking 5.15% pay cuts. But at the same time, there's enough in that same General Fund to lose due to the 49ers' stadium subsidy?

Twice, I asked the city to demand that the 49ers make our General Fund whole, but twice, there was no direct response.

The passage of Measure J does not make any of this a "dead" issue, and it should not stop anyone from speaking out. Our city loses big time with the 49ers stadium subsidy - and Santa Clara Plays Fair urges residents to read up, learn, and tell their neighbors what this will truly cost us as a city.



Thanks for all of your support,
Bill Bailey, Treasurer,
Santa Clara Plays Fair

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49ers' Stadium Subsidy: Common Sense gets Sacked.

Dear Santa Clarans,


On Wednesday, Tom Barnidge of the Contra Costa Times did an excellent job of covering the RDA extension which passed First Reading by our City Council on Tuesday evening:

Common sense takes a beating with redevelopment funding

"...So maybe this is not a simple yea-or-nay issue. Maybe cutbacks and reforms can reinvent redevelopment. But there's no way California should give $40 million to the 49ers."

Schools? Or stadium subsidies? As a city, we can't have lost that much perspective on this one issue.

Common sense got sacked like Alex Smith this last Tuesday evening - and so did a promise our Council made to us much earlier.



Best regards,
Bill Bailey, Treasurer,
Santa Clara Plays Fair

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49ers Stadium Subsidy - and a Broken Promise.

Dear Santa Clarans,


Last night, City Council voted to accept the First Reading of the RDA Extension. By doing that, they confirmed that they were breaking a promise that they made to all Santa Clarans four years ago.

Back in January of 2007, Council was very clear. They approved, unanimously, the Guiding Principles for the 49ers' stadium subsidy. The very first one was a pledge to us that the stadium subsidy was not going to impact our General Fund, directly or indirectly. See page 4/4, Guiding Principle "1."

Yet, last night, Council voted to bleed $20,000,000 out of our city's General Fund over the new RDA lifetime. Click the little icon here, and see page 15/15.

Note the "($19.5)" (MILLION) in the lower half of the table after "City of Santa Clara." That is what our General Fund loses, and those are real dollars.

But this isn't news to anyone, is it? We saw this same table on the evening of June 2, 2009, when the Term Sheet was presented - but only at that meeting, and after the news cameras were switched off. The General Fund ripoff was quietly buried.

Santa Clarans, we are not getting the whole story on the $444M 49ers' Stadium Subsidy, and certainly not on what it is really going to cost us as a city.

We may want to prepare ourselves for even more broken promises.

The Public Hearing on this SB 211 amendment, or RDA Extension, will be held on Tuesday evening, March 15th, in Chambers at 7:00 pm.

Can you make it?


Thanks for all of your support,
Bill Bailey, Treasurer
Santa Clara Plays Fair

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49ers Stadium Subsidy: It's 12:15 am - Where are the '49ers' stadium boosters'?

Dear Santa Clarans,


City Council took up the easy work - and then some really hard work - in Tuesday evening's City Council Meeting.

The easy stuff was the rezoning of the Centennial Way area to stuff a subsidized stadium for the 49ers onto 20 acres - along with abandoning Centennial Way itself and 'plopping' a 175-foot-high stadium wall right next to one of the Youth Soccer Park fields.

The 'stadium boosters' persisted with the same incorrect and grossly-exaggerated statements about their stadium. Sorry, but no: You do not "create jobs" when you blow $444,000,000 only to make jobs that pay less than $6,600 a year (Let's use the 49ers' own numbers: 2,600 game day jobs. However, KMA's consultants have been telling us since June of 2007 - and again last June - that the best we can do is a $17M payroll for all of them. Less than seven thou a year is really lousy job creation - and the Term Sheet is a lousy stadium deal because of that.).

Anyway, the 'stadium spenders' walked out of City Hall a little after 9:00 pm - just in time for the Council to take up the hard work.

As you all know, our city is in serious financial trouble. The City Manager felt she had no choice but to go to the city's ten collective bargaining units and ask them to agree to no increases plus pay cuts of 5.15% - or otherwise almost certainly go through a round of layoffs which will probably lead to pink slips for city employees filling 81.75 positions.

The City Council Chamber was packed with AFSCME and IBEW members who argued against the City Manager's plan, but it passed on a 6-1 vote.

So, granted that Council had to approve the City Manager's plan for cuts-or-layoffs. But it's completely hypocritical to harp on the costs of compensating city employees out of the same General Fund that will be taking a massive hit from the 49ers stadium subsidy. If you want to speak of 'fiscal responsibility' on Warburton Drive, it all goes on the table: public employee compensation and the 49ers' stadium subsidy - not just the individual scapegoats that suit our narrow purposes at the moment.

Like it or not: The 49ers stadium subsidy will also cause continued General Fund shortfalls once we sign off on the RDA's issuance of stadium subsidy bonds. That will happen because the RDA cannot service the stadium subsidy bonds and still pay back our General Fund what it owes to us.

That's why we can only ask: Late last night, when it was time to make the really tough calls necessary to keep our city from going broke - where were the '49ers' stadium boosters'?

As usual, they were nowhere to be found. But after three-and-a-half years of similar City Council meetings, that no longer surprises me.

The rest of us Santa Clarans walked out of City Council Chambers at about 12:15 am this morning.



Thanks for your continuing support,
Bill Bailey, Treasurer,
Santa Clara Plays Fair

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