What's at stake?
The pair of Fresno-area state lawmakers took an “unprecedented” step to guarantee a spot for the Better Roads, Safe Streets transportation tax proposal on Fresno County voters’ ballots this November. Now that the governor has signed their bill, it appears that voters will have the opportunity to decide whether the measure will succeed the county’s longtime transportation tax, Measure C.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday signed into law a bill to guarantee the proposed Better Roads, Safe Streets transportation tax measure a spot on the November ballot for Fresno County voters.
Earlier on Thursday, AB 1923 — co-authored by Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria and state Sen. Anna Caballero — received the required two-thirds support in both chambers of the state legislature to land on Newsom’s desk, passing 27-8 in the State Senate and 54-16 in the State Assembly.
The bill cleared both chambers and received the governor’s signature just three days after Soria rewrote AB 1923, originally a healthcare bill, into an “emergency statute” requiring Fresno County to place qualified signature-led initiatives on the November ballot.
The move from the pair of Fresno-area state lawmakers followed a controversial decision from the Fresno County Board of Supervisors last month that delayed placing the Better Roads initiative on the ballot until after the completion of a 30-day study.
Before Soria and Caballero teamed up, the supervisors’ move all but precluded the Better Roads proposal — which had garnered more than 30,000 signatures from voters — from appearing on ballots in November, as the 30 days allowed for the county study would extend one business day past the Aug. 7 deadline to place a local measure on the ballot.
November marks the final opportunity for Fresno County to attempt to pass a replacement measure before the county’s longtime transportation sales tax, Measure C, sunsets in June 2027. If Measure C expires without a replacement, cities are anticipating budgetary shortfalls measured in the tens of millions.
The City of Fresno put together a stopgap tax measure to put before voters in November to help offset the projected loss of at least $54 million annually without a Measure C successor — though Mayor Jerry Dyer said in a news release late Thursday that he no longer plans to submit the city’s contingency measure to the Fresno County Clerk, “now that the Governor and Legislature have ensured the citizen-led initiative will appear on the November 2026 ballot.”
The Fresno County Board of Supervisors’ chairman, Garry Bredefeld, already vowed at a news conference on Thursday morning to bring forward a motion at the board’s upcoming meeting Aug. 11 to initiate litigation if AB 1923 became law.
What did state lawmakers say about AB 1923 on Thursday?
The discussion among lawmakers at the state capitol on Thursday prior to taking their votes echoed the conversation at two hearings the day before: Does this bill erode so-called local control?
Multiple Central Valley Republicans sided with their colleagues from around the state in arguing it does.
“The legislature should not change the rules or bypass a lawful local process simply because initiative proponents disagree with the timeline,” said Assemblymember Alexandra Macedo, a Tulare Republican. “Singling out one county through an urgency statute also establishes a concerning precedent for state intervention and future local ballot disputes.”
But the Valley Democrats who wrote the bill, as well as their colleagues from across California, countered that AB 1923 protects the will of the thousands of Fresno County voters who signed on in support of placing Better Roads on the November ballot.
“Local control does not belong exclusively to local elected officials,” said Soria in her opening remarks to the State Assembly Thursday morning. “It also belongs to the people.”
State Sen. Jesse Arreguín, a Democrat from Oakland, went so far as to suggest the Fresno County supervisors’ “anti-democratic” move calls for changes to the state elections code.
In fact, something nearly identical to the Fresno supervisors’ move is playing out in Arreguín’s county of Alameda this week, where the county board similarly voted 3-2 on Tuesday to conduct a study of a proposed ballot measure that would raise the minimum wage in unincorporated parts of the county to $30 an hour — likely delaying that measure from appearing on ballots until 2028.
The organizers behind the Alameda County proposal had gathered 100,000 signatures, Oaklandside reported, and the county registrar had certified the petition as sufficient.
Arreguín said he wished he’d had a chance to author a bill like AB 1923 to address the situation in Alameda County.
“We need to amend the elections code,” he said, “to prevent this from happening in the future.”
But Assemblymember David Tangipa, a Republican from Fresno, had a different read of the situation in Alameda County.
“Why can Alameda County perform their duties, but Fresno County can’t? It’s called election interference,” he said.
Tangipa also called attention to some of the opponents of the bill that submitted concerns about the Better Roads proposal to the legislature, including the Fresno-Madera-Tulare-Kings Building and Construction Trades Council. That organization is headed up by Chuck Riojas, who backed a group that had announced intentions to collect signatures for a rival transportation measure. That group, known as “Fix Our Roads,” hadn’t turned in signatures to the Fresno County Clerk as of mid-July.
The multi-county building trades council was among five registered opponents of the bill, alongside the Fresno Area Hispanic Foundation’s Board of Directors, the Fresno County Farm Bureau, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and the Fresno County Board of Supervisors.
Legislative documents show the supporters outnumber the opponents at least 14 to one with more than 70 registered supporters.
That includes 11 Fresno County mayors, unions such as the Central Labor Council and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1027 (representing Fresno bus drivers), the Central Valley Community Foundation that financially backed Better Roads’ signature-gathering, environmental advocacy organizations like Fresno Building Healthy Communities and Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability, churches including Saint Rest Baptist Church and Mennonite Community Church, districts like Fresno Unified and scores of other organizations.
Fresno County Supervisor Luis Chavez also strayed from his colleagues on the board by registering his support for the bill.
“Our democracy and representative government depend on our constitutional right of one person, one vote,” Chavez said in a news release Thursday. “Nothing is more important, not a bureaucratic process, not a technicality, not a 30-day report, not the opinion of a handful of elected officials.”
What’s next?
While these decisions unfolded hundreds of miles north in Sacramento, Bredefeld simultaneously held a news conference at the Hall of Records in downtown Fresno on Thursday morning where he and other longtime critics of the Better Roads proposal railed against the intervention from state lawmakers and vowed to take action.
The board meets next week on Aug. 11, where Bredefeld promised to take additional steps toward litigation over AB 1923. The board is also scheduled to receive the study on the economic impacts of the Better Roads measure at their meeting that Tuesday.
But it’s unclear what further steps between now and then, if any, are required from the board in order to place Better Roads on the November ballot.
Fresno County Clerk James Kus told Fresnoland on Wednesday that it’s unclear whether the board still needs to call a special meeting and take a ministerial vote to place Better Roads on the November ballot.
County spokesperson Sonja Dosti said in an email that the “County is exploring options, and the Board will discuss the topic during its closed session at next Tuesday’s Board meeting.”
