5 South Bay Cities Share the Same Broken Website Template
Fremont, San José, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and Redwood City each procure and run their own website, independently, with their own staff and their own budget. So it's a little startling to find that all five return the exact same fallback message on core interior pages — departments, government structure, online services — when fetched the way a search engine crawler does: "Please enable JavaScript in your browser for a better user experience." No real content. Just that one line.
This isn't five cities independently making the same mistake. It's one underlying platform — the same legacy Granicus template, identifiable by matching DefaultContent/Default/_gfx/ asset paths across every one of the five sites — deployed five separate times, carrying the same gap into every deployment.
What we found, city by city
San José got its own dedicated writeup already — six pages there return the JS-only fallback, covering government structure, departments, and even a disability access grant program. The other four confirmed the same pattern this week:
Fremont
fremont.gov/government and the department directory return the JS-only fallback. Separately, the Press Room's featured news items span 2020–2024 — nothing more recent surfaced as "recent."
Santa Clara
santaclaraca.gov/our-city/departments-a-f returns the same fallback — and the page footer, once rendered, reads "Last Updated: 09-11-2019." Nearly seven years stale, on a page listing six City departments.
Sunnyvale
sunnyvale.ca.gov/city-services/online-services returns the identical fallback text, same platform fingerprint.
Redwood City
redwoodcity.org/departments returns the same fallback — and its own footer note adds an ironic twist: "Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility." In practice, JS-gated content is typically harder for assistive technology to reach, not easier.
Why one shared bug matters more than five separate ones
Each city's homepage renders complete, real content without JavaScript — so this isn't a wholesale platform failure. It's specific to one interior page template, reused across every city that licensed this particular legacy Granicus build. That's actually the useful part of this finding: because the root cause is shared, so is the fix. Whatever the platform vendor changes for one city's template plausibly fixes it for all five, rather than requiring five separate custom remediations.
What we didn't do
No login was used on any of the five sites, no admin access attempted, no scraping beyond public page loads. Every finding here is visible to any resident who visits these pages right now, the same way a search engine would see them.
This is the second entry in a recurring series. The first covered a stale boil-water notice on Santa Rosa's homepage. We're continuing to work through city websites across Northern California, publishing roughly every 8 days.
Have a city website you'd like checked? Let us know — this is unpaid, independent work in the public interest.
Run a city, county, or public agency website and want an honest, evidence-based check?
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