From my posting history I think people know that I'm not going to hesitate to call York an idiot or the 9ers org a trash fire these days.
I say this to say that IN THIS CASE I seriously don't think that's what's going on.
The basic issue is that it's basically impossible to get a stadium publicly financed in California, and the 49ers were the first to get it done in decades.
Compared to most publicly financing boondoggles Santa Clara actually got a pretty good deal (def better than Seattle did), once you accept that ANY public financing for sports stadiums is a raw deal.
Basically to get it done the Yorks and the Santa Clara city council shoved it through. There was ALWAYS major opposition to it, as there should have been.
What's happening now is that with the 9ers sucking donkey balls those who opposed it are grandstanding, and doing everything they can to drum up support among their constituency as having been "right along."
The real "tell" on this that if you actually read the reporting the S.C. City Council has basically been acting crazy if you think they're serious, but are acting totally rationally if you think they're just pandering to the base of voters who (quite smartly) never wanted the 49ers in Santa Clara to begin with.
Examples:
*The city council wanted to sue when the 9ers took the one-time option to re-set the terms of the lease as based on a pre-agreed upon formula, even though all of this had already been mutually agreed upon and negotiated as something they could do in the contract.
*The City Council announced on the steps of City Hall that they were going to hold the 9ers in breach of contract unless they delivered the financials to city hall, rather than them going down the block to where those documents are held. Even Florio, the biggest troll ever (and also a lawyer) said this was patently ridiculous grandstanding and that it's totally standard for people to travel to financial documents rather than the reverse, which he had never even heard of before.
*The whole craziness about turning a kid's soccer field into a parking lot: This was always part of the what had been agreed upon by the city and the team. As I recall as part of the contract the 9ers were supposed to pay for twice as many new fields for kids to play on in Santa Clara in exchange for the space that would be taken up by the parking lot. When it was actually supposed to go down though the anti-stadium folks turned it into a "kicking out the kids story", so the 49ers, after saying that this was all part of the plan and they were footing the bill to build twice as much recreational space for the kids, then said they'd build four times the recreational space for the kids just as a sign of good faith, but that got rejected too.
None of this changes the simple fact that the relationship between the team and the Santa Clara City Council is a total disaster, but I really don't think blaming the 9ers FO on this is correct.
There's TONS of stuff to blame them for (I'm more than happy to go through that list, but it will take a while :lol: ), but this ain't one of them.
