Milestones: The Scam! – Opinion

Stadium lights against dark night sky background. Soccer match lights.

Santa Clara residents have been scammed.

The $30 million deficit facing the city is the doing of Mayor Gillmor and her overpaid and underperforming City Manager, Deanna Santana.

Santa Clara has a partnership with one of the most successful NFL franchises in America, the San Francisco 49ers.

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Gillmor realized 40% of voters were not in favor of the stadium, so she and her prior Council cronies catered to these voters and declared the 49ers as evil, money-sucking billionaires’ intent on running Santa Clara. What a sham.

Gillmor has been tooting this horn of dishonest disparagement for the past six years, which has cost the City millions. The 49ers just keep doing what they do, community events, raising millions for non-profits, supporting Santa Clara schools, and playing great football.

Based on a fabricated “noise report,” nighttime events such as concerts, and big star attractions created excessive noise which was a “disturbance” to residents a mile away. Therefore, late night events were prohibited and City Manager Santana enforced the prohibition enthusiastically.

The results have been unbelievable.

Santa Clara was earning on average over a million dollars per major event. The City now gets nothing. Even though the 49ers fire off pyrotechnics at every game, Santana prohibited the Rolling Stones from firing their rockets at their show’s climax.

Santa Clara has a premier stadium that was designed and built to bring the city millions. And it did, until Mayor Gillmor perceived the 49ers franchise to be her stairway to the political stars and retain her stranglehold over the City. She and her Council declared the stadium produced too much noise so late-night events were cancelled and prohibited.

How can a City Manager arbitrarily eliminate major money-making shows at Levi Stadium, reduce stadium and City revenue by millions of dollars and then raise her own compensation to $800,000 a year?

This is calculated corruption at its core!

Santa Clara’s new City Council has taken the first major step in cleaning up City exploitation by terminating the devious and deceiving City Attorney Brian Doyle.

Now the Santa Clara Council needs to reinstate major nighttime events at Levi’s billion-dollar venue and deal with the outrageous actions of Santana and Gillmor who have created this financial mess.

It’s time to scuttle the scam and the scammers!

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View Comments (1)

  • The 49'ers should be the City's best partner.. Instead Gillmor has alienated them and made they the bad guys. Fix it. Sit down and fix it. Gillmor seems to need to have an enemy (any enemy) to make noise about. Fix the problem. Maybe it is the Mayor and her overpaid staff!!!!