What's at stake:
Mayor Jerry Dyer's three-year push to approve SEDA faced fierce opposition Thursday night.
A southeast Fresno mega-development known as SEDA is now on shaky political ground Thursday after residents packed City Hall to the rafters to tell the Fresno City Council that the project’s $3 billion shortfall and its potential to hollow out Fresno Unified with school closures was unacceptable.
In a 5-2 vote, the City Council asked the Dyer administration to conduct more studies on SEDA’s financial viability and future impacts to schools and other subjects over the next six months.
The list of demands and potential revisions requested by the council was so severe, said Councilmember Miguel Arias, he feared that it would require Dyer’s team to start over on planning for SEDA – potentially triggering a new environmental review and other zoning documents that would cost millions of dollars and take many years to complete.
“The real questions we need answered are bigger,” said Councilmember Nick Richardson. “There are much more important, larger-scale questions … about the effect [of SEDA] on water, schools, agriculture and business.”
City Hall veterans said Thursday’s SEDA hearing was the most packed city meeting in more than a decade. A headcount by the Central Labor Council tallied 355 people in attendance.
Students from Edison and Sunnyside High School put on their best Christmas sweaters to oppose SEDA, along with teachers, a few school board trustees,union leaders and Fresno Unified Deputy Superintendent Ben Drati.
With the exception of one speaker, the opposition to SEDA was universal among those who spoke at the eight-hour meeting.
“We have shown unity in that nobody wants this,” said Christina Soto, a former Dyer appointee on the city’s parks and arts committee (PRAC). “This is planned disinvestment. You’d have to be smoking a pipe to think any version of this plan is a good idea.”
The meeting was a stunning rebuke of Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer’s three-year push to get SEDA approved. No councilmember, with the exception of Mike Karbassi, said they supported the plan in its current form.
With community groups threatening the “nuclear option” against SEDA, Dyer has pinned his ambitions to get the whole project approved by focusing on the financial upside of the mega-project’s first industrial-focused phase, called South SEDA.
That would leave the financial burden of most of SEDA’s 45,000 homes unanalyzed, despite Planning Director Jennifer Clark saying in May that the city plans on starting later residential phases within five years of the first phase.
It is unclear what the Dyer Administration’s current SEDA phasing plans are.
FUSD Board President Veva Islas, on behalf of leadership of the FUSD board, asked for better partnership with the council in light of SEDA’s risks of school closures within Fresno Unified.
“You will hurt families and students living in central and southern Fresno,” said Islas. “Despite what Mayor Dyer says, our district is concerned.”
Fresno Unified shows up in force
On Monday, Fresnoland reported that SEDA risked an estimated 11 school closures in FUSD.
Estimated from a combination of Dyer’s housing demand study for SEDA and state population projections, some FUSD leaders have begun to raise the alarm about SEDA hurting the long-term viability of most neighborhoods in Fresno.
After Fresnoland’s story, Dyer went on KMJ, ABC30, and KMPH to say FUSD’s concerns were “overblown.”
Chang Yang, a Hmong teacher at Edison High School, along with other teachers across Fresno Unified, showed up Thursday night as part of a push to tell the council about SEDA’s impacts on FUSD.
FTA President Manuel Bonilla said the council needed to abandon SEDA because it risked destabilizing neighborhoods across Fresno with school closures and mass layoffs.
“Strong public schools are the foundations of stable neighborhoods,” said Bonilla. “SEDA would effectively subsidize growth primarily that would benefit Clovis Unified and Sanger Unified at direct expense to Fresno Unified’s students.
“Rethink SEDA,” Bonilla added. “Stop it because we need to consider a plan that really serves our students, our families, and our region.”
Bank takes some of Assemi’s SEDA parcels
In a GVWire story about the impact of FUSD, which is owned by developer Darius Assemi, who owns land in SEDA and wants to build near Clovis Unified’s new $500 million super-campus in southeast Fresno, Assemi’s publication pushed back on Fresnoland’s reporting.
GVWire claimed that Fresnoland had incorrectly reported that he owned land “throughout SEDA.” Instead, GVWire said, he only owned one parcel in SEDA.
This is true.
Fresnoland has since learned that a bank has taken over all but one of Assemi’s SEDA parcels since the county’s most recent tax rolls were finalized this spring as part of Assemi’s $700 million loan default proceedings that are being worked out in federal court.
Other parcels he owned earlier this year totaling 100 acres in multiple locations across SEDA are now held by Tri Counties Bank, according to PropertyChecker.com.
Dyer originally wanted the council to select among three alternatives for SEDA which essentially boiled down to how the business park should look for SEDA’s first phase. Dyer then hoped a financial report on that first phase – front-loaded with the most lucrative land uses – could be delivered by next June.
But the council larded up the request with far more tasking questions that would take a comprehensive look at SEDA.
City Manager Georgeanne White pushed back on the council’s request to study the impacts to the city along the Clovis and Sanger Unified boundaries.
“Expanding beyond the first phase and starting to go down the path of north SEDA [where CUSD is at], that is an exercise in futility. It’s going to be a big time suck that nobody is interested in pursuing.”
Councilmember Nelson Esparza, who made the major additions to the request, said he now wants the Dyer administration to look at the benefits of abandoning most of SEDA’s residential portions, among other detailed inquiries.
Planning staff revealed that the city’s near-zero bonding capacity isn’t enough to build SEDA’s $700 million water or sewer infrastructure.
“We’re going to have the ability to chop it off,” said Esparza about SEDA’s residential portion. “Why the hell should you trust the city given the nasty history of subsidizing sprawl?”
