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.