By Brian Doyle

Every Santa Clara Art and Wine Festival has a “free speech” zone where people are permitted to set up tables, chairs and canopies to express their opinions under our Constitution. 

There were tables for five of the six candidates for Mayor this year. I visited all of them and I talked with Kathy Watanabe and David Kertes who spoke freely and thoughtfully. 

Gary Ferraris was quite another interaction.

I told Mr. Ferraris that I did not know him and wanted to know why he wanted to be Mayor. His response was a very vague explanation that as a retired city employee he thought he could get the City Manager to do a better, more efficient job of getting city workers to perform public works. He didn’t say how he would do this.

When asked about his source of income, he said that he was an employee of one of the city unions and that he intended to keep the job if he were elected Mayor. This prompted me to ask whether he wouldn’t have a conflict of interest in making decisions about city labor contracts. He said he would just recuse himself. 

Based upon my knowledge of state conflict of interest law and how the city conducts labor negotiations, I informed him that because the City Council considers the City’s entire budget projections in closed session, he probably would have to recuse himself from all of the labor negotiations, not just sessions that dealt with the union that employed him. 

(When I later learned that the firefighters’ union had endorsed Mr. Ferraris, I wondered whether they considered that he might be excluded from any decisions about their contract.)

I then asked him how he would accomplish his only stated goal of improving worker effectiveness, if he would be excluded from any decisions about the topic. He did not have an answer.

The other topic that I brought up with Mr. Ferraris was the massive amount of spending that the 49ers were set to spend on getting him elected. When he told me that “there was nothing he could do about that”, I told him “come on, I wasn’t buying that”, especially since the other candidates – except for Kimberley Williams – had managed to get the 49ers not to spend the money.

When asked whether he had spoken to the 49ers, Mr. Ferraris got very nervous. He admitted he had spoken to someone named Elijah and a woman whose name he didn’t give me. 

When asked what they spoke about, he told me that it was “private”. After pressing him a little further, he said that he told them how he felt about the relationship and that they seemed to like his response.

I asked him whether he would continue to hide his communications with the 49ers if he were elected mayor, he said that he would. When I then brought up the fact that refusing to report the conversations would be a violation of the City’s calendaring ordinance, he got a “deer in the headlights” look on his face. Clearly this man had not done his homework.

I walked away from this conversation with the impression that Mr. Ferraris would be a uniquely ineffective choice for Mayor. He advocated no real issues that most voters are concerned about except for labor issues that he would likely be excluded from. His connection with the 49ers would be a cloud over every vote he would take regarding Stadium finances. His lack of any experience in city governance would demand a steep learning curve in effectively running council meetings and in following state law and city policies.

Gary Ferraris is simply too clueless to be mayor of Santa Clara.

Brian Doyle is a longtime Santa Clara resident and served as the City Attorney from 2017 to 2021.