By Brian Doyle

In my view, the most egregious example of Santa Clara Councilmember Suds Jain’s lack of ethics was his violation of the Brown Act by relaying confidential closed-session information to both the Santa Clara Weekly and the 49ers shortly after he took office.

On December 9, 2020, Councilmember Jain exchanged text messages with Weekly editor Carolyn Schuk. In that conversation, he disclosed potentially confidential information about the City’s pending CVRA voting rights litigation and offered to forward confidential emails from me, as then–City Attorney, to her about that litigation. No councilmember should ever be offering to pass along the city attorney’s confidential litigation emails to a friendly media outlet.

A few weeks later, on January 19, 2021, the Santa Clara City Council and the Governing Board of the Santa Clara Stadium Authority held a special closed-session meeting. The purpose was to confer with legal counsel — me — about several pieces of litigation, including significant disputes with the 49ers over Levi’s Stadium.

The very next day, January 20, 2021, Councilmember Jain began texting with 49ers executive Rahul Chandhok about setting up a meeting the following Tuesday. Their texts make clear the meeting would involve stadium issues that had just been discussed in closed session.

According to the public calendars of Councilmembers Jain and Anthony Becker, Jain, Becker, and Kevin Park did in fact meet with 49ers representatives on Tuesday, January 26, 2021, at 1 p.m. Jain and Park later confirmed they attended, in response to reporting by the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Jain’s handwritten notes of that meeting show that at least Larry MacNeil and Rahul Chandhok were present, and they suggest that former Councilmember Patricia Mahan — who also served as an officer of Jed York’s “independent expenditure” committees — participated as well.

Those same notes show that Jain, Becker, and Park discussed the City’s litigation against the 49ers. The topics he wrote down match information that had been provided to the council by the city attorney in closed session, including his note that, except for the “termination of management agreement” case, settling the other litigation and arbitration matters would be “easy.”

All three council members then misled the public about the nature of this meeting. Although the planned purpose — later confirmed by Jain — was to discuss ongoing litigation with representatives of the 49ers, Jain’s public calendar describes it only as a “Meeting regarding Stadium Operations.” Becker used the same generic description. 

The meeting is missing entirely from Councilmember Park’s public calendar, even though he has admitted he attended. And although the invitation went to both MacNeil and Jas Saijjan, and Jain’s notes show MacNeil participated, the public calendars of Jain and Becker list only Chandhok as the 49ers’ representative.

In my professional judgment, the timing and content of these communications provide substantial evidence that the January 26 meeting was arranged so that Jain, Becker, and Park could share the City’s confidential and privileged legal information with the 49ers — who were, at that time, the City’s litigation adversaries. That is exactly what the Brown Act’s closed-session protections are designed to prevent, and it is a clear breach of the councilmembers’ fiduciary duty of loyalty to the City of Santa Clara.

Their misleading calendar entries and omissions also violated Santa Clara’s municipal code, which requires councilmembers to disclose, for each non-internal city-related appointment, the names and titles of all participants and a general description of the issues discussed.

As the former City Attorney who advised the council during this period, I believe this episode is not a minor technicality. It is a serious ethical and legal failure that goes to the heart of whether residents can trust their elected officials to protect the City’s interests in high-stakes disputes.

Brian Doyle is the former Santa Clara City Attorney.