Fresno city council District 1 candidate Naindeep Singh opened up a big lead Tuesday after the latest round of midterm election results were released.
Singh, who carried razor-thin leads over the last week, now outpaces opponent Rob Fuentes by almost 1,000 votes. Singh now holds the lead 53.34% to 46.66%.
And three downtown blocks south, two Fresno Unified school board races remain tight with the longtime Sunnyside incumbent joining McLane’s veteran leader on the wrong side of the split.
In the Sunnyside race, labor leader Riley Talford emerged with a slim lead over 22-year incumbent Valarie Davis. Last week, Davis led by just 77 votes, but that lead changed hands Tuesday with Talford jumping out to a 164 vote lead, 50.72% to 48.73%.
Davis couldn’t immediately be reached for comment, but Talford said he wasn’t surprised by his new lead and expects to win the race, saying “there’s no looking back.”
“And once this vote is certified, our school district, our community, our parents, the students, they will get a trustee that will be hitting the ground running,” Talford told Fresnoland on Tuesday, “and I plan on doing exactly what I told you I was going to do, and so I’m making rounds to the schools, with my first focus being with the classrooms for kids with special needs, I ‘d like to see how those classrooms are running, how the schools are managing those classrooms.”
Meanwhile, retired teacher Karen Steed saw more of her lead shrink in the three-way race to represent the McLane area, with incumbent and nonprofit leader Veva Islas taking another chunk out of the margin and putting some distance between herself and realtor Mirna Garcia, who was running third.
Steed came into the day carrying 387 more votes than Islas and finished the day with 249 vote lead. Steed declared victory last week, but Islas did not concede. Neither could immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.
The remaining county board of supervisors race has been much less dramatic, with Kerman Mayor Maria Pacheco securing a runaway victory over Fresno City Councilmember Mike Karbassi, padding her lead by another 1,906 votes, 58.54% to 41.46%.
On the legislative front, the long-fought Measure S transportation tax appears to be all but dead after failing to move the needle substantively forward Tuesday. A total of 110,948 Fresno County voters have said ‘no’ to the tax that was marked as a “new tax” on the midterm ballot, 52.04% against versus 47.96% in favor.
Fresno County voters are also saying ‘no’ to Measure A, which would have allowed the county to join almost all other California counties in charging a hotel tax, with 55.86% opposed.
Fresno city voters, however, are embracing Mayor Jerry Dyer’s Measure D, a special general tax that he pitched as a backstop for the transportation need in event that Measure S failed, a move that looks increasingly shrewd as the ballots come in.
This story will be updated.
