Good morning! It’s Monday, Sept. 21. This is Rob.
Not yes: Does adding more police officers make the Tower District safer? The Fresno Bee
Student safety: Hoover High School’s junior varsity football program has been “placed on pause” after a student-athlete was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. ABC30
Tragedy: Two aerospace workers died over the weekend in a helicopter crash while battling the Dome Fire. YourCentralValley
Listen up: Two former Fresno Bee editors discuss the recent gutting layoffs at the city’s century-old paper of record. Central Valley Daily
1. Does anyone actually want to do this?
As anti-library privatization sentiment grows, backers of the fledgling proposal to outsource the Fresno County public library don’t have the votes to make it happen.
A vote to turn the library over to the private sector requires a supermajority of four of the five county board of supervisors. And supporters don’t have the vote right now and it’s unclear how much the math could change on the Fresno County Board of Supervisors in the coming year.
Earlier this year, Fresno Board Chair Garry Bredefeld ordered county staff to prepare a feasibility study and cost analysis of privatization as the county grapples with struggling finances on multiple fronts.
But even Bredefeld, who has publicly clashed with the library and what he has described as its “woke agenda”, has stopped short of saying he supports the idea.
“I’m waiting for a report to tell us whether, financially, (privatization) makes sense, and what services could be provided, and if they could be provided in a better fashion than is provided now,” Bredefeld said. “I’m not committed to anything simply because I asked for a report and an analysis of what it would mean to privatize the library.”
Meanwhile that report is due back in mid to late October and a public meeting is in the works to discuss the still unpublished report.
Read the full story from Fresnoland here.
2. SCCCD board clashes over PLA talks
Fresno City College’s ongoing negotiations over a project-labor agreement are intensifying, GV Wire reports, with a small faction of board trustees pushing to end negotiations and finalize a deal, but the board’s legal team has said that involvement could threaten the school’s accreditation.
Fuentes told GV Wire that he was present for the Aug. 19 meeting but was only there to observe negotiations.
He said as a member of the ad hoc committee, along with Danielle Parra and fellow trustee Magdalena Gomez, it is acceptable to be present for negotiations.
“I’m a part of the ad hoc committee that the board tasked with overseeing this negotiation process, so yes, I find it perfectly appropriate to observe the negotiation,” Fuentes said.
Fuentes sent an email to district leaders in August saying that if the PLA was not approved by October, the board would draft its own version of a PLA and place it on the agenda of the November board meeting.
The election for the Fresno City Council District 1 seat, for which Fuentes is a finalist, is Nov. 3.
3. Are Fresno drivers the absolute worst?
There’s a reason I don’t believe Fresno drivers are the very worst in the nation. I’ve been to Utah.
But if you want to argue that Fresno drivers top the charts of the reckless road warriors, it’s not like you couldn’t make a strong case against California’s fifth-largest city.
That conversation kicked off on Reddit last week when one Fresno-area driver posed the question about driving on the 99 and 41 freeways.
“It’s gotten so bad and downright terrifying how stupid and reckless people have gotten with their driving,” one user commented. “I’m almost at a point where I want to avoid the highway all together but then you have a bunch of assholes running red lights during stop and go traffic. It’s like you can’t win here.”
Whether city streets are more dangerous than freeways is unclear to me, but that red-light-running comment is real as hell, though.
Fresno’s the only city I’ve driven around where a red light means “gun it” and a green light means “wait for three drivers to run their red light, then go.”
The online chatter fell basically around the lines you probably expect. A high number of commenters describe Fresno traffic as a live-action Frogger roleplay, while others, like myself, feel safer in Fresno than in other shady cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco.
In terms of data that might actually help answer the question — are Fresno drivers the absolute worst — traffic studies apparently are as conflicted as Reddit users.
A quick search of recent traffic studies puts Fresno both at the bottom of safety lists — and the top.
And when the researchers reach the same conclusions as Reddit users, maybe it’s one of those things we’re just supposed to fight about.
Today’s newsletter was edited by Danielle Bergstrom.
