The two Santa Clara City Council seats on this fall's ballot will be handed to people who have never held them — and one of the four candidates is openly campaigning to end the city's decade-long war with the San Francisco 49ers over Levi's Stadium.

Districts 2 and 3 open simultaneously — both incumbents termed out, one leaving to run for the also-open mayor's office — letting a single election reconstitute a council defined for a decade by two fights: the litigation war with the 49ers over the publicly owned stadium, and the court order that forced Santa Clara to elect its members by district. Mainstream roundups covered the résumés; the real story is the balance of power the winners inherit.

Districts 2 and 3 are both open because Councilmembers Raj Chahal and Karen Hardy are termed out in December, with Hardy leaving to run for mayor. That mayoral seat is open too: longtime Mayor Lisa Gillmor, the council's most persistent 49ers antagonist, is termed out at the end of the year. In a single election, then, Santa Clara is reconstituting a council defined for a decade by two fights — the one with the football team, and the court battle that forced the city to elect its members by district in the first place. The candidate roundups have covered the résumés. The stakes are the balance of power.

Four newcomers are running. In District 2, Chahal's seat, Yvonne Inciarte, 37 — a former director of intergovernmental strategy for Rep. Ro Khanna — faces Kimberley Williams, 48, a longtime PTA and schools-foundation organizer. In District 3, Hardy's seat, Planning Commission chair Eric Crutchlow, 66, a cybersecurity product manager, faces Kyle Madej, 45, a Santa Clara native who runs private security firms. Their stated priorities overlap almost entirely: housing costs, public safety, aging infrastructure and a city budget in deficit. On paper it is the blandest kind of local race.

In interviews with San José Spotlight for its candidate roundup, though, the candidates were more revealing about what actually divides City Hall. Crutchlow, who chairs the Planning Commission, contrasted that body's habit of reaching consensus with what he described as unhelpful tension among councilmembers. Williams went at the sorest point directly: she is campaigning to mend Santa Clara's relationship with the 49ers, casting Levi's Stadium as a shared responsibility that neither the team nor the city benefits from seeing fail.

That is not a throwaway line. Santa Clara and the 49ers spent years in overlapping lawsuits over who controls and profits from the publicly owned stadium the team plays in — over rent, over late-night concert curfews, over who runs non-NFL events. An earlier deal, San José Spotlight reported↗ (external source, opens in a new tab), had the team put up $2 million toward contested game-day policing bills. Then, in May 2024, the same account reported, the city's Stadium Authority — the council sitting under another name — approved a deal it said would route about $20 million to Santa Clara over two years and close out the last remaining litigation. The vote was 5-2, with Mayor Lisa Gillmor among the two opposed. Gillmor called it a "loan-shark type deal." She has been the council's most consistent opponent of the 49ers' influence at City Hall, which is exactly why a District 2 candidate running to "repair" that relationship is a signal, not small talk.

The other, quieter inheritance on this ballot is the district map the candidates are running in. Santa Clara did not adopt by-district elections voluntarily. A 2018 court ruling found the city's citywide election method had kept Asian-American candidates out of office — none had won a council seat in the city's roughly seven-decade history — and ordered it replaced with six single-member districts, the map the city uses for its council seats today↗ (external source, opens in a new tab). The city fought the ruling for years before by-district elections took hold. The by-district system these four candidates are running under exists because of that fight. Both open seats happen to fall in the same cycle, with no incumbent defending either.

None of that appears in a candidate's list of priorities. But the winners will vote on the next stadium flashpoint, the next budget the deficit forces, and — alongside a new mayor — set the tone of a council every candidate agrees is too divided to function. Whoever Districts 2 and 3 send to City Hall will help decide whether the Gillmor-era posture toward the 49ers hardens, softens or ends.

Ballots are still months out, and each candidate's record deserves the scrutiny a genuinely contested open seat earns. That is the point: this is a genuinely contested open seat — four of them, effectively, counting the mayor's race — in a city where the last decade of politics was fought over a stadium and a map.