Remember Jack and his beanstalk? Last month, the Santa Clara city council was asked to agree to an Exclusive Negotiating Agreement (ENA) to trade the civic center for a handful of beans up north in Agnews. Except these aren’t a magic beanstalk to a bag of gold. All the city will get is … more beans.
But this isn’t new in Santa Clara. The city has a recent history of signing away its land in ENAs without enforcement or penalties.
Let’s walk down memory lane.
First was Joe Montana’s ENA for eight acres on Tasman. All Santa Clara got from that was a visit to the city council from the retired football star. The project floated around for years until it was absorbed into the next magic beans project.
Enter Related with a 240-acre bag of beans. It’s been more than 10 years since Related moved in with its carpet bags. Today, instead of Santana Row North we have a vacant lot and a plan to (maybe) build data centers. The council doesn’t even bother to put project updates on the agenda anymore.
And let’s not forget the ENA with Republic Metropolitan for college-dorms-posing-as-affordable housing. That dragged on for so long that the law changed, and the project might have put Santa Clara in violation of the Surplus Land Act (SLA) had the council’s summer hiatus not caused it to expire. The icing on this cake was that another local developer made an offer on the parcel — which never saw the light of day. The land is still a train station parking lot.
Now, Valley Oak Partners is offering the city another batch of beans, in an offer to trade the civic center for part of Oracle’s Agnews campus. These beans are a proposal to move city hall from the city’s historical center to an industrial area on the border of North San José. You don’t have to be a professional city planner to know that neglecting the social implications of such a decision is a surefire plan for failure.
This proposal arrived at the May 19 council meeting as an exclusive negotiating agreement and a declaration of surplus land for the civic center, despite no prior public discussion or public knowledge about any discussions taking place.
Here’s the entire public history of this ENA.
Real estate negotiations about 4220 Network Circle (“Agnews”) appear exactly once on a closed session agenda: on Sept 24, 2025. Two meetings with Valley Oak Partners appear on city officials’ calendars: a meeting with the city manager in April 2024, and a meeting with the mayor in October 2023.
Back in January, the city manager’s letter to the community said that “Findings will be presented at a public meeting this spring, giving the City Council and the community the opportunity to review and provide input. Community engagement will be central throughout the process, ensuring decisions are informed by data, shared priorities, and long-term planning.”
None of these have taken place. Nonetheless, a complete ENA has apparently materialized fully formed. Either that, or there were a lot of meetings and work going on out of view of the community and even the city council. Readers can make their own judgments about whether this is what people commonly understand as “transparency.”
Like the previous ENA fiascos, this is another example of long-term city strategy and policy taking a back seat to magic beans promising a free lunch for some civic goal.
But criticism without a road forward is just venting. So, what should Santa Clara actually do?
Defining the long-term strategic interests of the city and policies for achieving them should be discussed in public and agreed on before any negotiating happens — not after. That’s how our neighbor to the north, Sunnyvale, arrived where that city is today, with a marquee city hall and civic center. Sunnyvale spent nearly a decade on public engagement, master planning and financing before breaking ground. It opened its new city hall in 2023.
In the end, the ENA died that Tuesday night. That’s a good start, but only a start. Next, we need to figure out where we want to go before we map out the route to get there.
Santa Clara got federal money in the 1960s to destroy & rebuild Downtown.
City Hall was moved to the outskirts.
That money is Downtown money. Any sale or exchange of the 10 acre City Hall site on Warburton must be used to rebuild Downtown.
The council did not approve the city manager’s ENA request but council members Suds Jain and Karen Hardy were able to keep afloat the plan to move City Hall to Agnews. The council previously OK’d spending up to $20,000,000 to investigate the move.
This is all absurd. The Agnew site is not central to anything. It is on the border of Milpitas and has major traffic, noise (flight path), and odor (sewage treatment plant) issues … as well as being historically designated. All of these issues diminish the value of the Agnew site. In comparison, the City Hall 10 acres on Warburton is Silicon Valley’s prime site for residential high density housing.
City Hall should be brought back Downtown. Downtown is centrally located for civic business and public events. It was laid out that way in the 1860s, next to SCU, and centered around the Town Plaza (now Mission Library). All major roads connect Downtown to San Jose (The Alameda), to Los Gatos & Campbell (Bascom Ave), to Saratoga (Saratoga Ave), and to Sunnyvale & Los Altos (Homestead & El Camino). The only road connecting Agnews is Montague Expressway. Bring City Hall back Downtown. Sell the extremely valuable ($100,000,000 or more) 10 acre site on Warburton for high density housing and rebuild City Hall on one of the empty Downtown blocks facing Lafayette!
👏 BRAVO! BRAVO! BRAVO! Skip Pearson 👏
Whether people agree or disagree with every point, this argument raises a fundamental question Santa Clara residents should be asking:
If federal urban renewal money helped remove Downtown’s civic heart decades ago, shouldn’t the value created from public land be used to restore and strengthen Downtown today?
The vision is straightforward:
1) Bring City Hall back to the historic center of Santa Clara.
2) Place civic functions where residents can easily access them.
3) Support Downtown businesses, events, and community life.
4) Use the value of the Warburton property to invest in the future of Downtown.
5) Build housing on one of the most valuable residential sites in Silicon Valley.
Meanwhile, critics of the Agnews proposal continue to point out concerns about location, traffic congestion, flight-path noise, proximity to the wastewater treatment plant, and historic preservation constraints.
The larger debate is not simply about moving a building.
It is about where Santa Clara’s civic center belongs.
For more than a century, the answer was Downtown, adjacent to Santa Clara University, connected by major transportation corridors, and centered around the historic plaza area near the Mission Branch Library.
Many residents believe the future of Downtown depends on restoring that civic presence rather than moving it farther away.
Downtown was once the heart of Santa Clara.
Maybe it’s time to make it the heart of Santa Clara again. ❤️
I couldn’t agree more that the idea of moving City Hall to the old Agnews site has many problems and should only be considered after very thorough analysis. The idea of moving City Hall back into the Old Quad (there is no Downtown Santa Clara) is not a really good idea. I know many “old timers” like to imagine a rebuilt downtown like Campbell or Saratoga but the old downtown vanished when I was about 5 years old. I am old now so that was a long time ago. It is long gone and can never come back once the City allowed the apartment development east of Jackson St. in the 80’s. The Old Quad is in a little used corner of the City. It is hard to find and most people in the valley never go by it. Any commercial in a new “downtown” in the Old Quad would not prosper. Putting a City Hall on the limited remaining developable land would accomplish nothing but increase traffic on local streets. The existing City Hall (including the long empty Police Station) is getting old and has a lot of developable land. A better idea is to look at selling a portion of the existing site and use that profit to reconstruct or remodel the existing buildings.