Pat Kolstad - San Francisco 49ers Point Man

Kolstad

Pat Kolstad was a Santa Clara city councilmember from November 2000 to November 2008 and after sitting out for two years to circumvent California term limit requirements, Kolstad came back to the city council in 2010. Kolstad was one of a band of politicians, ex-politicians and bureaucrats who formed a front group for the San Francisco 49ers in 2010 to get an initiative passed to allow the building of a publicly subsidized and publicly owned football stadium in Santa Clara for the San Francisco 49ers. Pat Kolstad repeatedly called this group a "grassroots organization" when in reality it was just a conduit for the San Francisco 49ers to pour over four million dollars of propaganda into a city election as detailed in their Form 460.

Ballot Measure versus Initiative

By giving the voters an initiative versus the ballot measure that the Stadium Five canceled in favor of the initiative , Kolstad and the San Francisco 49ers and their front group Santa Clarans for Economic Progress did two things:

1. A ballot initiative can be written as an advocacy piece, whereas the city council's ballot measure would have had to have been more objective and truthful and detail the negative consequences of a Santa Clara San Francisco 49ers stadium.
2. Preventing lawsuits based on the negative environmental impacts of the stadium. And when you cram a 68,500 seat 14 acre stadium onto a 17 acre lot with no nearby parking and residential neighborhoods nearby, there are certainly going to be plenty of negative environmental impacts.