Ryan: Outside spending isn’t new to Santa Clara — judge the candidates, not the noise

In 2007, I helped found Santa Clara Plays Fair, the grassroots group that organized against a public subsidy for a 49ers stadium, a fight that became Measure J in 2010.

We were outspent roughly 160 to 1: more than $4 million from the team against our roughly $25,000. We lost. I have no illusions about what this team is willing to spend to promote its positions and its preferred candidates in Santa Clara.

I also know that outside spending in this city did not start with the 49ers. For years, the Santa Clara Police Officers Association and development interests were the dominant outside spenders in local elections, putting hundreds of thousands of dollars into City Council races. The team added another player to a system that outside money has shaped for a long time.

Independent expenditure committees also make their own decisions, and those decisions change. In past elections, the team’s committees supported Karen Hardy in 2022 and Kevin Park in 2024. This year, both are running for mayor, and the team’s committee is backing a different candidate. By law, these committees cannot coordinate with a campaign. A candidate cannot direct them, cannot stop them and does not answer to them.

What a candidate can control is her own campaign, and that is where Kimberley Williams has made her choice. She agreed to the city’s voluntary spending limit. Her opponent did not. Kimberley is also the only District 2 council candidate publicly supporting Proposition 4, which would allow public financing of elections. Public financing minimizes the impact of special interest money and creates real pathways for candidates who could not otherwise afford to run. New York City’s public financing program helped elect Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Santa Clara needs leaders who focus on solutions rather than old disagreements.

Santa Clara’s council has also grown more diverse in these election cycles, better reflecting the Asian American community that makes up a substantial share of our city. Kimberley, the mother of a biracial child, is raising her family in that Santa Clara and understands what it means for a council to reflect its community.

I understand why outside spending unsettles people. Voters deserve to know who is funding what, and that information should be easy to find. But a campaign that is only about spending totals tells residents nothing about who will show up to meetings prepared, return their calls and make sound decisions.

So let me talk about Kimberley. She has spent more than 15 years in higher education leadership, learning how to bring people with different priorities together to find solutions that last. Long before this campaign, she gave years of volunteer service through PTA leadership at the local, council, district and state levels. She sits on the California State PTA Board of Managers and its Legislative Action Committee, and she is president of the Santa Clara Schools Foundation. That is a record built over more than a decade, not assembled for an election.

Look at the broad range of organizations and individuals who have chosen to support her. Those endorsements required rigorous questionnaires and interviews before boards decided. I ask Santa Clara voters to look past a manufactured narrative rooted in an old feud with the 49ers, and to evaluate the District 2 candidates on who has the skills, temperament and record of showing up for our community.

I encourage every voter to watch the recording of the Chamber of Commerce candidate forum, co-sponsored by San José Spotlight, and to judge each candidate on what they actually said, not on a running tally of outside spending.

Michele Ryan is a Santa Clara resident and a co-founder of Santa Clara Plays Fair, the grassroots group that organized in opposition to the 2010 stadium subsidy measure. She is a California-credentialed teacher and administrator with more than a decade of experience in public education.