What's at stake:
A year after one of the most shocking attack mailers funded by anonymous donors, Fresno leaders still don't have the tools to run transparent elections.
Over pints at a downtown brewery on Thursday night, a political science professor, a city council member and the county’s top elections official described for a standing-room-only crowd how money from powerful interests flows into Fresno’s local races to shape political outcomes — often without leaving a trace.
The question that kept coming up for everyone was why the leaders of California’s fifth-largest city have given themselves so few tools to do anything about it.
The Fresnoland event, drawing former city council members, residents and even a handful of political lobbyists, centered on reporter Omar S. Rashad’s recent investigation into more than $130,000 in city contracts that former City Councilmember Luis Chavez directed to political consultant Alex Tavlian’s firm, Park West Associates — including roughly $31,000 for Facebook ads that ran on Chavez’s official government page while he was simultaneously campaigning for Fresno County Supervisor in 2024. Chavez won that race.
Rashad told the crowd that getting the records that documented those payments was a story in and of itself. Dredging up the documents included an eight-month-wait with the city attorney for the invoice records between Chavez’s council office and Tavlian’s company.
“I think it’s pretty rare to quote five sitting elected officials on the city level who tell you that all these dozens of city contracts should probably be easy to access for members of the public,” Rashad said of the council’s reaction to the investigation.
Another part of the investigation peeled back for the crowd Thursday night was finding out which loopholes Chavez used to spend $31,000 in taxpayer funds on Facebook ads. The city’s legal department had jerry-rigged its guidelines to allow taxpayer funds to subsidize more political messaging on Facebook, Rashad said.
Rashad detailed how the ads had been classified internally at the city as “pass-through expenses” — a contracting carve-out that exempted the costs from the threshold requiring city council approval. But Fresno’s city code, administrative orders, council resolutions, and transparency act contain no such exemption.
“There was internal legal advice that led to Chavez using this much money for Facebook ads, on top of already paying this company 99K for PR consulting,” Rashad said.
Fresnoland’s investigation landed Jan. 7. Within three weeks, the city council approved reforms barring the pass-through expense loophole, but much of the problems behind dark money remain unresolved.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen public officials move faster,” Fresnoland editor Rob Parsons said of the council’s response. “In my time of doing this for 20 years — it was great to see. But it was also a reminder that they actually can move fast.”
Why isn’t Fresno doing anything about dark money in politics?
The panel featured three guests: Thomas Holyoke, a political science professor at Fresno State who has studied money in politics for two decades; Nick Richardson, the city council member representing northeast Fresno; and James Kus, the Fresno County Clerk-Registrar of Voters. The discussion moved from the specifics of the investigation into larger questions about how untraceable money flows through Fresno’s political system.
Holyoke described dark money as “any ways that money is moved in politics so that the person giving the money or the entity giving the money remains unknown.” He traced the practice from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the rise of super PACs after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, and said what works at the national level inevitably gets replicated locally with its own flair or flavor.
“Success breeds imitation,” Holyoke said. “Something that has been found to work at the national level can be scaled down to the state level, can be scaled down to the local level.”
Rashad then pointed to a concrete local example: an LLC called Front Point Partners, based in Orange County, that has been represented by Tavlian and has made campaign donations and funded television airtime for Fresno city council candidates. Because LLCs are not required to file the same political disclosures as PACs, there is no way for the public to trace where the money originated — a structure Holyoke described as functioning like a mini-super PAC funneling money to multiple local candidates.
“The public should know who is contributing to a candidate. They should know what the candidate is spending money on,” Holyoke said. “Generally, people who contribute money are looking for some kind of benefit. Contributing money is an investment, and people expect investments to pay off.”
The panel also revisited the 2025 attack mailer targeting then-candidate Brandon Vang in the District 5 special election, which alleged that he was a statutory rapist. The PAC responsible spent $4,439 on the mailers and, the public found out later, was organized by Tavlian.
For months after the election, the public was in the dark on who was behind the vicious smear, because Tavlian initially didn’t file the required campaign finance forms. The city attorney’s office issued a $1,000 fine.
Asked whether a fine of that size was a meaningful deterrent for dark money, Holyoke said it was a big fat joke. “A thousand dollars — for a lot of these organizations, that’s going to be the change you find in the sofa,” he said.
The panelists discussed how dark money flourishes in an environment where campaigns are divided before even a single vote is cast. Councilman Richardson — who won in 2024 in an upset against a developer-backed candidate — said that the taxpayer money that went to Chavez’s Facebook ads in the run up to the election was more than what his entire campaign spent in total.
“If we were taxed with a thousand-dollar fine during my campaign, that would have been like a baseball bat to my kneecaps,” he joked.
Kus, who has worked in election administration for decades, explained the limits of his office’s role. He can ensure candidates file the required forms on time and fine them for late filings, but he has no power to audit the contents of those filings or investigate violations of state finance law. That responsibility falls to the state Fair Political Practices Commission, which, Rashad noted, opened an investigation into the Vang attack mailer in April 2025 — and as of two weeks ago, is still investigating.
“There’s a lot of laws,” Kus said. “But there isn’t a lot of people to actually go out and see if they are being followed.”
Holyoke said the enforcement gap has effectively pushed the work of monitoring political money onto nonprofits and journalists. He compared the dynamic to the national level, where the nonprofit OpenSecrets.org has become the primary source for campaign finance data because the Federal Election Commission lacks the capacity to do the work itself.
“Down here, at the local level, I guess we are outsourcing to Fresnoland,” Holyoke said. “It’s a matter of funding, and because of lack of funding, if the work’s going to happen at all, it often has to get picked up by the nonprofit sector.”
Fresno is the fifth-largest city in California, but unlike Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Diego, it has no local ethics commission.
The event ran a half-hour past its scheduled end as audience questions poured in — about whether there’s dark money in homeless funding, dedicating taxpayer funds to public records access, and the possibility of creating a city ethics commission. Richardson said he was open to the conversation.
“I was actually advised not to come to this tonight,” Richardson told the crowd. “I obviously didn’t listen, because I’m always down for a conversation.”
