By Suds Jain
This week Robert posted twice on my request to have City Council discuss use of the parking lot at the Youth Soccer Park for Stadium events when there are no soccer events at the YSP. I even said soccer has absolute priority.
There was no mention of Measure R in either of those posts even though Robert knows that Measure R provides essentially iron-clad protections against using the soccer fields for anything but soccer. In my pitch at the council meeting for putting a discussion on a future council agenda, I read the actual text of Measure R which requires a 2/3 supermajority vote of Santa Clara voters to sell, lease or change the use of our parkland. That is an extremely high bar.
I have often complained about biased postings by Robert and consider his clearly intentional omission of any reference to protections guaranteed by Measure R to be another example of bias.
So what am I trying to do. All non-profits in Santa Clara struggle financially. Grants of $10,000 or $20,000 can make a huge difference in the health of our non-profits. Presumably this also applies to Santa Clara Youth Soccer League which is a 501c3 Non-Profit that had a loss of $21,333 in 2017.
There are 135 parking spots at the YSP. Assuming two are used for Porta-potties, that leaves 133 parking spots. I guess people would pay $50 per spot and Mayor Gillmor thinks it could be much more. At $50 for 133 spots, the gross revenue would be $6650 per event. Let’s say operations overhead and maintenance is 50%, gives us $3325 per event. There are at least 8 NFL home games and about 12 ticketed non-NFL events per year. Twenty events results in $66,500 net revenue per year maximum because I imagine there would be many soccer events that coincide with ticketed events so ALL the spaces would be reserved for soccer.
My proposal is that, since this is City land protected explicitly in Measure R, the City should hire a parking management company and charge for parking. The 49ers would have nothing to do with the operation and would receive not even a dime from this paid parking arrangement.
Editor’s Note: Suds Jain is the District 5 Santa Clara City Councilmember. We provided him an opportunity to respond to articles we published last week.
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