The Santa Clara Convention Center is hemorrhaging money, revealing a pattern of mismanagement that calls into question why the city isn’t pressing for answers. 

Oak View Group (OVG), a private event management company, manages the convention center, a 100,000 sq. ft. venue at the heart of the city’s tourism economy. The city’s destination marketing organization (DMO), Discover Santa Clara, is responsible for marketing it.

The city maintains a tourism improvement district (TID), a collection of hotels near the convention center. Approximately $3 million in hotel taxes the city collects through the TID, called the tourism occupancy tax (TOT), funds the DMO.

The DMO’s publicly available board meeting packets reveal that in 2024/25, the organization booked a meager $266,978 in convention center revenue against a target of $1.9 million, just 14% of its goal.

OVG last reported to the Santa Clara City Council in June 2024.

That nearly two-year gap coincides with a period of significant underperformance, a federal indictment of the center’s management company and a California tax authority suspension of the DMO — a suspension kept quiet from the public.

Unexplained Reporting Gap

For years, the convention center’s financial performance was public record, presented quarterly to the council as a routine agenda item. But, that hasn’t been the case since the city formed the DMO.

The most recent report covered the third quarter of fiscal year (FY) 2023/24, through the end of March 2024. It showed the convention center on track for a profitable year, with gross revenue of $13.3 million year-to-date against a budget of $10.7 million.

But the reports have since dried up.

In an email, Janine De la Vega, the city’s public information officer, explained that the convention center has had a “major shift in management.” In April last year, the convention center’s finance manager resigned. Then, two months later in June, the general manager also resigned from OVG.

In October, OVG hired Raul Gutierrez as general manager and replaced the finance manager just last month. Since then, De la Vega wrote, the team has been “working hard to update the quarterly reports.” 

While that upheaval would understandably throw a wrench in the works, it only accounts for the reporting gap from June 2025 onward. It fails to explain the more-than-a-year gap in reporting prior to that.

Although the convention center is a public asset, OVG, a private Los Angeles-based venue management company, manages it. Because OVG is a private company, without the quarterly reports, the public lacks the means to evaluate its performance.

A Troubled Parent Company

In 2015, Tim Leiweke and Irving Azoff founded OVG. Backed by $1.34 billion in private-equity money, OVG has since grown into one of the largest venue management companies in the country. 

In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted Leiweke, OVG’s CEO, for arena management industry bid-rigging. He subsequently resigned. President Trump later pardoned Leiweke.

The indictment isn’t an isolated incident. In Connecticut, the Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) found that OVG steered a contract to Ticketmaster without the required bids or board approval, and that OVG lined its pockets with Ticketmaster bonuses earmarked for CRDA that weren’t disclosed to competing bidders. 

Such conduct at a publicly-owned venue is strikingly similar to what federal prosecutors alleged in Leiweke’s indictment.

Terms of OVG’s contract with the city are confidential, including what oversight the city exercises over OVG’s financial arrangements at the venue. Given that two people in management positions resigned right around the same time other OVG officials were implicated in chicanery is perhaps coincidental but telling. 

This presents a problem since the quarterly reports that would illuminate the center’s performance have screeched to a halt. And what the DMO packets show is unappealing.

Built to Drive Business, Struggling to Do It

In 2019, the city created Discover Santa Clara, a nonprofit. The DMO’s stated purpose is to drive business to the convention center by marketing the city as an event destination. 

By its own documents, it has largely failed at that core mission.

In addition to only achieving 14% of its revenue goal in 2024/25, the DMO also failed to book any Priority 1 events — i.e., events with 700 or more peak attendees and at least $650,000 in building spend — falling short of its goal of two. Throughout the year, the DMO lost 68 Priority 1 and Priority 2 leads to competing cities, representing an estimated $4.7 million in building spend and nearly 179,000 room nights that went elsewhere.

In a presentation to the city council earlier this month, Christine Lawson, Discover Santa Clara’s CEO, touted a 40% increase in sales leads. 

“We’ve started this momentum, and it is really important that we continue it,” she told the council.

However, leads are one of the least meaningful metrics for determining an organization’s financial health. Leads are meaningless if they don’t convert to sales. Using them as a metric is activity masquerading as productivity.

In addition, Lawson said, the DMO shifted how it spends its money, upping the percent of its budget dedicated to marketing from 20% to 70%. To do this, it funnelled money from sales and incentives. 

Market efforts often include establishing a social media presence, brand awareness, visitors’ guides and promotions — efforts difficult to quantify or tie to revenue. Sales, by contrast, are highly measurable. So, the DMO is shifting how it spends its money from demonstrable, measurable metrics to ones that are more fuzzy.   

A Suspension, Quietly Mentioned

Another fly in the ointment is that while the DMO was falling short of its targets, it was also operating under a legal cloud.

California Secretary of State records show that, in April 2024, the California Franchise Tax Board (FTB) suspended the DMO. A suspended nonprofit loses the right to conduct business and enter contracts in California — a significant legal disability for an organization managing millions in public money.

The suspension wasn’t publicly disclosed or reported to the council. It appeared in the public record after-the-fact in a single sentence, buried in the minutes of the DMO’s July 17, 2025 board meeting, where Lawson noted that “the DMO’s FTB suspension status has been lifted.” 

No suspension date, duration, cause or explanation of how the matter was resolved. Typically, the FTB suspends entities for failure to file required reports — a finding consistent with the DMO’s sparse public filing record.

What the Tax Records Reveal

IRS filings for Silicon Valley Santa Clara DMO Inc. reveal a pattern that raises governance questions.

The DMO has had at least three CEOs in five years. 

Eron Hodges served as founding chair and de facto leader in 2019/20. Matthew Stewart was CEO through 2021/22, earning $71,667 in his final year. 

In 2022/23, Lawson took the helm, collecting a $50,670 salary. The following year, Lawson’s pay skyrocketed to $278,915. No public explanation for that increase exists in any document reviewed.

In its founding year, an independent accountant compiled the DMO’s financial statements. Then that practice stopped. Since then, the DMO’s operations haven’t been subject to independent compilation, review, or audit. An organization receiving approximately $3 million annually in tourism money has only had its books independently verified once. 

Every year of the DMO’s operation has shown substantial management fees paid to non-employees. From 2021/22 to 2022/23, those fees ballooned from $163,113 to $204,739. Public filings don’t detail who received that money.

From the start, OVG has been embedded in governing the DMO. Kelly Carr, who the documents identify as an OVG360 representative, served on the DMO board from its founding year. By 2022/23, Carr held the position of treasurer — controlling the DMO’s finances — while simultaneously representing the company whose venue the DMO was charged with independently marketing. Carr resigned from the DMO board in July 2025, the same month the DOJ indicted Leiweke — yet another OVG top brass distancing itself from the city.

The DMO’s site no longer lists an OVG representative on its board of directors.

Years after the fact, the DMO also filed an amended return for 2020/21, noting it was correcting multiple items including government grant revenue from the city “that was not previously reported.” Although Santa Clara’s hotel-room tax — channeled through the TID as grants — fund the DMO, its IRS filings show no sponsorships, program service revenue, or membership income, pointing to minimal engagement with the industry it serves 

Failing to disclose public funding sources on a nonprofit tax return is more than a minor administrative error.

The City’s Role

In IRS filings, the DMO acknowledges that “the corporation’s performance of its stated purpose is subject to review by the Santa Clara City Council.” That review has been largely absent.

De la Vega wrote that the DMO intends to come to the council “soon” with the delinquent reports — implicitly acknowledging their absence. No timeline was given.

Since neither the DMO nor OVG have reported to the council in a long time, it is unclear whether the city is aware that the convention center is floundering. 

However, Reena Brillot, the city’s director of economic development and sustainability, sits on the DMO board.

Further, Mayor Lisa Gillmor, who has been publicly associated with both the decision to create the DMO and the OVG management arrangement, was a panelist at a DMO-hosted event alongside OVG’s convention center general manager and Lawson — the two principals whose performance the missing reports would illuminate. 

Emails to Lawson and Gutierrez went unanswered.

Several things remain unclear. Why have the convention center reports stopped? What has the convention center’s financial performance looked like for the nearly two unreported years? Who received the management fees disclosed in the DMO’s tax filings? What caused the FTB to suspend the DMO? For how long was it operating in a legally suspended state? How does a CEO whose organization hit 14% of its revenue target justify a $278,915 salary?

The city has offered no answers. The reports that would provide them are still missing.

Contact David Alexander at d.todd.alexander@gmail.com