What's at stake:
The council approved to establish procedures to implement the new policy on Thursday as well as pass an amendment on the city’s public labor agreement with the Building Trades Council.
A policy to restrict ICE from staging and conducting enforcement on city-owned properties passed on the consent calendar, 6-1, with Councilmember Nick Richardson as the lone opponent.
It follows a recent vote by the council to re-establish a $1 million Immigrant Legal Defense Fund to assist immigrants facing deportation.
Mayor Jerry Dyer agreed with the resolution that ICE is not welcome on city property, as long as “there’s not an expectation that we’re going to have armed police officers going out and confronting armed ICE agents. Because I can’t see any good come from that.”
The city will not voluntarily offer city-owned property for staging, processing, surveillance or logistics in federal immigration enforcement operations. It will also establish procedures for implementation, accountability and reporting unauthorized facilities. The new policy was sponsored by Councilmembers Annalisa Perea and Nelson Esparza.
Staging, or preparing, before ICE conducts their operations, has happened in Roeding Park and at various parking lots in downtown Fresno. Community members also pointed to the arrest of an individual in August by ICE at the Fresno airport as reasons for why the policy was needed.
More than 200 people have been detained by ICE in the Central Valley since early October. And legal observers from the Valley Watch Network, like Gloria Hernandez, have seen staging in downtown Fresno.
The resolution applies to city-owned public property, including parking lots, parks, recreation facilities, and vacant land, said Sukaina Hussain, deputy executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, in an interview with Fresnoland.
Hussain, who was part of the efforts to bring forward the bill, said supporters were inspired by AB 1807, a law that takes effect in January, banning staging and enforcement from ICE on state-owned property. Fremont, Santa Rosa and Alameda County have also recently passed a similar ordinance.
“When there is trust between the community and our local government, our communities are safer, healthier and are more productive,” Hussain said. “Local resources are for local communities. City places are paid for by public tax dollars, and should be utilized for the community that funds them.”
Immigrant rights advocates and leaders held a news conference early Thursday in front of City Hall to advocate for the resolution.
Esparza said that city employees and paid security “will be expected to document and report attempts to use city property” in enforcement actions, with the city attorney being notified.
“I also want to be clear that this resolution, what it does not do, does not close public spaces to federal officers, and it does not interfere with legitimate criminal law enforcement,” Esparza said.
Perea said that the city has the jurisdiction to oversee the types of operations staging on their sites and the resolution “establishes reasonable boundaries” for the voluntary use of city property.
“Fear is crippling, and emotional fear is real, and nobody should have to fear whether or not it’s safe for them to walk out of their home,” Perea said at the news conference. “We can uphold the law while making decisions that reflect our responsibility as Fresno leaders to our residents.”
Union leaders push back against Fresno’s new labor agreement
The council voted 6-1 to extend its Community Workforce Agreement, which governs labor requirements for major city-funded public works projects, through Dec. 31, 2031.
The highly contested vote raises the minimum project cost covered by the agreement up to $2.5 million, from the previous threshold of $1 million.
Projects under the $2.5 million price tag would not be required to use union labor as outlined in the project-labor agreement.
The Community Workforce Agreement, originally signed in September 2021 with the Fresno, Madera, Tulare, Kings Building Trades Council and affiliated unions, establishes wages, benefits and working conditions for construction workers while setting goals for hiring local residents and people from groups historically underrepresented in the trades.
Debate around setting that threshold went back and forth for much of Thursday as councilmembers started the day with a proposal to make the threshold $3.5 million, but eventually settled on the lower amount.
Dyer blamed “inflation” of labor and material costs for raising the $1 million threshold to $2.5 million
Georgeanne White, Fresno city manager, said that, of the 59 projects that have been subject to a project labor agreement, the average contract amount has been over $4.7 million. The city brought forward the dollar amount to the Building Trades Council who approved it.
Arias said the PLA brings many benefits to the city by prioritizing local hiring, ensuring public works projects are completed on time and within budget by skilled workers, and providing workers with good wages, health care and pensions. He added that the agreement keeps taxpayer dollars circulating in the local economy by supporting local workers and businesses.
“Going from 1 million to three and a half million is a 250% increase,” Arias said. “That, my friends, is not inflation. There is no way that anybody can justify a 250% increase in inflation for construction contracts.”
Arias argued that raising the threshold would mean fewer city jobs going to local union workers, whom he said deserve good wages, health care and retirement benefits that allow them to live comfortably in Fresno.
Chuck Riojas of the Building Trades Council said he opposed lowering the threshold and that both the city and the union have already agreed to $3.5 million.
“I don’t want to ask that we negotiate this from the dais,” said Riojas. “It is my hope that we would consider the amendment that we agreed to.”
Riojas did not respond to Fresnoland’s request for comment.
The rest of the deal stayed the same, including a requirement of at least 50% of apprentice-level work hours on covered projects to be performed by Fresno residents.
The amendment also requires city administrators to submit annual reports to the city council on the agreement’s implementation and local hiring results. If the local hiring targets are not being met across covered projects two years after the amendment takes effect, the city and Building Trades Council must meet to discuss potential changes to improve compliance. The same review process would occur annually after that.
During the first two years of Fresno’s project labor agreement with the local building and trades council, the city fell short of its goals for placing local residents in construction jobs.
Eric Christen, executive director of the Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction, said that the coalition views the project labor agreement as discriminatory against the 90% of the construction workforce that are union-free across California.
“Your projects that have been placed under the PLA have been utter failures,” Christen said. “How can you justify provisioning your financial labor agreement if you’re looking to renew for five years with no public discussion, having a provision that keeps young apprentices out from being able to work?”
City takes out $15 million federal loan for affordable housing
A resolution to apply for a $15 million federal loan through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) passed on the consent calendar.
The loan would expand affordable housing development and establish a funding pool for nonprofit affordable housing developers to purchase land and manufactured homes.
The loan would be repaid through future annual allocations of federal Community Development Block Grant funds for the next 20 years. The city said the funding would serve as a key part of its financing strategy to support affordable housing development.
The decision comes after two policies passed at the city level this summer to streamline the development of affordable housing proposals in the city.
Some former city council candidates, who’ve now won their seats, including Ariana Martinez Lott in District 7 and Naindeep Singh in District 1, campaigned on bringing more affordable housing to Fresno.
Council tables automated license plate readers resolution
After much back and forth throughout Thursday’s Fresno Council meeting, councilmembers voted unanimously to table Nick Richardson’s ordinance to utilize automated license plate recognition (ALPR) technology as a tool to assist the Fresno Police Department in carrying out law enforcement activities.
The discussion returns Dec. 3, at the next city council meeting. Arias and Perea both wanted more community involvement in the conversation.
It wasn’t immediately clear Thursday what that community engagement might look like in the coming weeks.
The proposal would bar any future vendor agreement from giving another agency or a national database default access to Fresno’s data unless the city expressly authorizes it.
It would also ban facial recognition, prohibit vendors from using the city’s data for their own purposes and require officers to give a specific reason for every search. The ordinance calls for annual audits but does not require the city to make those audits public.
The resolution comes as the city’s contract with Flock Safety sunsets in February, though it will seek another company to manage the city’s license-plate readers.
A Fresno police officer is also under investigation after the department accused the cop of abusing Flock Safety cameras for reasons not connected to a criminal investigation, according to a recent city report.
Many community members who spoke during public comment opposed the resolution and called on councilmembers to table the decision until next year.
Crystal Rocha, co-founder of Rehop Fresno, said during public comment that the grassroots group had filed a public records request 82 days ago on Flock data and criticized Richardson for describing the resolution as an act of transparency.
“What you’re proposing is out-of-date policy that doesn’t address the new capabilities of ALPR technology, but it sure does cover the city’s ass,” Rocha said. “If the tech is evolving, so must our guardrails. Why expedite this process and enter into a multi-year million-dollar ALPR contract in December without sufficient measures in place?”
Fresno resident David Bueller, said the cameras need to be taken down entirely.
“These systems are not secure; their effectiveness is questionable at best, and quite frankly, we should not be using them, regardless of who the specific vendor is, whether it’s Flock or Axon or Motorola or whoever.”
