What’s at stake?
The investigation comes with less than a week to spare before the March 18 special election for the District 5 seat on the Fresno City Council.
The Fresno City Attorney’s Office is investigating whether a shadowy group behind a campaign mailer targeting a candidate in the upcoming city council special election broke the law.
City Attorney Andrew Janz told reporters at a news conference Monday that his office received a complaint March 7 from candidate Brandon Vang’s campaign against Fresno Future Forward, the group listed on the mailers to voters in District 5.
Janz’s office is looking into whether Fresno Future Forward violated the California Political Reform Act, plus the city’s campaign finance laws, by failing to register disclosures about their expenditures with the Fresno City Clerk’s office. As of Monday, Janz said, the group had not filed any disclosures with the clerk.
Based on an initial investigation, Janz said the mailers went out to hundreds of voters, suggesting the group spent more than $1,000 – which would require the group to register the independent expenditures with the city.
“The voters have a right to know, under the law, who is behind these mailers,” he said, “so that they make an informed decision about who they will vote for to represent the residents of council District 5.”
But the heat is on with the special election to replace former City Councilmember Luis Chavez set for next Tuesday, March 18, and with early voting already underway.
Janz said he’s hoping the investigation can beat that and take “less than a week.”
He added his office will “notify the voters in one form or another” once the investigation is complete.
A swift investigation into the Vang campaign’s complaint
The mailer, a copy of which the Vang campaign shared with Fresnoland, accused Vang of committing statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl over 30 years ago when Vang was an adult. The mailer cites a 1993 lawsuit Fresno County filed against Vang to establish child support.
The Vang campaign called the allegations “completely false” in a statement, adding the child support case involves his wife of 30 years and their son.
Janz’s office won’t be investigating the specific allegations in the mailer, however, the city attorney emphasized.
“It is not my role as city attorney to evaluate the merits and contents of the mailer itself,” Janz said Monday. “Any dispute about the truth or veracity of the claims contained in the mailers is a civil matter between any parties involved.”
Instead, the goal of the investigation is to unmask who sent the flyers and bring them into compliance with campaign finance laws, Janz said.
“Our goal is to achieve compliance without any of those civil fines,” he said, though he referenced a section of municipal code that gives the city attorney “broad authority to basically gain compliance” whether through civil fines or fees.
The City Attorney’s office plans by Tuesday to subpoena a downtown Fresno UPS store on Van Ness Avenue listed as the address affiliated with Fresno Future Forward on the mailers.
“If that doesn’t reveal anything,” Janz added, “we’re going to talk about maybe looking at the folks that printed the documents.”
Other D5 candidates respond to the controversy
In an interview Monday, Vang’s campaign manager Pedro Ramirez said they hope the investigation quickly unearths who’s behind the mailers.
Ramirez declined to say who the campaign thinks might be behind them, saying they’d rather let the city attorney’s investigation play out.
“I mean, we have our ideas,” he said, “but again that’s why we formally asked the city attorney to investigate because it is within his purview to do that.”
Ramirez also said that while some voters who believe the allegations may pull support from Vang, the mailers seem to be backfiring with the voters that spoke with the Vang campaign.
“People were letting us know, ‘Hey, I saw the mailer. I’m still voting for Brandon,’” he said. “For some people even more actually – they weren’t going to vote for Brandon, and they saw that he was getting attacked, and now they are.”
Fresnoland reached out to the three other D5 candidates – Elizabeth Jonasson Rosas, Paul Condon and Jose Leon Barraza – for comment on their campaign’s involvement with the mailer.
In an interview Monday, Jonasson Rosas – a longtime Fresno Unified Trustee and wife of former councilmember Chavez – denied her campaign had any involvement.
“It’s illegal to coordinate with PACs,” she said, “so no.”
She declined to comment on the contents of the mailer further, saying she wants to stay focused on talking to residents of D5 about solutions to issues the district faces and “not getting distracted.”
Condon also denied involvement with the mailer in an email Tuesday, saying he hadn’t personally seen a copy of it.
If the allegations are false, the group behind it “should be held accountable,” Condon said. But if they’re true, he added, Vang “shouldn’t be able to run.”
Vang currently leads the pack in terms of campaign contributions to his D5 campaign in 2025 as of the candidates’ most recent filing, covering the period from Feb. 2 to March 1. He’s amassed over $118,000 in monetary contributions, many of which have come from individual contributors.
Jonasson Rosas followed closely with just under $98,000 in monetary contributions. She’s garnered endorsements from major political players in Fresno, from the mayor to the Central Labor Council.
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