Good morning! It’s Wednesday, Dec. 10. This is Rob.
😰 Still cold: More gray weather over Fresno today with highs in the 40s. NOAA
🚫 No sympathy: Fresno County Supervisors took their first look at a new law that, if passed, would allow the county to reduce the number of sexual offenders that can live in a single-family home. Fresnoland
⛸️ Downtown’s Winter Village has arrived: The Downtown Fresno ice rink is now open for holiday season. ABC30
🛣️ Help the county improve road safety: Fresno County’s Department of Public Works is asking residents to help shape a safer transportation future by using a new online mapping exercise designed to capture community-identified traffic safety problem areas. Find the online tool and more information here.
📚Free books! To support winter break reading for students and help them expand their home libraries, Fresno Unified is partnering with Scholastic to provide more than 100,000 books to students in preschool through fifth grade — each student gets to take home five books! The event is set for 11 a.m. Friday, Dec. 12 at McCardle Elementary School, 577 E. Sierra Ave.
Moved to tears: A Fresno man is headed to the season finale of “The Voice.” CBS47
1. Fresno sues over ‘forever chemicals’
The City of Fresno is suing more than three dozen companies it accuses of contaminating the city’s groundwater with PFAS, the synthetic compounds known as “forever chemicals.”
Fresnoland’s Gregory Weaver reports that Fresno’s water has been clocked with some of the worst contamination of “forever chemicals,” known as PFAS, across the U.S. Cleanup is expected to be prohibitably expensive. The city wants the companies to pay for the damage to Fresno residents’ water.
A 2024 analysis from USA Today found that Fresno’s groundwater is over 600% EPA standards for forever chemicals — some of the most severe contamination in the state.
The lawsuit, filed Nov. 3 in Fresno County Superior Court, names industry giants 3M and DuPont alongside local metal plating shops, E. & J. Gallo Winery, and chemical distributors.
2. ‘Mom and dad are fighting’
Fresno supervisors clashed with a group of county mayors this week over the beleaguered transportation tax proposal, with at least one supervisor pledging to oppose the plan, Fresnoland’s Pablo Orihuela reports.
The Board on Tuesday continued to hammer the Council Of Governments’ spending proposal, with Supervisor Garry Bredefeld arguing that north Fresno and Clovis opposed the last iteration of Measure C in 2022 and were likely to vote it down again.
“I can assure you they’re going to vote it down again, and I’m going to help them vote it down,” Bredefeld said.
Parlier Mayor Alma Beltran, the transportation committee’s co-chair, also criticized the supervisors for courting a third party to pursue a separate, signature-backed transportation measure.
Beltran: “We need to figure out how we can come together instead of arguing…How we can support one measure. Having two measures out there is not going to help…both will fail.”
3. ‘All of those people had to relocate’
A new UCLA report examines just how destructive the construction of Highway 99 was for West Fresno.
Fresnoland’s Julianna Morano spoke with West Fresno residents and researchers of a new report at UCLA, unpacking the decades-old history of the city’s west side that was largely forced out and paved over.
Four-hundred homes were demolished to make way for the freeway’s construction and about 1,000 residents were displaced, UCLA researchers say.
But the report also approximates how much of that destruction could have been avoided — had state officials instead selected one of the alternative routes that West Fresno community leaders pushed for back then.
Jacob Wasserman, the project manager for the UCLA study, said, “the more destructive route was chosen in Fresno,” noting several local leaders at the time urged the state to consider other routes.
Wasserman: “But those voices were not heard.”
Today’s newsletter was edited by Danielle Bergstrom.
