What's at stake?
The city's long-range city planners are responsible for working with the community to craft and implement plans that reflect residents' vision.
Fresno officials recently shuffled a key urban planning team, drawing sharp criticism from a longtime planner.
On Jan. 15, city planners were informed via email that the long-range division of the city’s planning department would be consolidated into the current planning division, senior planner Casey Lauderdale shared with Fresnoland in an interview.
“This really came out of the blue,” Lauderdale said.
The city’s long-range planning division is responsible for engaging residents across the city to build and implement plans that support the goals and visions for neighborhoods and the city.
The move came about a month after a contentious City Hall vote over the largest development plan in city history that drew condemnation from a large crowd of protesters who accused elected city leaders of once again placing the interests of developers ahead of community needs.
Lauderdale said the department changes affected about 10 people who work in the long-range division.
Planning staff were told that once they wrapped up their projects – and there’s a few plans still in the works, like the South Central and Central East Specific Plans, for example – that they’d shift over to current planning and report to the supervisors there, she added.
Current planners function more like a development service – making sure that developers and builders’ projects are in compliance with city and state land use regulations, from rezones to subdivisions to conditional use permits.
Planning Director Jennifer Clark declined an interview with Fresnoland, and instead shared in a statement that the move to consolidate long-range and current planning functions is intended to facilitate “cross-training” across the department.
“All planning work remains intact, and our planners will continue performing the same functions as a unified team,” she added.
Lauderdale said that cross-training is a good goal, but said she worries that it won’t alleviate the department’s long-standing understaffing woes.
“I personally think that once the [long-range planning] projects are done, there won’t be any more proactive planning efforts,” she said.
She also said she was concerned the move is an attempt to stifle a division of planners that attempted to have an independent voice.
“Our team has really stood up inside City Hall for community interests,” she said. “We’ve spoken up against things like SEDA, even though we were pretty much forced to work on that.”
The city’s planning department isn’t a stranger to occasional reorganizations of its different functions.
Fresnoland spoke with two former city planning leaders who reflected on the role that long-range planners have played over the last several decades. Both said they didn’t want to criticize the city’s decision.
“Plans are not self-implementing,” emphasized Nick Yovino, who served as the department’s director from 2001 to 2008, with his career as a planner dating back to the early 1970s.
“Infill development doesn’t just fall out of the sky,” he said . “Especially in a place like the west area.”
But he was also familiar with how the department has changed over the decades due to budgetary constraints and developers’ demands, especially during the building boom of the 2000s.
Keith Bergthold, who served as the department’s assistant director and then interim planning director from 2008 to 2014, echoed the important role that long-range planners play in helping plans get implemented, especially in the neighborhoods west of the 99. The city council approved the West Area Specific Plan in October.
“How are you going to consistently and persistently implement these long-term plans, which is the solution for Fresno — not sprawl?” Bergthold asked.
Yovino said that outside of crafting community plans, planners spend a lot of time “cleaning up” the zoning code, crafting city policy, and finding funding to make sure that development happens in alignment with the community’s stated vision.
Lauderdale pointed to a handful of initiatives led by long-range planners, from building an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) incentive program to chasing grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to clean up brownfields in southwest Fresno to allow redevelopment to occur.
Lauderdale is worried all of that will go away.
“Our culture isn’t just ‘check the box.’ We question things,” she said. “And I think we’re being punished for that.”
