Oct 19, 2022, 4:33pm PDT
Released last week, the grand jury report raised questions about the 49ers management of Levi's Stadium and the team's interaction with the five-member so-called majority bloc on the Council. The NFL team, which has played at the city-owned stadium since it opened in 2014, has contracts with Santa Clara to manage the venue for both games and other events held there.
According to the grand jury's report, which has the pointed title of"Unsportsmanlike Conduct," Becker and four of his colleagues — Hardy, Chahal, Kevin Park, and Vice Mayor Sudhanshu"Suds" Jain — who together comprise the majority bloc, met with lobbyists for the 49ers behind closed doors, possibly in violation of state open-meetings laws. Many of those meetings took place around the time of votes by the Council on matters concerning the 49ers, according to the report.
The City Council doesn't need to appoint an outside ethics commission to examine the council's behavior, Park said at the meeting. The Council already has an internal committee that could do that job and work up a response to the grand jury's investigation, he said.I feel that in our zeal to be open and to be kind, we're kind of needlessly putting together commissions and committees that we don't actually need their processes for," Park said.