One morning in August, Ronald Garratt pulled up beside a parking lot where San Jose policemen on motorcycles were accelerating around traffic cones, and he made a conceptual leap.

“Right there,” he said, gesturing toward the cones, “is the stadium site.”

In California, visualizing a new NFL stadium is all anyone can do. Nobody has built one in the state since the 1960s.

But Garratt, the assistant manager of the City of Santa Clara and the head of its development team, may be close. He has spent nearly three years working with the San Francisco 49ers on a new facility to replace their 50-year-old warhorse on San Francisco’s Candlestick Point. The project—which is in the midst of environmental review and remains subject to a popular vote by Santa Clarans—has been approved by the city council. It also has the blessing of 49ers owners John and Denise DeBartolo York, and their son, Jed, who has led the negotiations.

What they’ve agreed to can be seen as either the last stadium deal of a passing era…or as the first deal of a new one.

In addition to the land, Santa Clara will do what municipalities have been doing for decades and ante up as much as $114 million in public funds toward the project: $40 million in tax increment financing, $2 million in development fees, around $20 million to move an electric substation near the site, $17 million toward a parking garage, and $35 million or so from a hotel tax.

That’s substantially less than the $160 million the team requested from the city—not to mention the sweetheart deals that numerous NFL teams were able to negotiate during better economic times. If you set the current price of a new football stadium at around $1 billion, Santa Clara’s entire contribution weighs in at only slightly more than 10 percent, giving the 49ers some $900 million to finance on their own (and an onerous debt service that, some observers believe, will never get approved by NFL owners.) The San Francisco Giants spent less than half of that nine years ago to build an entire baseball stadium.

But Santa Clara’s $114 million is also $114 million more than anywhere else in California is offering (and the Yorks say they haven’t looked further afield). “They’re not going to find this in another municipality,” Garratt said. (San Francisco has earmarked $100 million of a developer’s money for a stadium as part of a mixed-use project in Hunters Point, but thus far no developer has contractually committed to the enterprise.)

So the 49ers are moving forward with a deal that includes a $5 million annual payment by the franchise to a stadium commission, no income from naming rights, and the obligation to cover any shortfalls in non-NFL events—a deal, in short, that would have been laughed out of the conference room had it been proposed to Eddie DeBartolo in the mid-1990s when he began to explore possibilities for the team he owned at the time.

“It’s not your traditional ‘Here’s your $100 million,’” Jed York said, “but it’s a deal that works. And you can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel.”