Fresnoland is holding intro interviews with incoming Fresno City Councilmembers and Fresno County Supervisors on our weekly podcast, Fresnolandia, starting with Supervisor Luis Chavez. A lightly edited version of our conversation with newly elected District 6 councilmember Nick Richardson is below.
Listen to the full episode below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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We interviewed Nick Richardson at Fresnoland’s offices downtown on April 4. In his short three months on the Fresno City Council, he’s tried to remain jovial with his colleagues – but made a mark when he volunteered to reduce his salary by $10,000 to help save the city’s free swim lessons program.
He’s expressed a few opinions that fall in line with the north-south split on the council – including opposition to the city’s proposed smoke shop ordinance – which failed on a 3-3 vote, as well as concerns about how much residents should get to weigh in on new housing developments proposed in the city’s more affluent and ‘high opportunity’ areas.
District 6 includes the neighborhoods of northeast Fresno, from River Park, to Woodward Park, Copper River, down to the neighborhoods just north of Fresno State and Bullard Avenue.
He strolled in ready to make his mark, in a cornflower blue seersucker suit and the trendy ski sunglasses that Gen Z can’t get enough of. After chatting with us for about an hour, he left to join several of his colleagues at opening night for the Fresno Grizzlies.
Danielle Bergstrom: Why did you run for office?
Nick Richardson: A little bit of masochism. The same reason I joined the Marine Corps.
There were a lot of easier options and maybe more lucrative choices for me or paths, but especially coming out of the Marine Corps, a lot of guys want to continue flying. I could easily have shut my mouth and gone and flown for American Airlines and made $300,000 a year doing that.
But there is a drive, I think, in a lot of people to do the hard thing because it’s hard.
Jordan Mattox: Were you surprised when you won?
NR: No. I wouldn’t say I was gonna be surprised if I had won or if I had lost. I think it caught a lot of people off guard and the folks who are the old guard in the city, or the known political consultants or what have you, a lot of them were surprised because it laughed in the face of traditional orthodoxy of local politics.
But having seen how much effort we put in just the throngs and throngs of people who showed up to, to walk with us, to work with us, to make phone calls for us to volunteer and be at our events and help us hand things out. It was very clearly an entire community coming together for this. The hard work paid off.
DB: You’re not anti-establishment necessarily, but you didn’t run with the backing of all the usual suspects: the labor unions, the police and fire unions, the building trades, the Chamber of Commerce types, or the developers.
You won in November, as a Republican without the establishment backing, and then we had Brandon Vang just win the race for District 5 similarly – without the typical endorsements from labor or developers, although he’s a Democrat.
Do you see that as part of a larger movement? How do you interpret what’s propelling candidates like you and Brandon forward?
NR: Boy, I really hope so. I honestly ran the campaign I think the best way I knew how, which is get out there and if you’re like, Marines have been thousands of times in the past, if you’re outmanned, outgunned out, endorsed out, fundraised, whatever that’s not an excuse for you to stop trying.
You shouldn’t be running a campaign or conducting yourself with the goal of being endorsed or with the goal of making the most money because neither of those are the responsibilities or the prerogative of a city council member. Your job is to do the uncomfortable things, to be there, to be responsive, and to serve the people.
You are holding something that belongs to them for a fixed amount of time. And I really hope that’s a mindset or mentality that spreads and becomes more ubiquitous.
DB: You’ve been on the council now for three months. How has that liberation from the old guard, if you will, allowed you to make different decisions?
NR: Everyone wants to call and sit down and have lunch now and talk. And it gives me the ability to go in because I don’t need money for the next three and a half years.
It gives me the opportunity to go in and talk to people who traditionally have the ability, unlike most of us, to speak with their checkbook. Most of us don’t have that. I don’t have that. I can’t pay somebody 5,000 bucks in the hopes that they serve me better.
So it allows me to go in there and talk to ’em and say, listen I don’t need your money. But your knowledge is gonna stick with me. So thank you, Mr. Developer A or Mr. Fundraiser B or Magnate C, I appreciate that you wanna pay me, but I don’t need your money.
And frankly, I don’t want it. My biggest fear is that I get up in public, on the record, on the dais, and I look stupid. I don’t want to look stupid. I want to look like I’ve studied these things up and I care about the people I serve enough to do my homework. So the best thing you can do to me is talk to me about what issues you’re running into [as a developer].
Talk to me about your experiences in the planning department or with public works, or with a local economy.
My colleagues know better than to come to me and say this group that backed you wants this, so you better fall in line. They know they have to come to me and bring me a logical reason why I should help them pass something or why I should vote yes or no on something.
And it’s really made room for logic. It’s made room for compassion. It’s made room for common sense. It allows me to go to these other groups who have vested interests, this union or that union and sit down and not have them pull the string that’s in my back that they planted with a check eight months ago.
They do come to me and say, ‘Hey, listen, this is why this is best for the city. Will you help us on the grounds of common sense?’ So it’s very liberating.
JM: What are the pressing issues in District 6?
NR: Whether it’s a trailer park or a gated community or old, 1970s Bonadelle houses, every part of the district has a different primary concern. Are there things that are citywide? Of course, right? Folks are worried about small businesses, about the homeless issue, about the increased cost of living. That’s everywhere.
But let’s go around [the district] geographically a little bit, starting in the northwest.
We’ve got, in the far northwest portion of our district, we’ve got a little mobile home community called Woodward Bluff. It’s just up there on the north side of Woodward Park.
Their biggest concerns are the homeless encampment that’s taking place in the southwest part of where they live in addition to some of the incursions and fluctuations to the water level of the river.
Folks who live just moving east along Friant Road – their concern is Friant. Friant and Shepherd is arguably the most dangerous intersection in the city. And they’re concerned with not necessarily the traffic backing up on Friant, but the safety of the traffic.
Working our way over to the east, a little bit up northeast of the district, you’ve got Willow and International.
They’re concerned with parking. There’s a lot of new development going in there. And some of those developments are apartments and a lot of these apartments are not allocating a sufficient amount of parking to their development, which means that parking then moves outside of the development onto some of these private streets in front of folks’ houses.
This can be an issue when it comes to safety and crossing the street. If there are cars on both sides, you can’t really see someone walking or walking their dog or even a kid on a tricycle. So they’re really concerned with how parking’s gonna affect them.
Moving south between International and Shepherd or Teague, you’ve got infill parcels that haven’t been developed yet.
People are concerned about what’s gonna be built there. Some places are great for housing, some places are great for commercial areas, strip malls and whatnot. And knowing that the right thing is going in there for the right reasons is very big on some people’s list, whether it’s on Lakeview in front, on the west side, off Woodward Lake, or it’s on the east side on Chestnut across from the water treatment facility.
Moving down, you’ve got some other smaller issues that are a little more localized, right? You’ve got people traveling too fast, east and West Alluvial, which has two of our elementary schools. You’ve got Mountain View and Lincoln both on that street. So we’ve taken some steps with Public Works to get out there and get some radar speed signs and some traffic cops making a presence.
JM: Do you think we need to slow traffic down on Friant? It’s a racetrack for a lot of people.
Nick: No. I don’t think speed is the problem. Bad actors always have a role, right? It’s like when your kid turns 16, you go, I’m not nervous about you. I’m nervous about the other drivers. My cousin was killed there last St. Patrick’s Day out there on Copper, not too far from Friant, because of a lot of factors. Not to mention the person driving the car was intoxicated.
When I was in the investigative world, going around and looking at these mishaps, very rarely was the fix to the problem firing something or getting rid of the individual. That individual made this decision that caused this mishap because they existed in an environment under procedures and policies and whatever else that allowed that decision to be made unsafely.
So are you gonna fix every driver? No. But from the city standpoint, do we need to be constantly revising and updating the speed, the pace, and the timing that these lights are changing? Yes, absolutely. Do we need to make sure that all of these, all the intersections that have issues with non-dedicated left-hand turns, get these dedicated?
Yes, we totally need that as well. Sometimes it’s spacing, sometimes it’s what we see over on Chestnut and Copper or what we see on Behymer and Granville in that area with curbs and new adjustments to the street going in, not being marked well enough.
The second one specifically was one of the factors that led to my cousin being killed.
But the individual driver, there’s only so much you can do, right? You can give tickets as many times as you want, but we also have a shortage of policing capability in the city.
DB: Where do you think we should be looking for cuts as we try to close the city’s $20 million deficit in the budget?
NR: It is, it’s belt tightening season, as I like to say. And. This comes with some creativity because throwing money at a problem is rarely the fix to it, right? You can hire as many cops as you want. You could try to cram 10 more cops into the northeast policing station, but they’re not going to have room, they’re not going to have working vehicles.
They don’t have the infrastructure in place for that right now. For the city’s growth, unfortunately, we grew to the size we needed at the time, not the size that we would need it [for the future]. This goes to policing districts. This goes to, infrastructure. This goes to where the plumbing goes and fire stations, you name it.
So looking forward and building a flexible infrastructure to include a safety infrastructure plan is important. Now, right now, in the short term, let’s look at creative solutions. So we have a phrase in the Marine Corps, closest alligator to the boat. You’re flying the helicopter around your boots untied, but also your tail is on fire.
Okay. Which one of those am I gonna fix first? With the fire department, for example, there’s been the mentality for years that more firefighters and more cops is the fix, okay?
I’m willing to have that conversation, but I don’t think that is an end in and of itself. So how do we invest in these things without just throwing money at it? For example, police cameras around the city.
It’s well known that a lot of the police cameras around the city don’t work. I’ve seen this personally.
Now imagine if you had cameras that did work and you could track down folks who were vandalizing or were squatting, or were illegally dumping or whatever else.
That wouldn’t require a cop to respond every time they could catalog it and get to it when they get to it. That’s an investment that instead of paying for six more cops or coming up with some new fancy logo for a new branch, that’s a smaller investment that will have a benefit that will outlast and out reach just more cops.
Let’s look at firefighters on the other side of this. So the fire department’s retirement system is currently funded at 118%. It’s the only one in the country that’s that high. Meaning if every firefighter who qualified for retirement wanted to retire, right then the city could fund every single one of them and then have 18% of their retirement fund left over.
It’s unnecessary, and they will tell you it’s unnecessary. So when I want to do something that contributes to our fire safety in the city, such as increasing the airfield, firefighting, and rescue capabilities, or the ARF capabilities at the airport – which, we don’t currently have sufficient staff or equipment to fight the fires that one terminal brings.
Now we’re about to add a second terminal to our airport, which will be fantastic. But we really won’t have the firefighting capabilities for that. So we can either wait until people die and the city’s stuck there holding the bag wondering why we didn’t do something in the past, or we can do something about it now.
So unlike police who are one for one, firefighters are on a 1.5 time pay for overtime, right? If you’re a cop, and you take my shift, you make what I would’ve made. If we’re firefighters and you take my shift, you’re gonna get pay and a half. If we were to lower that down, so we want to pay more for airfield firefighters, how are we gonna do that?
We can just come up with more money and we can bluster and rant and rave on the dais. Or why don’t we say, ‘Hey, Fire Department, ball’s in your court. We wanna do this because you know you need it for fire safety. Would you rather we don’t fund your retirement program up to 118%, or would you rather reduce your overtime pay from 1.5 to 1.25 or maybe just one to one.
Let them make the decision. They know what’s best, so why don’t we let them make the decision on that so we can move that money around in what appears to be a zero sum game.
I’ll give you another example. The Selland Arena, the whole convention center complex, they’re on a plan with the Pardinis currently for all of their concessions and all of their catering. That costs us over a million bucks every year to pay that contract for them to come in and do it.
And we don’t make any money off it because the money goes to them for doing it. So if you were to allow the arena or the convention center to do their own catering or their own concessions, that would be a money generator and it would be saving the city, I don’t know, over a million bucks a year. And that’s just in that one meeting that I had because I decided to agree to a tour of these facilities and I actually just met with ’em about 40 minutes ago.
If I found that easy in my first month in office, it’s going to take some scratching and sniffing, but we can probably look around and find at least a dozen more examples of that. What is the reason the city would put this contract [Pardinis] in? Probably some politician somewhere.
That politician ain’t me. And if it means saving taxpayers money and not having a city that’s in a deficit, those are decisions I don’t see as hard decisions, but debatably tough decisions that I’m here and ready to make.
DB: What have you seen in your three months at City Hall as some of the third rails of city politics that people don’t want to touch or talk about?
NR: Pay is one. So if I had my way, for the city council and all elected officials for that matter, their pay would be tied to some sort of economic indicator – meaning the better the city does, the more you get paid, and vice versa.
So if you wanna tie that to like twice the median income of the city, that’s something I would absolutely be here for.
But that is a conversation that’s gonna get you some strange looks. Yeah. People don’t wanna talk about that, especially in public. There are a lot of things like that.
There are, when it comes to what we just talked about regarding first responders, for most of the council members up there, the answer is give them more money. Give them whatever they need, salute them, thank them, everything else. As somebody else who’s worn a uniform, I understand that, more people and more money.
I think it was what, Biggie who said it? More money is just more problems.
So how about smarter money? How about smarter decisions? And that’s something that, again, it may not be a popular decision, but the third rail also varies person to person, or politician to politician, because if it’s a group or an entity who has backed you previously, you almost have an NDA with them.
Meaning, that I will not bring up anything that may be contrary to your business interest because I’m in this position and you helped me get here. This is the liberating thing.
JM: Let’s jump to a different topic, which we’ve covered quite a bit recently, which is the proposed blast mine by the multinational CEMEX company. You haven’t spoken about it yet, so we would love to hear your thoughts on it.
NR: I have a lot of constituents who live up there along Friant who are very passionate about it. Everything from [concern about] plumes of CO2, making their way over to their house or the decibel level that their dogs will be experiencing because of underground blasting that the people can’t quite perceive.
And I will say they’ve [CEMEX] done a good job at putting their seismic intrusion devices, which actually we used to deliver when I was in the Marine Corps as well into the ground to tell whether or not the vibrations from their digging was gonna have an effect on water lines, on the stability of other pieces, of the ground, of the river bedrock, of whatever.
This ultimately is not a city decision, it will be a county decision. So my concerns are primarily how will it affect the city? How will it affect the people who rely on me to make sound decisions? So this means my biggest concerns are about Friant Road.
They use Friant for their transportation of the gravel. How is it gonna affect any market that may benefit from them being there? So you think of construction, you think of road repaving and infrastructure. You think of homes going in, you think of buildings, whether it’s a remodel or a new build or some of the infrastructure we’re trying to build downtown.
What will that look like cost-wise for the consumer, for us, for the taxpayer, when we have to go to Coalinga, to, to acquire all these materials?
DB: Isn’t there a mine across the river in Madera County? Why would we need to go to Coalinga for the materials?
NR: It’s not the stuff or the scale that we need.
DB: According to whom?
NR: According to CEMEX. They keep tabs on their closest competitors. And if they get an order that is above and beyond what they can produce, they know where to go and they know where to go for the cheapest alternative. They don’t really advertise it, but they know where those things are – Save Mart is very familiar with the operations of Vons, if you will.
I’m not making this decision because I have any love for big scale tract home developers. I’m looking at what it is going to do for the taxpayer that is my aunt and my mom and my grandma who live in that area. If there is a disproportionate impact on them, their lives, their infrastructure, their safety, their transit to and from work.
And maybe the ear pain of their dog, then I’m sympathetic to that. I would not approve something that’s going to disproportionately impact their lives if it will make their lives cheaper. There’s a negligible impact on the environment that can be proven by experts.
CEMEX has tried to make the argument that [approving the project] is about a bunch of jobs. It’s really not that many jobs. I will be very frank. Jobs is a poor argument for maintaining CEMEX in its current capacity.
How much is this going to raise our taxes? Will people decide not to develop in Fresno anymore, thereby contributing to our already exacerbated housing crisis?
What is making Fresno an attractive place to be for developers, for business owners, for entrepreneurs, for folks looking for jobs, and to educate their kids and start their families – what is the impact it’ll have on them? That’s really my calculus going into this. And ultimately, this is a county decision.
You can never prove that there’s going to be an environmental disaster, because it’s a complex system, until it happens. And there’s so many variables that we don’t know. And that’s, I think, our big con, at least my big concern is that multinational companies can be as careful as they can be.
JM: So what you’re saying is ultimately, you’re concerned about what your district is concerned about, which is roads and noise.
NR: Yeah. Roads and noise. I love the river and I want be able to ride my bike around down there without listening to construction equipment.
But it’s not my decision, now that I’m here in this seat, I have to understand that my priorities and my preferences really take a back seat.
DB: You just referenced that we have a housing crisis and it’s obviously getting worse, and there was a policy that came forward in front of the council for discussion to make it easier to build housing in infill areas, and you had some concerns about that.
And so I’m just curious if you could talk a little bit more about your opposition to that and ways that you think that we can accelerate building more housing.
NR: Absolutely. So being entirely intellectually honest, the bill itself was not, ‘Hey, let’s make it easy to build houses.’ The bill was specifically about adding multifamily residents to areas that are currently zoned for office or commercial as one of the additional allowed usages for that land. And let’s make it have ministerial approval. Ministerial approval just means that something that libertarians generally love, that it can be approved by the lowest capable level employee in the planning department, as opposed to coming to the planning commission and having these elected or appointed officials get their greedy, political, nasty hands all over it.
I love that. There are some second and third order effects, just like rent control, something that at face value, you go, wow, this is fantastic. Like I rent now and someone controlling how much my rent can go up – that’s fantastic. I love the sound of it. The second and third order effects of that are important.
You’ve got to dig in. So what does it do in its entirety? Yes. It allows the big sexy part of it. The part that gets most of the attention is that we can convert currently unused office spaces or office buildings for residences. This means we put roofs overhead. You increase the supply.
Demand will fluctuate as necessary. Prices will go down. Overall, the more of something you build, the less expensive it is. Along with this comes a couple things. One it not only takes those buildings and those commercial spaces that are currently unused after the pandemic, we saw that a lot of people realized that they could run their business from home and they don’t have to go into the office anymore to perform their duties.
But also land before it’s built, before it’s developed at all empty parcels. We have a couple, we’ve got a really attractive one, just this big sexy plot in the northwest corner of First and Herndon that I would love to see turned into something like Avalon Commons, which is an affordable housing project.
It’s close to public transportation. It’s close to commerce. It’s in a great school district.
It’s already got the infrastructure off front to turn in there. It doesn’t disturb Herndon, being an expressway.
Now, places like First and Herndon, that argument can be made, right. We can make the argument that, okay, maybe this is best for housing, maybe it’s best for commerce. But let’s look at where this problem is the most exacerbated.
River Park brings in a quarter of all of the sales tax of the entire county.
DB: Where did you get that number?
NR: That came from the county Assessor Recorder. The single largest contributor in the city to sales tax, which is vital as we’re trying to run the city and not be in a huge deficit, is auto sales. Bullard and Blackstone are huge. That entire Blackstone corridor all the way up until River Park is huge. They’re the single biggest contributor.
Nobody wants an apartment, a second story apartment on Blackstone. Blackstone is not the place.
DB: Blackstone and McKinley, people live there and it looks wonderful.
NR: That is not the backbone of the car dealer areas. If you were to tell someone that you would build them a brand new house right there on the corner of Blackstone and Bullard, they would tell you to kick rocks.
DB: Don’t you think that argument was made when they built the housing on Blackstone and McKinley? Who in their right mind would build housing next to a bunch of used car lots?
NR: I can’t speak for what that conversation looked like, but what I can speak to is we have areas around the city very clearly that are residential neighborhoods. And they’re residential because the emergency services, the public infrastructure, the utilities, the electrical and the water and everything is next to it.
And then we have areas like Blackstone, which are very clearly commercial. They’re vital to the city and our ability to maintain incoming taxes that alleviates individual homeowner and taxpayer or renter from paying extra taxes because we’re able to get it through the sales of desired goods.
DB: So you may not know this, I’m an urban planner, so mixed use development is everything, right? Think of Santana Row, a shopping mall in San Jose. Very successful, has lots of housing next to it. People can walk to the stores. Why can’t we incorporate more of that?
JM: What would need to happen to Blackstone to make mixed-use attractive?
NR: It would have to be planned that way in the beginning.
DB: But that’s just not how cities evolve. They change over time and you have to adapt the uses as you go.
NR: I would disagree to an extent because when I think of the perfect mixed use area, the perfect mixed use, say downtown or locality, I think of the place where I lived with my dad, when my dad lived in Germany when I was a kid.
This town was built in the 1400s. It looked like Beauty and the Beast. It was cobblestone roads. There were like two or three stories of apartments. It was great. We could walk anywhere we wanted.It was accessible.
Now, this town was built before cars. It was built before horses and carriages were even widespread. Beautiful city that said, it operates perfectly because it was planned for everyone to be able to walk to all of the vital resources that they needed and not have, it’s not four lane roads.
In fact, you can’t drive cars through the majority of downtown Lish if you ever go to Lish.
Knowing that we have Blackstone that is able to provide what it does economically – we have to be able to use it for what it is.
Yes, I would love to have somewhere that looks like, whatever, New York where you can walk around and everyone’s kids are playing in the fire hydrant and JLo is walking down the street and everyone gets along. But Blackstone is not that.
Listen to the full discussion here.
