What's at stake?
The Elm Avenue rezone on Thursday, if approved, would walk back the remaining parcels that the 2017 plan rezoned away from industrial. The landowner's application asks to convert 11 parcels at Elm and Annadale avenues from Neighborhood Mixed Use back to Light Industrial.
For more than three years, the owners of roughly $47 million worth of industrial property in southwest Fresno – including a minority owner of the Sacramento Kings – have been trying to rezone 55 acres of one of California’s most polluted neighborhoods back to industrial. The state’s air regulator, the city’s planning commission, city planning staff and the mayor all say no.
On Thursday, the Fresno City Council will vote.
In recent days, Sacramento attorneys for the landowners sent letters to the city accusing it of rushing the process on flawed data and warning they are prepared to litigate. On Monday night, inside a church in Southwest Fresno, residents met on how to combat the landowners’ rezone attempt.
“As God would have it, it’s not working,” Pastor B.T. Lewis said about the landowners’ tactics, at Rising Star Missionary Baptist Church on Monday night.
Lewis, who also serves as a community engagement liaison in the Mayor’s Office, drew 30 southwest Fresno residents — some in the pews, some on Zoom — to organize ahead of Thursday’s hearing. The vote would reverse a key piece of the community plan Lewis helped build.
In 2017, Lewis was part of a years-long effort that produced the Southwest Fresno Specific Plan, which phased out industrial zoning in one of the most pollution-burdened communities in California. The rezone application has been tabled or continued four times over the past year.
Lewis said the landowners and their lawyers have been pushing to delay a separate city planning effort — the Central Southeast Area Specific Plan — so its housing units can be used to offset the losses from the Southwest rezone – a requirement under state law. “They don’t have the right to try to delay the Central Southeast plan for their purposes,” Lewis said.
“I pause because sometimes I’m just in awe of people’s arrogance.”
Lewis told the residents that the landowners push to get the rezone done — and save their land values — have gone too far.
“We have more support this week than we’ve had in past years in City Hall,” he said. “They’re not just trying to push us around. They’re trying to push City Hall around. And folks just don’t like to be pushed around.”
What industrial landowners want rolled back
The Southwest Fresno Specific Plan was a landmark achievement. A steering committee of residents, business owners and community members spent more than two years crafting a vision for a neighborhood that had long borne the weight of the region’s industrial sector. The plan area ranks in the 97th percentile statewide for pollution and poverty, according to CalEnviroScreen.
The plan’s central promise: get industrial zoning out of the neighborhood. Its core policy directed that all land previously designated for industrial use be rezoned to office and mixed-use categories.
It was an attempt to reverse decades of land use decisions which had packed people and warehouses together like sardines, Lewis said.
“I’m always amazed,” he said, “at the idea that you can have light industrial right next to a school. “
“As if the air knows better.”
What’s at stake
But the plan has already been chipped away once. In 2022, the council rezoned 32 acres in the neighborhood back to industrial, amid widespread community opposition. Councilmember Miguel Arias voted for that rezone.
State Attorney General Rob Bonta called the move “likely unlawful,” but no legal challenge was filed. After being originally cut out of the rezone deal, the remaining landowners on the adjacent 55 acres saw the vote as an opening — and filed the current application.
The Elm Avenue rezone on Thursday, if approved, would walk back the remaining parcels that the 2017 plan rezoned away from industrial. The landowner’s application asks to convert 11 parcels at Elm and Annadale avenues from Neighborhood Mixed Use back to Light Industrial.
The parcels are owned primarily by two entities. PW Fund B LP, connected to Phillip Oates and the Buzz Oates commercial real estate empire in Sacramento, holds two parcels. His commercial real estate portfolio is valued at roughly $3 billion.
Span Development LLC, linked to King Husein, chairman and CEO of Span Construction & Engineering, holds seven parcels. A family trust holds the remaining one. The total assessed value across all 11 parcels is approximately $47 million.
Representatives of Buzz Oates and Span Development could not be reached for comment. Phone calls to the landowners’ attorney, John Kinsey, were not returned.
The existing industrial tenants on the parcels can already continue operating indefinitely under the city’s non-conforming use provisions. California’s Air Resources Board and city officials have made this point repeatedly in hearings on this issue.
In a 2022 letter, CARB concluded that pursuing a rezone “for several years suggests that the applicant seeks to expand industrial uses, either for the current landowners or for new landowners after a property sells.” The agency flagged property resale value as a concern — warning that selling the parcels without enforceable restrictions could result in intensified industrial use.
Last April, the Fresno Planning Commission denied the rezone. City planning staff are also recommending denial to the city council, finding the application failed to meet the criteria for a rezone.
Mayor against rezone
The California Air Resources Board has opposed this rezone since 2021. In a letter sent to all seven council members last year, the agency described southwest Fresno as “already overburdened” and warned that the proposal “is in tension with state environmental justice laws.” Combined with a 2022 rezone of roughly 32 adjacent acres, CARB said the two actions would eliminate zoned capacity for more than 7,000 housing units in an infill area.
A new addition to the opposition of the rezone is Mayor Jerry Dyer. “I am more sympathetic to the residents of West Fresno who wish to retain the mixed use designation for this property,” Dyer said in a statement. “It is now time for other areas of Fresno to be designated for industrial development.”
Lewis said the neighborhood is already losing ground with core businesses.
“We lost Kentucky Fried Chicken. We lost Wendy’s. We lost the Rite Aid.”
The landowners push back
In the days before Thursday’s vote, the landowners’ attorneys at Downey Brand LLP sent two letters to City Attorney Andrew Janz.
The first, sent March 13, accused the city of being “engaged in a concerted effort to bend the facts and stoke community outrage.” It disputed the city’s housing unit calculations, alleged the city had accepted over $64,000 from the landowners for an environmental review it then shelved, and asked for a postponement of 90 to 120 days.
“The Elm Avenue landowners paid for that analysis, and the city cashed the check,” wrote John Kinsey, the landowners’ attorney, to the City of Fresno.
The dispute and request for the delay centers on math.
Under SB 330, the city can’t approve the Elm rezone unless it simultaneously approves another action that adds at least as many housing units elsewhere. The city calculates that the Central Southeast plan would add about 2,939 units — not enough to make up for the lost potential homes by reverting the 60 acres back to industrial.
But the landowners’ consultant says the city used the wrong methodology and that the plan actually adds 3,543 units — more than enough. Neither calculation has been independently verified.
A second letter, sent March 16, demanded that Councilmember Miguel Arias recuse himself from the vote, alleging he showed “an impermissible probability of actual bias” based on statements at a town hall and on social media.
To justify the call for recusal, the letter cited a 2020 appellate case involving the city of Sacramento. That case involved a conditional use permit — a quasi-judicial proceeding subject to stricter impartiality standards — not a legislative rezone like Thursday’s vote.
What to expect on Thursday
Lewis’s message to the room Monday night was simple: show up, fill out a speaker card, fill the chambers.
“Even if they say something as simple as, ‘I live in West Fresno and I would not like this rezone approved,'” he said. “Those are the kind of statements that the council needs to hear.”
Southwest Fresno resident Michaellynn Lewis urged residents to bring new faces — children, elderly adults, anyone who doesn’t usually come to City Hall. “It’s not just the usual suspects of us who go in there all the time,” she said. “There’s an entire community that we’re sacrificing if we don’t go in and fight for them.”
The Fresno City Council will take up the Elm Avenue rezone at 4 p.m. Thursday at Fresno City Hall.
