The civil grand jury has been quietly investigating the stadium authority for Levi’s Stadium, home to the San Francisco 49ers and Super Bowl 50, while billionaire developers play chess for Santa Clara’s future.

The city of Santa Clara’s success is largely due to its political leadership. Elected leaders in Cupertino, on the other hand, have been an embarrassment, and none of those incumbents should be allowed to return to office.

Santa Clara Plays Fair has long been considered one of the South Bay’s preeminent NIMBY groups. Most sports economists consider the new 49ers football stadium in Santa Clara—set for completion in 2014—to be an excellent example of how private-public partnerships can create economic development while the city only puts some temporary skin in the game. Santa Clara Plays Fair disagrees, and the NIMBYs, ever allergic to planning and progress, appear unwilling to go gently into that good night. In what was probably intended to be a satirical cartoon posted on the group’s Facebook page, artist Eugenio Negro asks three rhetorical questions about the new stadium, each getting edgier until the third joke falls off the cliff.

The San Francisco 49ers’ new stadium in Santa Clara is just a year or so away from its July 2014 opening, but some Santa Clara residents are still fighting the stadium’s construction. Santa Clara Plays Fair, a committee opposed to the newly-named Levi’s Stadium, is organizing its members to appear at the Redevelopment Agency’s Oversight Board meeting Tuesday afternoon.

It is fundamentally wrong in a representative democracy to allow a minority to game the system and stop progress because they don’t like the result. The tea party is an example on the national level and the efforts of the ironically named Santa Clara Plays Fair is another.