Good morning! It’s Tuesday, March 24. This is Rob.
Play it again: Highs in the mid-80s today with aggressively sunny skies overhead. NOAA
Fresnoland is hiring: That’s right, we’re hiring for our first-ever Senior Revenue Officer to help lead and execute our fundraising strategy with local donors and sponsors. Share with your fundraising friends! Fresnoland
Preservation? A proposal for a Dick’s Sporting Goods store at Fashion Fair Mall hinges on whether Fresno’s Historic Preservation Commission agrees the decades-old old building is worth saving. Business Journal
Clean it up: Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer announced that registration for the Greatest American Cleanup event opened on Monday. YourCentralValley
‘Giving Pantry’ El Capitan Middle School opens the second food pantry at Central Unified schools. ABC30
1. Would AI centers make power bills cheaper?
The president of PG&E Corp. says Fresno County is uniquely positioned to take on the AI data center boom in ways she said could potentially benefit the region’s ratepayers, the Business Journal reports.
Remarks from Carla Peterman came Monday while addressing the Rotary Club of Fresno, where it was suggested that every new gigawatt could drive down residential rates by roughly 1%.
A recent study found that placing data centers near solar generation sites in Fresno County could tap into energy that is currently being curtailed due to transmission line congestion.
“A 20-megawatt Fresno County data center could theoretically run on that stranded solar power for about 54% of the year,” the Journal reports.
But while much was made of the potential energy cost savings for residential ratepayers, there was less discussion about the amount of water that AI data centers use and how that would potentially affect central San Joaquin Valley farmers.
Fresnoland’s Danielle Bergstrom took a deeper drive into the potential water issues with AI data centers last year.
2. More young people are buying homes in Fresno?
About one in four Gen Z adults in Fresno own a home. That’s the highest rate of ownership for the younger generation in the state of California, ABC reports.
A new study indicates that homebuyers in their 20s have been on the rise, especially in the Fresno area and other parts of the central San Joaquin Valley.
The study describes Fresno as a “hot spot” for young homeownership with the highest share of homeownership in California at around 24%.
However, it remains unclear exactly how the younger generation has been able to afford homes in this economy and housing crunch.
Doug Ressler is the Business Intelligence Manager for Yardi Matrix.
Ressler: “I think the average age to buy a home right now is somewhere around 38-39 years old, so we were a little bit surprised that they were buying homes in the 20s. Maybe they’re going to the bank of mom and dad, I don’t know.”
3. Farmworker Appreciation Day
We should’ve probably always called it “Fresno County Farmworkers and Agriculture Appreciation Day.”
We used to call it Cesar Chavez day in Fresno County but, as expected, that ended on Monday during a special meeting of the Fresno County Board of Supervisors, which voted unanimously to strip the disgraced late leader’s name from the March 31 holiday.
It’s just the latest monument to fall in the wake of a devastating New York Times investigation that exposed the sexual abuse of underage girls and the rape of a co-leader of the farmworkers movement, Dolores Huerta, ABC30 reports.
Fresno State has already removed Chavez’s campus statue and the Fresno City Council is scrambling to rename Cesar Chavez Boulevard for the second time in less than five years.
Today’s newsletter was edited by Fresnoland’s Omar S. Rashad.
