Did Fresno city leaders find a contracts ‘loophole’ to avoid oversight?

This is Part 1 of Under the radar contracts. No oversight. Hours after it published, two Fresno city councilmembers hosted a news conference, pledging to increase transparency on how city leaders hand out contracts. Part 2 of Fresnoland’s investigation is available here.

In June 2024, Fresno City Hall was in the middle of a busy budget process — on top of being embroiled in a police chief scandal.

The same day the Fresno City Council approved a then-record $2 billion budget, councilmembers also quietly passed a major policy change without any public discussion. 

Then-Councilmember Luis Chavez — along with Miguel Arias and Nelson Esparza — sponsored a resolution allowing councilmembers and other city leaders to give government contracts to third-party consultants worth up to $100,000 — all without needing city council approval.

The policy change doubled the old $50,000 threshold for government contracts exempt from council scrutiny.

A Fresnoland investigation found that between 2020 and 2025, some city leaders regularly handed out these under-threshold government contracts to consultants — at times several of them to the same one in a single fiscal year. For example, one consulting company was awarded 19 contracts exempt from council approval in the span of those six years — worth just under half a million dollars in total. 

Because under-threshold government contracts are exempt from city council approval, they’re also effectively exempt from public disclosure. There’s no way for a member of the public to view how many under-threshold government contracts have been handed out by city leaders over the years. The total amount is unknown, but they add up to at least several millions of dollars altogether.

Additionally, Fresnoland found that consultants at times bill the city more than the value of the contract, even when the $100,000 threshold limit applies.

Just 11 days after the Fresno City Council increased the approval threshold, Chavez’s city council office awarded a $100,000 government contract to Local Government Strategic Consulting, a company run by local political consultant Alex Tavlian. 

The contract specified that Tavlian’s company wouldn’t bill more than $100,000 — as it never went before the Fresno City Council for approval.

Over the next six months, Chavez’s council office paid Tavlian’s government consulting company $131,042.35, according to invoices and payment records.

That included Chavez’s council office paying Local Government Strategic Consulting more than $16,000 a month for constituent outreach — something typically done in-house by a councilmember’s staff, rather than an outside contractor. 

At the same time — from July to November 2024 — Chavez’s office also paid Tavlian’s company more than $31,000 for Facebook ads, which also coincided with the runoff election for Fresno County District 3 supervisor, between Chavez and incumbent Sal Quintero. 

Chavez declined Fresnoland’s requests for an interview. He also did not respond to a list of detailed questions sent via email. Tavlian did not respond to Fresnoland’s requests for comment or to a list of detailed questions via email either.

Their July 2024 contract never appeared before the Fresno City Council for approval, even though payments to the consulting company were not only greater than the initial contracted amount, but also greater than the approval threshold for government contracts exempt from city council approval.

A Fresnoland investigation found that it was the third year in a row that Chavez’s council office paid Tavlian’s government consulting company more than the approval threshold.

While the June 2024 city council resolution sets rules for these smaller, under-the-radar contracts, Fresno’s city code also sets clear boundaries. City council approval “is required if the total proposed expenditure of city moneys under the contract and any amendments thereto exceeds” the city’s approval threshold.

Additionally, all contracts over $100,000 are generally subject to a public bidding process, with some exceptions, according to Article 9, Section 1208 of Fresno’s city code. 

Fresno city councilmembers say reform is needed

Fresnoland filed two California Public Records Act requests to obtain all contracts, invoices and payment records between the City of Fresno and Tavlian’s government consulting company over the span of five years. It took eight months in total for the City of Fresno to provide the records. 

Those documents show that the City of Fresno paid Tavlian’s consulting company $557,572.85 between January 2020 and January 2025.

About 83% — or $463,872.85 — either came directly from Chavez’s office or were funds that Chavez motioned to be awarded to Tavlian’s company.

Fresnoland took its findings to the Fresno City Council. Most of the councilmembers who agreed to speak to Fresnoland said they didn’t want to directly criticize Chavez — a former colleague to most of them and now a sitting Fresno County supervisor.

However, the councilmembers who spoke to Fresnoland said more oversight and stricter rules should be put in place.

“If that expenditure is to a single vendor, and it’s going over the voted-on, established, approved limit, then that’s pretty black-and-white: It’s a violation,” Councilmember Nick Richardson told Fresnoland. “I don’t know what the accountability mechanism is to hold them accountable, but clearly it’s not working.”

Five members of the Fresno City Council — Richardson, Miguel Arias, Tyler Maxwell, Brandon Vang and Mike Karbassi — said they’d support reforms to increase the City of Fresno’s transparency on city contracting, including the publication of an annual report listing all no-bid government contracts listed by consultant, which would include contracts worth $100,000 or less.

“Most of them will be boring and uninteresting to 99% of people,” Richardson said. “But I think it’s worth it because the ones that pop up — that are alarming and make the democratic hairs on the back of your neck stand up — they deserve their time in the spotlight.”

Councilmembers Vang, Maxwell and Karbassi shared similar perspectives.

“This situation shows the need for stronger transparency and accountability,” Vang told Fresnoland. “Given the City’s current financial situation, it would make sense to consider lowering the contract threshold back to $50,000 to make sure larger expenses receive proper Council review before approval.”

“The city council makes millionaires every month at city hall,” Maxwell told Fresnoland. “Sometimes we’re giving out smaller contracts and I think those require a level of transparency, too.”

“It’s totally doable,” Karbassi said. “It’s probably going to be a long list but it’s public record. I don’t see why not.”

Councilmembers Nelson Esparza and Annalisa Perea did not speak to Fresnoland.

It’s unclear how many under-the-radar contracts exist

Fresnoland also reviewed the City of Fresno’s contracts database, which showed that Fresno’s city manager, for years, has handed out dozens of government contracts to consultants either equal to or less than the city’s approval threshold. There’s no way for members of the public to know how many of these contracts have been handed out to consultants over the years.

Fresno is California’s fifth largest city by population. It’s also one of only a handful of California cities with a strong mayor form of government — along with San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Oakland. 

Some California cities are ahead of Fresno in terms of transparency and smaller dollar contracts. For example, the City of Oakland has a policy that requires public disclosure of all contracts handed out by city leaders that don’t need city council approval.

The City of San Diego has a website listing all consultants with city contracts over $25,000 going back more than a decade. 

Fresno’s online contracts database does not contain all of the city’s contracts. Additionally, they’re not listed by their amount, and instead organized as PDFs in alphabetized folders. 

However, the database does show at least a dozen instances of the same consultants ending up with more than one under-threshold contract in a single fiscal year that, together, are worth more than the city’s threshold for contracts exempt from council approval.

Between 2020 and 2025, local company Provost and Pritchard Consulting Group was awarded a total of 19 under-threshold contracts — worth a total of $460,500. In three of those years, the sum of their contracts was greater than the city’s approval threshold.

A representative for Provost and Pritchard did not respond to Fresnoland’s request for comment. 

Another local consulting company, Brooks Ransom Associates, was awarded five contracts in just September 2023. All but one were for repairs to four different city-owned parking garages. The fifth was for work on the Roessler Winery Building. 

The total sum of those five contracts was $109,000, at a time when the city’s contracts approval threshold was still just $50,000.

Scott Carter, a principal engineer at the company, told Fresnoland that the City of Fresno isn’t one of Brooks Ransom Associates’ main clients and the five contracts make up less than 3% of the company’s revenue if they were hypothetically paid out in a single year. 

“When we do work in the city of Fresno, we still design as if it were being submitted to a stricter agency,” Carter told Fresnoland. “I think because of that, the City of Fresno is very familiar with our work and comfortable with our work, that when the city actually needs an engineer, we’re probably one of the ones they’re reaching out to.”

Carter added that he’s never heard of the city’s approval threshold for contracts.

“It’s never come up for us,” Carter said. “We just submit a proposal and then wait, see if it gets chosen and then approved — and then we get notice to proceed from the city. So that’s never come up in a conversation on any of our projects.”

Carter added that the work for these kinds of civil and structural engineering consulting contracts have many layers of approval and can take years. So expediting the process for awarding these under-threshold contracts, Carter said, could save time and taxpayer dollars at the end of the day. 

“How much additional taxpayer dollars are going to that project that taxpayers are having to pay for — to get the same result as actually expediting the process because it’s under the threshold?” Carter said.

‘This policy has created a loophole,’ councilmember says

Fresno City Manager Georgeanne White told Fresnoland via email that the practice of giving out multiple under-threshold contracts to the same consultants complies with current policy since each contract has a different focus. She declined Fresnoland’s request for an interview, but responded to questions over email. 

“The Contracting Authority is not by vendor,” White wrote over email. “It is by project and scope of work.”

When asked for where it says that in the city’s regulations, she didn’t point to a specific policy or section in city code, and instead relied on an internal legal interpretation. 

“Interpretation of contracting authority is provided by the City Attorney’s Office,” she wrote to Fresnoland. City Attorney Andrew Janz declined Fresnoland’s request for comment, and did not respond to questions about the legal interpretation.

Councilmember Arias told Fresnoland he didn’t know the city’s administration had multiple under-threshold contracts with the same consultants in a single fiscal year.

“This policy has created a loophole where everyone’s blind on how many contracts exist — that in the cumulative is greater than the threshold that we have all set,” Arias told Fresnoland. 

Back in June 2024, Arias was one of the three councilmembers who brought forward the item to double the city’s contracts approval threshold. He said a request to do so came in from the city’s administration, because the threshold hadn’t been raised in decades and doing so would make city government more efficient. 

Arias said the intent behind the policy was never to create a practice where specific consultants could end up with several contracts in a single fiscal year, whose sum is greater than the city’s threshold.

“I’m more concerned about the interpretation,” Arias said. “That was never the intent that was discussed when the council adopted the minimum threshold requirement.”