What’s at stake?
Today marks a “huge” step toward at least one of the two rival plans to replace Fresno County’s transportation sales tax, Measure C, going before voters on the November ballot.
In the race to the November election, one of the groups proposing a replacement for Fresno County’s soon-to-expire transportation tax, Measure C, turned in the signatures on Tuesday, moving them one step closer to a spot on the ballot.
Following just under a month-and-a-half of canvassing, Fresno County Residents for Better Roads and Safe Streets announced at a news conference that they’d collected more than 32,000 signed petitions from county residents, well over the roughly 22,000 needed to qualify for the ballot.
The coalition backing the plan, which is composed of a diverse set of community-based groups and Fresno County mayors, pried open a U-Haul trailer parked outside the Fresno County Clerk’s Office downtown on Tuesday morning to deliver boxes of signatures to the county official for verification.
“This measure is a must,” Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer told reporters on Tuesday before he helped hand over a box. “It is not a luxury. It is an absolute must.
“And let me just say this: There is no ‘plan B.’”
Submitting signatures isn’t the only step left to secure a place on the November ballot — “but it’s a huge one” that took lots of time and resilience, said Andy Levine, spokesperson for the campaign and a Fresno Unified trustee.
Now, it’s in the clerk’s hands to verify those signatures through random sampling, a process that can take up to 30 business days.
After that, if the signatures prove sufficient, Fresno County Clerk James Kus said he’ll have to bring that information before the Board of Supervisors, where the board can either pass the ordinance language into law themselves or a resolution to place it on the ballot for voter approval.
“They do have a right to ask for a report from county offices regarding the impact of the proposed law, and that report has to be completed within 30 days,” Kus added. “But after receiving that report, they have only two options.”
Tuesday’s development comes as a rival group says they’re vying for their own place on the November ballot.
That group, consisting of multiple transportation consultants, is backing an alternative plan known as Fix Our Roads.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the Fix Our Roads group hasn’t filed the campaign finance form called the Form 410, county records show. That filing is required of campaigns that spend or collect at least $2,000.
In some cases, campaigns can receive support from a “general purpose political campaign,” Kus said, like the Democratic or Republican parties, and then that spending is reflected on the routine filings of those groups, rather than in a new Form 410. The next filing deadline for general purpose campaigns is in July.
But Kus added that it’s atypical when it comes to something as costly as signature-gathering that a group wouldn’t submit a Form 410.
“Once you start getting into the signature-gathering phase, that’s a lot more money, a lot more focus,” he said. “It’d be fairly difficult to do that without having a campaign that was purely for that purpose, because you’ve got to pay the bills.”
Henry Perea, a former Fresno city councilmember and county supervisor who’s backing the Fix Our Roads plan, didn’t provide an estimate of how many signatures they’d gathered as of Tuesday, but said in a text message that the group is planning to canvas at Fresno State’s Vintage Days event.
He didn’t immediately respond to a follow-up question about why the group hasn’t filed a Form 410.
The clock is ticking for both groups to check off the final boxes to qualify for the ballot, and Kus said the deadline to turn in signatures that he’s been giving folks circulating petitions is May 4.
That’s partly because of the time it then takes his office to verify signatures but also because the Fresno County Board of Supervisors’ meeting schedule lightens up after June, and their ministerial approval is required before a citizen-led initiative can appear on the ballot.
The board only has one regular meeting scheduled between July 1 and August 7, the final deadline to qualify for the November ballot.
