The Zong

It turns out that Matier & Ross have a few dogs sniffing around the Niners’ Santa Clara plans, and it looks as if building professional sports stadiums still costs a lot of money, even if you build it in a dipshit burg like the S to the C.

One way or the other, the San Francisco 49ers will ask Santa Clara residents to pick up as much as $200 million in costs for the team’s planned new football stadium next to the Great America amusement park, according to sources close to the team.

Hey, that’s only about $2,000 per resident!  How much are season tickets?

Specifically, the Niners have their eye on two chunks of public land and tens of millions in cash reserves from the city’s self-run electric utility, Silicon Valley Power, the sources say.

The team decided to make a play for the utility’s cash after concluding that obtaining development rights from the city — and spinning off development profits to pay for the stadium’s construction — alone wasn’t going to provide enough money.

As it stands, the Santa Clara City Charter forbids any entity but Silicon Valley Power from using those cash reserves. So the Niners are contemplating asking the City Council to place a charter amendment on the ballot as early as November asking voters to OK the deal.

Sounds complicated, although not any more complicated than cleaning up Hunter’s Point. Still, while I thought that one of the reasons the 49ers gave for rejecting the San Francisco proposal was because it involved a parking structure and commercial spaces, one of the Santa Clara plans involves just that:

In addition to the utility money, sources say the Niners are still pursuing the idea of Santa Clara putting up two pieces of real estate — some 15 acres of Great America’s parking lot (for both the new stadium and a parking structure), and 11 acres across the street where they hope to work a deal for office or commercial development.

What the fuck?  Add this to a list of reasons that I suspect the Santa Clara deal is simply there because John York didn’t get enough fruit baskets from Gavin Newsom last Valentine’s Day.

- M.G.