The complicated process of building a new stadium for the San Francisco 49ers in Santa Clara has become more complex, as team officials appear poised to start their own initiative drive to develop the $937 million, 68,500-seat project.
At Tuesday night’s City Council meeting, during which members certified the project’s environmental impact report, a group of former civic officials said they are launching an initiative drive independent of the city’s stadium efforts. The group, called Santa Clarans for Economic Progress, includes former City Council members Pat Kolstad and Ardyth Parle, as well as Don Callejon, former superintendent for the Santa Clara Unified School District.
The stadium is proposed to be built on the periphery of California’s Great America amusement park, open since 1976.
Notice of the initiative should be filed with the city Thursday, according to Lisa Lang, vice president of communications for National Football League team, which has its headquarters in Santa Clara. She said the 49ers would fund the effort to gather 6,000 signatures, or 10 percent of registered city voters, to put an initiative to build the stadium on the June 8 primary election ballot.
She said the team and its political action group would start signature gathering activities later this month. The drive would have to be completed by late January.
A citizen’s initiative would have one major advantage over a city-sponsored stadium ballot measure, Lang said: a successful challenge to the project’s environmental impact report would not result in the approval being negated.
“The more we learned about the legal dynamics about the (California Environmental Quality Act) process, the more we realized a city ballot measure could be subject to delays to the project if an EIR challenge was successful,” Lang said.
But if it’s approved through a citizen’s initiative, such a challenge would not delay the project, Lang said.
“We feel the surer path to a timely binding vote is through the citizen’s initiative,” she said.
Team officials have said repeatedly they want to start building the stadium by 2012 and have it completed in time for the 2014 NFL season.
Santa Clara City Council members
Ray are still scheduled to finalize language on their own ballot measure at their Dec. 15 meeting, according to Ron Garratt, assistant city manager. However, he said they likely will discuss the 49ers’ stadium initiative and how it would affect their own measure at next week’s meeting.
“It’s up to the council,” Garratt said when asked if there could end up being two stadium measures on the June 8 ballot. “There could be two measures, but from a public policy perspective, when there are multiple measures on the same issue voted on at the same time -- as we have had happen in statewide elections -- people become confused.”
If the city’s measure and the team’s initiative both appeared on the June ballot, whichever measure received the highest number of affirmative votes would win out, according to Elizabeth H. Silver, Santa Clara’s interim city attorney.
Garratt said the city would not be out any money on the year-long process of compiling the EIR, since the 49ers paid for the review.
In a related stadium issue, Garratt said city officials were “a bit surprised” by the lawsuit filed Monday in Santa Clara County Superior Court against the project by Cedar Fair Entertainment Co., the Sandusky, Ohio-based company that owns California’s Great America and Gilroy Gardens. He said officials from Santa Clara and Cedar Fair have been meeting for months to hammer out an agreement to alleviate the company’s complaints about the stadium project.
“We’ve had some very positive meetings with them recently,” Garratt said. “We plan on going forward with the talks in the interest of coming to a resolution.”
Garratt said the biggest concern of
Ray Cedar Fair officials is about sharing parking lots with the stadium on the days of events, contending big crowds attending football games could adversely affect parking availability for park-goers.
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