What's at stake:
The Fresno City Council took a watershed vote on Thursday.
The burritos were prepped. The overflow seats had been laid out. Fresh opposition signs had been printed and residents from across town were ready for a marathon last stand on Thursday night to oppose SEDA, Mayor Jerry Dyer’s $4 billion mega-project for southeast Fresno that risks 11 school closures citywide.
But then, only minutes before SEDA’s public hearing was set to begin, the city council came out of private meetings with their lawyers and waved the white flag.
In a 6-1 vote, SEDA was tabled “indefinitely” around 4:45 p.m..
“This is the greatest policy win in some ways in the city of Fresno’s history,” said Dillon Savory, executive director of the Central Labor Council.
“I can’t remember people-power winning at this level in Fresno.”
Thursday was, in many ways, a night decades in the making. SEDA has long been the crown jewel of developers in Fresno: in essence, a plan to build a new Clovis from scratch in southeast Fresno.
But over the last four years, a counter-movement of residents, teachers, and city hall watchdogs have been relentless in resisting the mayor at every turn.
City Hall was packed to the rafters multiple times over the last year to heckle the council on SEDA. Fresno Unified, the biggest employer in the city, estimated last year that the mega-project could cause 11 district schools to shut down. Neighboring school districts followed suit: both Central Unified and Sanger Unified announced their opposition to Mayor Dyer’s project through the spring and summer.
What ultimately stopped SEDA in its tracks on Thursday were the latest election results released by county election clerk James Kus.
Released in the late afternoon, they showed that staunch anti-SEDA candidate Naindeep Singh was pulling ahead of his opponent, former prosecutor Rob Fuentes. It was Singh, along with council candidates Ariana Martinez-Lott and Joaquin Arambula, that had become fixtures at City Hall over the last year in opposing SEDA.
With the prospect of those three taking power, said Councilmember Miguel Arias, approving SEDA in a lame duck session would have been futile. Any approval would have been overturned anyways once the new slate of candidates were sworn in next year, he said.
“We would have been caught up in litigation only to undo this action in January,” said Arias.
“Elections have consequences…I believe once the intent of voters became clear this afternoon, this was the eventual result.”
Councilmember Mike Karbassi made the motion to table SEDA, with Arias as the second. Northeast Fresno Councilmember Nick Richardson was the lone dissenter.
Councilmember Annalisa Perea, who just won her bid to join the State Assembly, issued a statement on SEDA saying “the question before us was not whether Fresno needs to plan for future growth, but whether the plan presented tonight was the right plan for our city.”
The idea that Thursday was a new dawn for Fresno policy was even shared by southeast Fresno councilmember Brandon Vang. He said he felt a kinship with the slate of candidates about to be sworn in.
“I’ve been here two years, but the reality is I’m part of that group,” Vang said.
Through three campaigns, his constituents had never wavered in their opposition to SEDA, Vang added.
“The consensus of these three campaigns was that people in D5 [his district] didn’t want SEDA. The risk is so great. Why not invest in your current Fresno residents?”
Southeast Fresno residents who were ready to go for Thursday night’s hearing said they were elated at the council’s retreat – but added that they wanted the new council to kill the project for good come January.
“My biggest concern is the word ‘indefinitely,'” said southeast Fresno resident Brett Thompson. “I don’t want to see this thing come back.”
SEDA has long been known as a “zombie project” in Fresno – almost a rite of passage for Fresno mayors to take it on as their pet project, meet with developers to strategize on a plan, only to drop the mega-project like a hot potato once the financial difficulties of building a new town from scratch became apparent. Like Jason Vorhees in Friday the 13th, generations of Fresno policymakers have failed to put SEDA down for good.
Now was the chance, said David Ramming, a Southeast Fresno farmer.
“We’d like to see it finished and them just vote no,” he said. “Finish the thing!”
The night was a major failure for Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer. Over the last year, his administration tried to make the case that SEDA would be a financial benefit to the city. But a cast of watchdogs, teachers and residents poked holes in his math time and time again.
On Thursday, Savory, the labor leader, credited the coalition for making SEDA the major issue in this year’s election.
“We created an amount of pressure where they had no way out,” he said. “We knew if they were overridden with the facts, and we made this the biggest campaign issue of the year, and the people who ran against this issue actually won, they would have no other direction to turn,” he said.
“That’s a credit to everybody: every landowner and union person. This is a win for all those involved.”
