What's at stake?
"These things would take air flight, because they're sewer roaches," one staffer said. "They're monstrous things. That whole place is a shithole."
The mouse was still alive when she found it.
A Fresno Council of Governments staffer was at her desk when she heard a faint squeaking. “She was like, ‘What is that noise?'” a coworker recalled. “Eventually, she looked down in her desk, and there it was: a live mouse, squealing” — caught in a notoriously inhumane glue trap, dying in her drawer.
Another staffer, brave enough to handle the flailing, screaming animal, carried it by hand to a nearby trash can.
The episode left the office that plans Fresno County’s transportation system with an impossible choice: keep the traps in their desks and absorb the mental toll of handling dying rats, or discard the traps and buy a few days of peace with the infestation.
This is the workplace of the agency charged with creating the region’s transportation future — an office above a shuttered casino in downtown Fresno, in a building owned by Tom Richards, a local developer and former California High-Speed Rail Authority board director.
And in May, with rats running through the ceilings on and off since 2024, the board managing the agency, led by Fresno mayor Jerry Dyer, signed a new five-year lease with Richard’s company worth roughly $1.3 million in total.
Dyer advocated for signing the lease, despite no clause in the $20,000-a-month contract requiring the landlord to fix the rat problem.
“This was happening during negotiations,” one staffer said about the rat problem while the board met with Richards. “I don’t know if they were taken into consideration at all.”
“Morale is low,” said another.
‘They’re kind of comfortable here now’
Fresnoland interviewed four people who work in COG’s 13,000 square-foot downtown office. None described the space as safe. Fresnoland granted them anonymity to protect against potential retaliation.
They describe an office under siege. One talked about a photo of rat droppings on work desks. Another shared their anxiety of second-guessing food left in the break room, which is required to be sealed in containers. Email blasts alert everyone to the latest rat sighting, another said, with instructions for how to deal with the animals. A fourth person was appalled that a rat had ransacked a woman’s desk drawer and chewed through her tampons. The infestation has even spawned a humorous moment or two. For example, coworkers were able to share a laugh when another staffer’s liquid-filled stress ball exploded in his face — after a rat had gnawed through the rubber the night before.
“At first, we’d see traces of them, like their poop on the carpet. Then it was the smell of them. Some of them would die in the walls,” one staffer said. “But now they’re being seen running around during the day. They’re kind of comfortable here now.”
One staffer counted four rats in 10 days this June. One was caught alive behind the water cooler, another in a conference room. Pest control needed a gas mask to retrieve a dead one. The week the board approved the lease, a rat was seen leaving executive director Robert Phipps’ own office.
“It is essentially a rat hole,” the staffer said. “Anything would be better than a rat-infested building.”
Eddy Valencia, a technician with commercial-property experience at Dustin Pest Control, said the infestation is exceptional, even for downtown Fresno — a spillover from the abandoned Club One casino below and the empty buildings surrounding it.
“That makes sense, unfortunately, because that building, at one point, had food,” Valencia said. “That whole building is currently empty.”
“The rats essentially have the run of the building now.”
Richards, the politically-influential owner of the building, did not respond to multiple requests for comment over the span of a few days.
The rats’ brazenness — raiding desk drawers instead of sticking to dark corners — points to a much larger underlying population, Valencia said.
“Ordinarily, rodents are going to be extremely cautious. But when there’s a large population of rodents, then some of them get pushed elsewhere,” Valencia said. “If it’s not on the severe level, then it’s getting there.”
And then there’s everything else
Staffers say the rats are only the start. Downstairs, they say, there are flying cockroaches.
“These things would take air flight, because they’re sewer roaches,” one said. “They’re monstrous things. That whole place is a shithole.”
An unhoused man was recently found sleeping in the board room, according to the four Fresnoland spoke to. Another lived in a backroom for a stretch before anyone noticed. For a good stretch of time, mounds of human feces turned up in the elevators — steaming, one person recalled, in the winter cold. When a homeless person’s crack pipe set a mattress on fire outside the office, the office got smoked out and was forced to evacuate, according to COG’s finance director.
“We had to walk out on the street while the Fire Department danced around,” said Les Beshears, the agency’s veteran finance director.
With homeless people occasionally wandering the office halls, one staffer said they were afraid to walk to the restroom alone.
“If something happens in there, and you don’t bring your cellphone, you’re kind of screwed,” they said. “It’s just not the safest area to work.”
COG survey cited by Mayor Dyer not accurate, staffers say
A security guard is now stationed outside to fend off the homeless, and COG’s finance director, Beshears, says he hasn’t stepped over “piles of shit” inside the offices or elevators in a while. But staff say they had long hoped that the accumulation of indignities would force leadership’s hand to move out of the half-abandoned building when the lease was up for renewal this May.
“There was a push to move. But I don’t really know what happened,” one staffer said.
COG’s Executive Director, Phipps, rejects the idea that he and the board were cavalier about the workplace issues and how they affected the people working under him.
“We do not want to put our staff in jeopardy. That’s our No. 1 value,” Phipps said.
The severe conditions, he argued, are a function of the surrounding vacant buildings rather than the agency’s indifference — a downtown-wide problem common for commercial buildings.
“Other buildings have had the same problem,” he said about COG’s situation.
The agency has escalated its pest-control contract, Phipps said, with trap crews now “coming three times a month,” and is working with Richard’s Penstar Group, a real state group that manages the COG building, to “calibrate the pest control efforts”: sealing entry points with hard foam and wire mesh where rats push through the building’s structure.
As the infestation grew worse in May, getting the board to sign off on the new $1.3 million lease with Richards required stretching the truth on how employees truly felt about the office, interviews show.
When the new lease came up for approval this May, Phipps told the board a survey showed employees overwhelmingly wanted to stay. “75% voted to stay,” he told the board.
But staffers dispute that any substantive survey happened.
“The survey wasn’t a survey. Staff was just asked when he popped into their office,” one staffer said. “It was a very awkward situation. What can you say?”
Another described the same scene: “It came out of nowhere. It was being asked like — making you agree with him. That was my direct superior. I didn’t want to go against what he says. I felt caught off guard and a little intimidated. In the end, I said I was all for staying.”
At the board’s May meeting, only one member pushed back on signing the new five-year lease.
“I still continuously hear complaints about this building — the rodents, the homeless,” said Parlier Mayor Alma Beltran. “People who work here every day deal with these conditions. … All we’re doing is saving money, but the situation is still the same.”
Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer, supportive of extending the lease, pushed back on Beltran by saying her concerns were overblown.
“I’ve heard the rumors or urban legends about people not being happy with the building,” Dyer said. “Who are those people? Because I think there was a polling of employees.”
Dyer was referring to the survey that employees say wasn’t really a survey.
Dyer has received over $10,000 in campaign donations from Tom Richards and related Penstar employees, according to city records, including Richards donating the maximum amount to both of Dyer’s 2020 and 2024 mayoral campaigns.
But Dyer’s mention of the survey effectively ended the discussion. The COG board approved the million-dollar lease, which runs through May 2031. Parlier’s Beltran cast the sole “no” vote.
Dyer did not respond to a request for comment about what employees have been going through.
“You as admin are supposed to care for your staff. Why would you choose to put them through that by re-signing the lease?” one person who works in the COG building said.
“Why would a policy board care if they come up for an hour once a month?” said another. “Of course you’re going to approve the lease. It’s the easy thing to do.”
Despite dealing with the rat problem since 2024, Phipps is hopeful the problem can be solved soon.
“They have been very responsive, in my opinion,” Phipps said about Richards’ Penstar Group. “We have stepped up efforts.”
Phipps also pointed to money already committed to the building by Fresno mayor Jerry Dyer — several million dollars budgeted in the coming fiscal year to gut and rebuild city-owned elevators COG uses.
Phipps says that there are even official records on his side. In March, according to Phipps, the building’s own pest-control contractor submitted an affidavit stating its traps hadn’t pulled up a single rat in eight months.
Moving, Phipps said, would have cost “up to a million in tenant improvements.”
He acknowledged the new lease contains no guarantees to solve the rat issue.
“There’s no language in it that provides any guarantee of any sort,” he said. “But our costs are fixed.”
“I’m scared for him”
Now, with the prospect of another five years in the rat-infested building, staff say they have a more immediate worry: Les Beshears.
Beshears, who is in his 70s, has been Fresno County’s top transportation finance guru since Measure C first passed in 1986. Drive around Fresno, and every interchange and highway lane you drive over was probably built with money Beshears personally allocated to one local agency or another over his four-decade tenure. It is commonly known around the COG office that, around lunchtime, he takes a quick cat nap under his desk.
With food smells in the air at that hour, coworkers fear a hungry rat will bite COG’s beloved finance boss while he sleeps. Early last month, one was even seen walking out of his office space, two people in the COG office said.
“Is he going to be OK? There are so many rats running around,” one staffer said. “He’s not scared of anything. He’s very brave. But I’m scared for him.”
They’re right that he isn’t scared. Beshears, who grew up picking cotton on a Texas farm South of Corpus Christi, said he has dealt with critters his whole life. No rat is going to push him off his office post, he says.
“Hell, I don’t know how many I’ve shot,” he said about rattlesnakes on his porch back home. “I’ve stepped over a few of them too. It’s kind of exciting. It gets your blood churning when you hear that ‘Raaaa.'”
He recalled that once, staking his cow in a neighbor’s pasture in Texas, he spotted a snake in the weeds. He said he grabbed a stick, crept so close behind the snake his nose was “within three inches” of its tail, and struck it.
“I tore half his head off,” he said. “Living with nature is a part of life.”
Beshears says he’ll keep on doing his cat naps – he isn’t losing sleep over any rats.
“I don’t know how widespread the fear of rats is, but I sure don’t care,” he said. “Rats are like a rattlesnake: If you let ’em be, they’ll leave you alone.”
Part of his rationale is that he doesn’t believe the employees’ reports about a rat leaving his office in the first place.
“They were just trying to bluff me,” he said. “If they think this place is hazardous to their health, why are they hanging around for?”
Even as downtown has deteriorated in recent years, Beshears doesn’t have any regrets. He says COG has paid $3 million to $4 million in rent to Richard’s company since they moved in 2010, which could have bought a building. But COG’s board room is one-of-a-kind, he says.
“We could have bought the Rowell building for less than a million dollars,” he said about the building’s price in the 2000s. “The conference room: that’s really why we’re here in the first place.”
Two staffers have a quieter theory about why COG’s arrangement holds — why a workforce would keep showing up to a building like this without making a scene.
A notable part of COG’s staff, one notes, is on H-1B visas: employees with the most to lose and the least room to complain. Once those staffers get their green card, many of them have quickly left the agency for other jobs, another said.
“The reason we’ve been so anxious about it — you have people here on H-1B visas. They’re not going to really create a fuss. Why would you?” one staffer said. “You’re from a culture that’s more obedient, and you have a lot more to lose.”
Beshears, for his part, can’t quite figure out why anyone stays if it’s as bad as they say.
“Evidently,” he said, “there’s something else that is going on to risk their life to work in this rat-infested jungle.”
