Good morning! It’s Friday, Feb. 13. This is Rob.
Fog returns: It will apparently be both sunny and foggy today and tomorrow with highs in the 60s. NOAA
Pushback on student walkout crackdown: Parents and other adults who attended Tuesday’s student-led walkout in Clovis schools pushed back this week against claims they helped or encouraged students to skip class to protest ICE. The criticism came a day after Clovis police said they planned to seek criminal misdemeanor charges against adults in connection with the anti-ICE protest. The Fresno Bee
‘Reawakening the culture’: My Homies Kitchen dishes up more than incredible food in downtown Fresno. YourCentralValley
Documentary screening: The Tehipite branch of the Sierra Club invites you to join to attend a presentation of “Big Trees, Big Impact” by local documentary filmmaker Lee Terkelesen at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 18 at the Woodward Park Regional Library. Fresno County Library
1. ‘Outsourcing to Fresnoland’
Speaking before a packed, standing-room-only crowd Thursday at Tioga Brewery, Fresnoland’s Investigative Reporter Omar. S. Rashad gave the public its first look behind the scenes of a recent series of hard-hitting stories that triggered massive reforms at City Hall.
After breaking down the lengthy reporting process — which included the meticulous, at times excruciating, examination of more than 3,000 individual city contracts — Omar sat down with a group of local experts to further unpack how money, and dark money in particular, emerges in local races.
Fresnoland’s Gregory Weaver notes that “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.”
Professor Thomas Holyoke: “Down here, at the local level, I guess we are outsourcing to Fresnoland. 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.”
2. ‘Being alive is not a crime’
Amid on-going student protests in Fresno County and increasing pressure to keep students safe on campus, Fresno Unified schools found a compromise, at least on Thursday.
Fresnoland’s Diego Vargas attended Thursday’s on-campus “We are Young, Not Silent” student rally at Edison Computech Middle School and heard from students who refuse to be silent about the Trump Administration and ICE’s anti-immigrant tactics.
“I would have hoped that we learned from our past: people being targeted and taken from their homes just because of who they are. Doesn’t that sound familiar?” said Gabriella, an eighth-grader.
“We need to use our voices and we need to be loud to show our love for our diversity and our community and our love for our culture; you can’t beat hate with hate, but you can beat hate with love. Being alive is not a crime.”
3. Central Valley Democrats still haven’t picked a lane yet
California Democrats are having a hard time pulling together a coherent plan to unseat U.S. Rep. David Valadao, CalMatters reports.
Despite recently restacking the California Democratic Party’s already stacked deck, party loyalists find themselves in the familiar old fight between moderates seeking a middle ground and others looking for the same populist platform that powered Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City last year.
“Months out from a critical primary election, there’s a sharp divide among liberal activists over which Democratic candidate could be capable of toppling Valadao in a conservative-leaning, working-class district where a significant portion of Hispanic voters flipped from supporting former President Joe Biden in 2020 to backing President Donald Trump in 2024,” Maya C. Miller writes for CalMatters.
California delegates gather next week at the party’s state convention in San Francisco to chop up party endorsements for the upcoming 2026 ticket.
Today’s newsletter was edited by Danielle Bergstrom.
