What's at stake:
The Friant area will look very different if the project is approved.
A $1.1 billion mega-project for the Friant area is heading towards a final vote at the Fresno County Board of Supervisors next month after the county planning commission unanimously recommended approval Thursday.
The project, known as Friant Ranch, is decades in the making and aims to build a new town roughly the size of Fowler on Friant Road, just below Millerton Dam.
The project is again under fire from Fresno-based voting rights, agricultural and environmental groups who argue that the project’s environmental review is full of holes.
Lawyers and lobbyists supporting the Ranch told the commissioners that after 30 years of planning — half of it bogged down in courtroom fights — that the better part of their lives had been spent trying to push Friant Ranch to the finish line.
“I’m 67 years old, and I just did a rough calculation that approximately 20% of my life on the planet has been spent litigating this project,” said Jim Moose, an attorney with Remy Moose Manley, representing Friant Ranch.
Leaders from Fresno’s Sierra Club, League of Women Voters, and the Central Valley Partnership were lined up against the project on Thursday. As the next chapter of the decades-spanning fight with environmentalists and others nears, one long-time proponent recalled the story of how it all started.
Decades ago, Friant Ranch’s Brian Wagner recalled, the late matriarch of a local telephone company named Luanne Silkwood said she greenlit the idea to turn the family’s 100-year-old cattle grazing ranch into something they could stake their legacy on.
“She said, ‘OK, do it. But make it something we can be proud of,'” said Wagner. “We’ve tried our best over these years to make a community that will benefit Fresno County and Friant.”
Luanne’s nephew, local power broker and former assemblymember Frank Bigelow, has become the face of the project ever since, handling the details of turning the 1,000-acre heirloom into a resort-style retirement community.
The vision that’s been settled on is complete with trails, a ballroom and an indoor lap pool – big enough for roughly 7,000 life-loving seniors. Consultants for the Ranch estimated last year it’ll take 10 years and over $1.1 billion to build.
“Frankly, there is not another parcel large enough in the Fresno area to handle an active adult community like this,” Wagner said.
Bigelow wasn’t spotted by Fresnoland on Thursday, but Friant Ranch’s team of lawyers was flanked by nearby Friant residents opposing the project, as well as leaders of local voting rights and environmental groups armed with lawyers of their own.
What’s the next fight about?
The next major fight that’s teed up for the Board of Supervisors next month will be about how the county helped Bigelow pick up the pieces of Friant Ranch’s environmental review after it was pulled apart by the State Supreme Court.
Fresno County’s previous 2011 approval was overturned by the State Supreme Court in 2018, ruling that the county failed to adequately address Friant Ranch’s pollution impacts.
It took Bigelow’s team another five years to put together a new analysis. By that time, in 2023, the county’s previous approval was more than a decade old. And the environmental review that was reapproved by the county planning commission on Thursday is even older — back when Barack Obama was president, in 2009. The wildlife surveys underlying these findings date back even further back, into the mid-1990s.
Environmental groups present on Thursday raised concerns to the county that the environmental review was simply too outdated to meet the latest state requirements. New laws and changes in the Friant Ranch area itself warrant a second look at traffic and water issues, they have written to the county previously.
For example, since 2011, a major blast mine has been proposed, a new state groundwater law written, new rules measuring traffic by miles driven and Table Mountain’s casino has ballooned “8 times larger” than once contemplated, according to a letter from the groups.
On Thursday, Fresno-area resident Radley Reep told the county about an unanalyzed impact of how Friant Ranch plan to dispose of its treated sewage water.
The wastewater will be stored in ponds near the San Joaquin River, which, according to Reep and consultant documents reviewed by Fresnoland, show will seep into an adjacent pond owned by the San Joaquin River Conservancy.
It’s not known what the impacts of that wastewater would be on the underlying groundwater that pond connects to, Reep said.
“It has not undergone environmental assessment, which is enough for you today to say ‘please go back to the table and fix this particular problem before we recertify the [environmental review].’”
The county planning commissioners did not ask any follow-up questions to Friant Ranch’s team of lawyers about Reep’s concern.
The commission voted 6-0 to approve it. Friant Ranch’s final vote is Oct. 20, at the County Hall of Records room 301.
