By Robert Haugh
After nine months of meetings, revisions and mounting criticism, the Santa Clara City Council has abandoned plans for a charter overhaul on the November ballot.
Only one piece survived.
At its July 14 meeting, the Council unanimously approved a separate measure allowing the City to use alternative contracting methods for major public works projects.
The rest of the Charter Review Committee’s work is dead for this election.
Santa Clara’s 13-member committee spent roughly nine months reviewing the City’s governing document.
The original goal was to reorganize the charter, modernize outdated language and bring it in line with current laws and City operations.
The proposed draft would have cut the charter from 18 articles to nine, added a glossary and reorganized large sections of the document.
But the project grew into a much broader rewrite of how Santa Clara government operates.
The recommendations were divided into three categories by City Attorney Glen Googins: routine cleanup, substantive but supposedly uncontroversial changes, and more contentious proposals.
That system quickly broke down.
Several Council members questioned whether changes labeled routine were actually significant.
Others warned that provisions described as clarifications could shift authority among the Council, City Manager, City Attorney and other elected officials.
Mayor Lisa Gillmor and Council Members Kevin Park and Kelly Cox repeatedly raised concerns about vague language, weak guardrails and moving key rules out of the charter and into future ordinances.
“Residents would be ratifying a shell that says, ‘there shall be rules,’ without knowing what those rules will actually say and with no further say once the framework is approved,” Gillmor said.
The process also drew criticism for lack of public participation.
A Charter Review Committee member even acknowledged that the committee should have received more public input.
Rather than send voters a complicated package without broad Council support, the Council scrapped the overhaul.
The lone survivor was a narrower measure allowing design-build and best-value contracting for public works projects costing at least $250,000.
The Council appointed Suds Jain and Karen Hardy to draft the ballot argument – the same team with Raj Chahal that led the effort to change the City Charter in 2024.
That effort was to get rid of the directly elected Police Chief and City Clerk.
During the 2024 Measure B campaign, they used the endorsement of a Police Chief who died 36 years earlier. No kidding.
Eric: not allowing the public to attend and comment in the sub committee meetings is a closed meeting. discussing it after the fact does not allow ideas and information to flow.
I agree with the Mayor and City Council. Why change things that have worked well for years. Only minor changes were needed.
The Chart Committee did propose changes based on a rating of Level 1 – just cleanup, Level 2 – improvements and 3 – major change. The current charter needs changes to bring it up to current law and the way the city does business. Not trivial and was the basis for Level 1 cleanup. Why the city council chose to ignore the Level 1 recommendations is a good question that should be asked.
“The original goal was to reorganize the charter, modernize outdated language and bring it in line with current laws and City operations.” How about bringing the laws and operations into compliance with the charter? There’s a thought.
Did I understand correctly that the public was barred from these meetings? Is that even possible? I was on the review committee that introduced the ballot measure implementing term limits and the public was always invited and at the end of the meetings, allowed to speak.
Things have changed, and not for the better, sad to say.
I’ll try and clear this up since I served on the CRC (this is solely my own opinion).
Subcommittee meetings not being open to the public isn’t a departure from past practice or a legal shortcut. It’s how this kind of work is normally structured, and I believe (I’m not a lawyer, but we had several lawyers in attendance at the meetings) this is within the legal aspects of the Brown Act.
The full 13-member CRC divided into six subcommittees so we could cover the workload in nine months instead of two years. Splitting a large body into smaller working groups below quorum is standard practice for exactly this reason. It’s the same logic the state legislature, county boards, and most city commissions use for committee structures.
Every recommendation that came out of a subcommittee was then brought back and discussed at the full CRC meetings, which were open, noticed, and included public comment, same as always. Nothing was finalized in a subcommittee. The subcommittees drafted, and the full committee vetted and voted in public.
If you want an analogy from the Council side: staff research an item before it comes to Council, developing a recommendation through internal analysis and drafts that aren’t public. Then the item and staff’s recommendation are presented and debated at an open Council meeting. Nobody considers that “barred from the process,” because the deliberation and vote that actually matters happens in public. The CRC subcommittees worked the same way.
So no, the public wasn’t barred from the CRC’s actual decision-making. What happened Monday was that the Council, after those open deliberations played out over nine months, decided not to advance most of the package to the ballot. That’s a separate question from how the CRC did its work.
One thing I’ll add to the issue of transparency: the final city council vote happened around 1:30am on July 15 is a legitimate problem, separate from the subcommittee question. Late-night votes are a real barrier to public participation regardless of how open the meeting technically was. Very few residents can stay up that late on a weeknight, and it effectively narrows “public input” to whoever can outlast the agenda. That’s worth raising with the Council as its own issue.
Recommendation for future charter amendments: Limit speaking time of councilmembers who constantly repeat themselves and waste public and staff time.
This is amazing. The City Council actually does something that is *good* for the city …
Actually, they just refrained from doing something bad. Not quite as laudable.
And it is an election year. Their decisions are damage control now. If that’s possible.
Ok, well at least more than two of them realized this was not a good idea to put it on the ballot.
Good decision.