What's at stake?
The estimated $1.1 billion plan would build a new town the size of Fowler along Friant Road just south of the town of Friant.
For nearly three decades, the Bigelow family has pictured building a new town in the foothills above Fresno: rustic lodge- and farmhouse-style homes feeding into a village center complete with shops, a ballroom and an indoor lap pool. The name? Friant Ranch.
On Thursday, the Fresno County Planning Commission will vote on whether to recommend approval of the project.
The estimated $1.1 billion plan would build a new town the size of Fowler along Friant Road just south of the town of Friant. Even so, the county’s environmental review for Bigelow’s billion dollar proposal concludes that such an ambitious undertaking would leave few lasting environmental impacts.
“With exception of the loss of farmland and traffic, potentially significant impacts could be reduced to a less than significant level,” the staff report says.
County planning staff have recommended approval, and supervisors are tentatively set to make a final vote Oct. 20.
Project heading to county board yet again
The ranch is owned by former Madera County Assemblymember Frank Bigelow and his family. The plan calls for 2,500 homes, most of them for residents 55 and older, on about 1000 acres. Friant Ranch’s planners bills it as “the Central Valley’s first master-planned retirement community for Active Adults” and say it “will energize and invigorate Friant, economically, socially and aesthetically.”
This isn’t the project’s first trip before the county. Friant Ranch was approved by the county Board of Supervisors in 2011, but that first shot was swatted down by the Sierra Club and Fresno’s local League of Women Voters.
In a landmark 2018 ruling, the state Supreme Court found the county’s environmental review failed to make “a reasonable effort to substantively connect” the project’s air pollution to likely health consequences. The rest of the review was upheld or went unchallenged, but the county was forced to rescind its approvals in 2021.
That ruling is why the county is now recirculating only part of its environmental review in its path to potentially approve Friant Ranch next month.
The county rewrote only the air quality chapter, released in February 2023. Everything else, including traffic, water and wildlife, carries over from its 2011 approval, with only a checklist and appendices updating it.
The county argues those sections were upheld in court and can’t be challenged again.
What was left out
The major conflict is over what that approach left out.
The site holds about 14 acres of vernal pools that are potential breeding habitat for California tiger salamanders and western spadefoot toads. A golden eagle was spotted on the site in 1995, and badger dens have been found north and south of the ranch.
Yet no new wildlife surveys were done for the latest review, the county acknowledges. Its consultants relied on site surveys from 1998, 2006 and 2007, plus a 2022 database search that added seven special-status species not previously analyzed that could occur on the site.
A lot may have changed in those foothills since then, according to a letter five nearby families submitted to the county in recent days. Bald eagles have been found nesting nearby, they wrote, and American badgers and bobcats have been run over at a high frequency along Friant Road in the last two-and-a-half years.
But the county says new wildlife surveys weren’t needed.
“Because the 2011 Final EIR was determined adequate as to biological resources, no biological resources surveys were conducted,” it wrote in response to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The state agency, for its part, said in 2023 that it “concurs” with the county’s analysis, finding wildlife mitigation “sufficient.” However, it is unclear if the agency staff responsible for overseeing Friant Ranch is aware of the trends spotted by nearby residents.
The surroundings have changed, too. The new town would rise a few miles north on Friant Road from where CEMEX wants to drill and blast a 600-foot-deep hard rock pit along the San Joaquin River, a separate project still under county environmental review.
The City of Fresno questioned whether the county could meet state laws requiring full disclosure of environmental impacts if they used “a document that contains data from 2011 and prior.”
The Sierra Club’s lawyers pointed out that since then, a major blast mine has been proposed, a new state groundwater law written, new rules measuring traffic by miles driven and Table Mountain’s casino has ballooned “8 times larger” than once contemplated.
The county replied that “changes over time…do not require a constant updating” of an EIR.
Air quality and water concerns linger
Air quality and risks to water supplies are what the major legal guns are pointed at as the project moves forward.
Environmental attorney Doug Carstens previously told Fresnoland that the key assumption that underlies Friant Ranch’s new environmental review – that 80% of the car trips caused by the development will be less than three miles – is unfounded.
“This is a sprawl project. This assumption just doesn’t make sense,” Carstens told Fresnoland in 2023. “It’s not a legally adequate environmental review. It needs an overhaul. Right now, it’s woefully deficient.”
And on water?
In 2014, the county once promised that it would update its water supply analysis for Friant Ranch after the project’s future water supply went dry during the 2012-2016 drought. But the county chose to drop that goal in 2021, according to Fresno resident Radley Reep.
“The County’s change of heart was nutty,” he wrote to the county.
The commission meets at 8:45 a.m. Thursday, Hall of Records, Room 301.
