Board members ditching SVO
From Comcast to Sharks, Silicon Valley’s chamber of commerce shrinking after racist attack ad
Less than five days after posting a racist political attack ad, Silicon Valley’s chamber of commerce has been hit with a growing exodus of influential and wellknown board members.
As of Friday, at least a fifth of its 80 board members confirmed to The Mercury News they have resigned and a broad coalition of many nonprofits and businesses reportedly have withdrawn their membership from the Silicon Valley Organization, a business advocacy group that represents more than 1,200 businesses across the region.
The organizations that confirmed they cut ties with the SVO and their employees were stepping down from their seats on the board in protest of an image posted on the organization’s website earlier this week include Cisco, Comcast, PG& E, Kaiser Permanente, the San Jose Sharks, the San Jose Earthquakes, San Jose State University, Lockheed
Martin, Sand Hill Property Co., Team San Jose, Core Companies, Pivotal Now, SPUR, the California Apartment Association, Good Samaritan Hospital and Regional Medical Center.
“Comcast, like so many others, was appalled at the racist imagery recently posted on the Silicon Valley Organization website,” the company wrote in a statement Friday. “We found it unacceptable and effective immediately,
Comcast will resign its positions on the SVO board and SVO PAC board and Comcast will rescind its membership in the SVO.”
In a statement Friday, PG& E said it also stopped payment on its recently submitted annual dues to SVO and is requesting that its $5,000 contribution made to the SVO PAC on Oct. 23 be refunded as well.
The latest resignation an
nouncements come just a day after Silicon Valley Organization CEO Matt Mahood stepped down and two days after the organization’s executive board announced it was suspending all campaigning efforts and hiring a third-party investigator to determine how and why the ad was published.
The image at the center of all the fallout was posted on the organization’s website earlier this week — and promptly taken down after intense public scrutiny — as part of an attack ad against San Jose District 6 candidate Jake Tonkel, who is running against incumbent Dev Davis. The blackand-white image featured a group of Black men in a South African street next to a cloud of tear gas overlain with the words, “Do you re
ally want to sign onto this?”
The SVO said the ad was intended “to demonstrate the consequences of cutting the police budget by 80%,” which the organization falsely claimed Tonkel — a proponent of more robust police reform — favored.
The image quickly circulated online and drew immediate backlash — from nonprofit leaders to elected officials to the organization’s own members.
SVO board members Joshua Howard and Anil Babbar of the California Apar tment A ssociation were the first to announce their resignation Wednesday morning, citing their disappointment in the “inappropriate and blatantly racist imagery that was posted on the SVO website.” And by Thursday, a coalition of mostly nonprofit community leaders was calling for the organization to dissolve its PAC,
the campaign arm that supports business-friendly candidates.
Terr y Christensen, a longtime political science professor at San Jose State University, said he never has seen anything like this in his 50 years of watching Silicon Valley politics. Still, Christensen said the SVO is not beyond salvage as long as it “stops doing such negative campaigning.”
“They need to refocus on their main job, which is representing the region’s businesses, especially its small and medium businesses,” he said. “It’s just not good politics to be so extreme because some of them (the candidates) will win and then you’ll have to deal with them, and grudges can last a long time in politics.”
Sam Singer, a San Francisco-based crisis communications expert and political consultant, said the SVO has a “very significant uphill battle” but now is trying
to do “the right things given the wrong that they’ve committed.
“Who are they going to be able to recruit to a ship that appears to be sinking? That’s the $64,000 question, and I think they’re going to have a hard time piecing this organization back together again.”
Dennis King, executive director of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Silicon Valley, is among the SVO board members who have yet to resign. In an interview Friday, King said he is on a quest to find members of the board who are “willing to hang in for a short period of time to see if we can really make a serious change.
“There needs to be a dramatic change and we need to be engaged in that,” King said. “But if we can’t make the change, then it’s time to walk away.”
Part of his challenge, however, is that the first five
board members he reached out to first already had resigned.
Board member Kevin Surace is urging those who have already left their seats to rescind their resignations and join the rest of the members who are staying the course in “steering this critical organization to be a leader, not a follower, in inclusion.”
“I stand here today not as someone who gave up but as a change agent,” Surace said at a news conference Thursday. “The way you fix things is to change it from the inside, and that is exactly what we are going to do.
“You affect it by staying and bringing this organization to lead.”
The organization has refused to identify the individual responsible for posting the photo and has referred to the person only as a “web administrator.” The SVO is working with a pub
lic relations company, PRxDigital.
Eddie Truong, the director of the SVO PAC, said Friday he was “not allowed to comment.”
In a statement Friday, PRxDigital Vice President Terry Downing said the organization’s third-party investigation into the image, which is being conducted by the law firm Carothers DiSante & Freudenberger LLP, will be completed by the end of next week.
“The board has taken swift action and launched a third-party investigation into how such an image could have been posted,” Downing wrote. “To be absolutely clear, The SVO, including its board and staff, does not condone racist campaign practices from the PAC or anyone else in our community or organization. Racism will not be tolerated in any form at SVO or from its member companies.”