Op-ed: Relocating Santa Clara City Hall at the cost of downtown again?

Santa Clara is on the verge of repeating one of the most painful mistakes in its history.

For those new citizens to Santa Clara, the city has the distinction of being the only city in America to demolish its own downtown. In the 2017 Mercury News article “The worst local decisions of the last 50 years,” Scott Herhold wrote: “No land-use decision of the last half-century has damaged the urban fabric of a city more than Santa Clara’s decision to tear down its eight-block downtown in the 1960s.”

In 1957, Santa Clara secured millions of federal and local dollars to restore its historic downtown. But those funds were diverted — used instead to build a “modern” City Hall on new Civic Center lands away from downtown. By 1962, downtown Santa Clara was demolished. Today, a jumble of unrelated office buildings, strip malls and apartments surrounded by acres of unused parking lots is the carcass of a once booming downtown.

Ironically, seven decades later, those same lands may again be sold off or sacrificed once again to finance another City Hall move that was not a 2025 city priority — and that distinctly undermines the 2025 priority of returning downtown to Santa Clara. During a special December City Council meeting, Santa Clara’s leadership approved more than $20 million as a potential first step to relocating City Hall to the former Agnews state mental hospital site — a massive decision that was not a city priority, has no community consensus and no transparency about its impact on citizen-owned land.

This signals something that should deeply concern every Santa Claran: the possible sell-off of citizens’ Civic Center lands — tens of millions of dollars’ worth of land that belongs to every resident of this city. This, after asking the same citizens to approve a $400 million bond to fix roads, storm drains and renovations after years of City Hall’s poor budgeting and mismanagement.

Terms like “budget transfers” and “future needs” were used to justify this. Let’s be clear: This goes beyond technical budget adjustments, into choices that will define Santa Clara’s civic identity for generations. These decisions are being made through financial sleight-of-hand — without open debate and without a clear council policy or a public vision for what Santa Clara wants to become.

The 1957 dollars that bought those Civic Center lands were originally promised to rebuild downtown Santa Clara — City Hall was literally built on a broken promise. If there is justice in civic planning, it’s this: The Civic Center lands that cost Santa Clara its downtown must be the foundation that brings it back. Before selling or repurposing any of these properties, our city leaders owe residents full transparency. Which parcels are being studied? What is their value? How will these actions serve the downtown master plan? And most importantly — why is the future of Santa Clara’s civic life being decided without us?

Relocating City Hall is not a “facilities upgrade.” It is a choice about who we are. It determines whether Santa Clara will remain a bedroom city with no downtown or become one that finally restores a proud destination point for its citizens. Our downtown’s destruction was the downpayment for this Civic Center. It is therefore appropriate that some of the Civic Center acreage be used as leverage to return a complete downtown Santa Clara.

The blame of “the worst local land use decision in the last 50 years” falls on the management and councils of the late 1950s. By passing yet again on the rebuilding of downtown, our current city manager and council are making the worst land use decision of the next 50 years.

Dan Ondrasek, Mary Grizzle, Donna West and Isabella Ondrasek are members of the volunteer group Reclaiming Our Downtown, who since 2016 have been trying to return downtown to its original location in Santa Clara.