It’s Friday, Aug. 1. Danielle, here!
☀️ Starting the new month off well: High of 98 today.
🚧 Tulare Street is open: if you work, live, or shop in downtown or Chinatown, you know how difficult this street closure has been. The key connector, which now runs under the train tracks, thanks to high-speed rail, opened yesterday.
Listen up: As a *Swiftie* I’m obligated to tell you that the first day of August means it’s time to listen to August, one of the best tracks on Taylor Swift’s Folklore album.
1. It’s been a cool, cool summer
It’s not in your head: it really has been the coolest July in Fresno in about a decade, and one of the coolest summers we’ve had in the past half-century, according to data from Oregon State, reports Gregory Weaver for Fresnoland.
Last month, just five days reached triple-digit temperatures. (For context: last summer, we had 22 days of triple-digits in July.)
Unfortunately, our cool weather is just a blip on a warming planet. A recent analysis from Carbon Brief, a climate-focused news organization in the United Kingdom, found that we’re on track to have the second or third hottest year on record in 2025.
2. South Tower gets a long-fought park
It took nearly a decade but a South Tower neighborhood is celebrating a new community park, built on a site that used to be a police station, reports Julianna Morano for Fresnoland.
Dozens of neighborhood residents packed the new Broadway Parque at the corner of Elizabeth and Broadway during a ribbon-cutting ceremony with city and community leaders.
Some city leaders wanted the vacant lot rezoned for new apartments. The neighborhood had other plans.
South Tower advocate Kiel Lopez-Schmidt: “We saw that this property, the police station, was going to be torn down, and did not get an invitation to the table to decide what was the future of this land,” said Schmidt, executive director of the South Tower Community Land Trust. “We had to invite ourselves.”
3. Newsom signs bill requiring funding plan for high-speed rail
A bill from Fresno Republican Assemblymember David Tangipa requiring updates of high-speed rail cost estimates and service plans in the authority’s 2026 business plan was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom Wednesday, reported ABC30.
There’s plenty of uncertainty around funding for the Central Valley segment, after President Trump recently yanked $4 billion from the project. (The state is suing.)
Gov. Newsom has proposed setting aside $1 billion annually from pollution credits, known as cap-and-trade, for the high-speed rail project, but legislators have yet to approve the plan.
Assemblymember Tangipa: “My bill is an important step to make sure Fresno and the Central Valley are not left with an unfinished monument of wasted taxpayer dollars,” he said in a statement.
