Good morning! It’s Wednesday, Feb. 18. This is Rob and Omar.
Lighter rain storms expected today with highs in the 40s and heavier rain on Thursday. NOAA
The CEO of California’s High-Speed Rail Authority on leave after arrest. The Fresno Bee
Efforts to improve access along the San Joaquin River got a $2 million boost. KMPH
1. Here’s the latest on the Arts Council investigation
On this week’s Fresnolandia podcast, Jordan and Danielle speak with Fresno City Councilmember Miguel Arias about the fallout from the alleged embezzlement of $1.5 million in Measure P arts funding from the Fresno Arts Council.
They dive into what’s known about the case so far, why it’s been slow to learn more facts about it — including an arrest and whether the right internal controls were in place for both the city and the Arts Council, and what local arts organizations and artists can expect in the third round of grants, starting this spring.
But even with so many questions lingering, the fallout of the theft investigation has already had reverberating consequences for small local arts-related businesses.
2. Hobby Lobby CEO gives keynote at annual prayer breakfast
Steve Green, the president and CEO of Hobby Lobby, spoke to more than 2,000 people at the annual Fresno Clovis Prayer Breakfast Tuesday morning, Fresnoland’s Diego Vargas reports.
During his speech, the keynote of Tuesday’s breakfast, Green said he is grateful that the United States is a nation built on “God’s word.”
Green also recounted how Hobby Lobby won a landmark 2014 Supreme Court case after being sued for not allowing its employees’ health insurance providers cover contraceptives and abortion.
At a Monday night private event in Fresno, Green told an audience that California, at one time, was off-limits for a corporation from Oklahoma City’s conservative business community, joking that the Golden State was “a foreign country.”
Hobby Lobby CEO and President Steve Green: “Our government’s not perfect, it never has been, nor will it ever be. We are grateful, though, that our nation has been built on concepts, on principles found in God’s Word, and we stood on the fact that our founders enshrined in our Constitution our religious freedom.”
3. Fresno State employees strike
Accusing Fresno State and the CSU system of playing a “bunch of lawyer games” to essentially welsh on contracted bonuses, a group of employees walked off the job Tuesday.
YourCentralValley reports that the employees, backed by the Teamsters union, launched a four-day worker strike on Tuesday.
Union reps say the university system is not negotiating in good faith and questioned why the workers should take less money this year when top CSU brass just received “nice big fat raises” which one union rep described as just “another scenario of, you know, we don’t have any money for you, but we have money for ourselves.”
CSU leaders say the Teamsters are contractually obligated to return to the bargaining table to renegotiate the raise since the university system received less money from the state than was initially planned when the deal was struck several years ago.
Today’s newsletter was edited by Fresnoland’s Omar S. Rashad.
