Note: This post was originally published at Fresnoland.
Over the last fifteen years, Fresno County’s roads have fallen apart spectacularly, at a scale unrivaled in the state of California.
On the eve of the Great Recession, Fresno County stood as having the fourth-best roads in the state, according to a statewide report from the California League of Cities. Since 2008, counties such as Los Angeles have kept their roads in the same condition. Out of 100 points, Kern County’s road pavement scores dropped one point over the same timespan. Orange County and San Bernardino County actually improved their roads by a few points.
Fresno County saw its road pavement score drop fourteen points – the biggest, by far, in the state amongst major counties.
County reports point to the logistics industry and industrial agriculture as the major culprit, whose massive growth since 2008 has caused big rig traffic to outpace population growth, causing 6,000 times more road damage per vehicle than passenger vehicles. Today, the county has a $1.7 billion road maintenance shortfall.
One of the biggest political puzzles facing Fresno County in the next two years will be who pays for this new mess – the public or the guys with nuts, trucks, and warehouses. And so far, nobody knows how to pick up the pieces and come up with a vision of Fresno County’s future that everybody can agree on.
On Wednesday, a vote at Fresno County’s top transportation planning board to initiate planning for a new $5 billion Measure C spending plan for the 2026 ballot was canceled after five members of the eight-member board either didn’t show up or left in protest in the middle of the meeting.
Fresno County Transportation Authority (FCTA) chairman Buddy Mendes said that in the 10 years he’s been on the board, he’s never seen the board suddenly lose quorum like on Thursday.
“I got one word: chickenshit,” Mendes said.
As Fresno County’s Measure C stumbles, once again, to gather support for a renewal plan with road repaving as a central focus, interviews show that the political situation is at a stalemate behind closed doors.
All they have to offer is that same thing that failed two years ago. We’re not charging those who are causing most of the damage to our roads. It’s crazy.”
Miguel Arias, Fresno County Transportation Authority
A group of power brokers, including Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer and Clovis Mayor Lynne Ashbeck, have closed off contact with key opposition leaders which doomed the 2022 attempt for Measure C’s renewal.
Talks between the two groups have fallen apart, said Veronica Garibay, a leader with the Transportation For All coalition and Leadership Counsel for Accountability & Justice, over basic issues of what role, if any, residents should have in crafting Measure C’s $5 billion spending plan.
“It shows absolutely no leadership or vision by Fresno County decision-makers to do right by community residents,” Garibay said.
Two people on Dyer’s side, including Dyer, said that the framework they had been working on with Garibay lost support with them because “it removed authority from the elected officials,” Dyer wrote in an email.
The city of Fresno is keeping the heat on the county-wide coalition, with Fresno city councilmember and FCTA board member Miguel Arias threatening on Wednesday to create a city-only transportation sales tax – potentially leaving Measure C running on political fumes.
Arias described the existing approach, of having the public pay for the costs of road damage, as “the largest subsidy to the logistics industry” in county history.
“All they have to offer is that same thing that failed two years ago,” Arias said. “We’re not charging those who are causing most of the damage to our roads. It’s crazy.”
Logistics, Agricultural Growth Outpace Road Maintenance
For nearly twenty years, Fresno County had great roads. Then a warehouse and nut boom exploded a multi-billion dollar hole in road maintenance funding – one that local political leaders have been hesitant to climb out of on the backs of industrial projects.
The problem was predicted near the end of Fresno’s good-road heyday. In 2004, four years before the start of the county’s road collapse, planners said truck traffic on local highways and legacy rural roads was up to four times the state average, growing 300 percent faster than population growth. As industrial agriculture intensified their production methods, the county public works report said at the time, a huge road maintenance bill was about to come due.
“Dispersed agricultural activities result in truck use of even the most minor roads. This results in a greater maintenance burden over the entire road system,” the 2004 report said.
A 2006 developer fee seemed poised to solve the problem – a fee for roads based on the impacts of businesses. But developers scored a coup. The money could only be used to build new highways and interchanges, Robert Phipps, the head of COG, told Fresnoland. The rule meant their fees could not pay for the increased road maintenance caused by their operations.
When the nut and logistics boom hit full steam in the 2010s, Fresno County’s roads went into free fall.
In agriculture, the new nut harvests channeled huge trucks on roads built in the 1920s – designed for the light load of commuting farmworkers and Model-T Fords, not a 10-ton Peterbilt.
After having average Pavement Condition Index scores near 75 for decades, Fresno County’s PCI fell to 60. In Madera, a place with even fewer resources than Fresno County, the harvest has been a disaster. Madera County now has some of the worst roads in the state.
In 2022, Fresno county’s political leaders came up with a plan to pay for the damages. They decided residents, not the businesses banking record profits on their expanded production, should pay for the funding shortfall.
A $7 billion spending plan for Measure C, Fresno County’s transportation sales tax, was announced in Spring 2022. The plan aimed to spend $3.5 billion to bring Fresno County’s road quality back to the 2008 days. To do so, leaders cut public transit funding by 40%, eliminated farm worker carpool programs and more.
The plan caused an uproar. With such a heavy focus on repaving, even common-sense projects like building new sidewalks for school children were eliminated in the $7 billion spending plan.
Opposition against the plan became a bipartisan issue – opposed by both the Democratic and Republican parties, along with Fresno Unified teacher’s union and the local carpenters union. The plan was supported by realtors and the Fresno Chamber of Commerce.
Despite the opposition, in 2022, local politicians theorized that residents, above all else, wanted their streets repaved. Some of them even compared residents’ love for fresh asphalt to All-American staples like baseball, hot dogs and apple pie.
Ultimately, the theory was a dud. In November 2022, the proposed spending plan failed to get the necessary 67 percent vote in Fresno County, falling in a similar fashion to a road-focused Measure C renewal attempt in 2002.
Measure C’s failure pointed to a long-standing problem in Fresno. For years, leaders have shied away from asking industry to shoulder a bigger share of infrastructure costs. In Fresno County, it is becoming increasingly common for politicians to rely on added sales taxes on local residents to help fill the budget shortfalls caused by low revenues from developer and business fee programs.
That this pattern would eat away at the region’s future for light rail, public transit or more walkable neighborhoods made the issue a political necessity to solve. After the November failure, both sides, led by Dyer and Garibay, regrouped to see what they had in common. They called themselves the Group of 10.
A Brief Moment of Collaboration
The first meetings, starting in April 2023, went great, said Garibay.
“The goal was to see if there was a pathway where we can all work together,” she said. “Not to talk about the details of a measure, projects, priorities. Only to see if there was a pathway to make sure that the process was as inclusive as possible.”
By October of last year, that exploration had yielded fruit. The group unveiled a framework for the 2026 Measure C renewal that would turn Fresno’s traditional top-down approach on its head. At its core: a vision placing decision-making power in the hands of residents.
Using similar techniques to how climate change spending programs have been crafted in Fresno, the framework established that top transportation officials could not craft Fresno County’s Measure C in isolation.
This was a change from how the 2022 plan was created, where top county transportation officials Tony Boren and Mike Leonardo largely drafted the core details of the plan which was rubber stamped by eighteen boards of elected officials.
Instead, the new transportation framework puts residents in the driver’s seat. Slides presented within the group outlined a collaborative process where community members would work alongside transportation officials in 2025 to craft a spending plan for the 2026 Measure C renewal.
The process hoped to culminate in a pivotal moment: a public forum scheduled for spring 2026. At this gathering, residents would give a final recommendation on the spending plan before it began its journey through official channels through city councils and transportation boards to get on the 2026 ballot.
It was a fundamental reimagining of the power structure of transportation planning, said Henry Perea, who was on Dyer’s side.
“[What the plan did was say]: ‘hey, look, all of you other committees, all of you people who, in the past, have run the process and have created the document that finally went to the voters, you don’t have a say anymore other than being a part of a committee. You don’t have decision making authority. That’s significant,” he said.“They put it all in the community.”
Perea soon brought up these concerns to Ashbeck, Fresno Chamber of Commerce head Scott Miller, Parlier Mayor Alma Beltran, and Dyer. They soon feared that the resident-focused approach could take power away from elected officials.
“To create a document where a group of unelected people have basically all the power in their hands to create a document and that technical staff and the CEOs of these organizations really have no decision making authority: I have a problem with that,” Perea said.
Interviews with both sides show that Dyer’s side did not try to negotiate with Garibay’s side over the framework after these concerns were raised. They simply shut off all contact with Garibay’s coalition. Between October and February, Dyer’s side didn’t respond to multiple calls to set up meetings, according to Garibay.
“It was just kind of at a standstill,” Perea said. “So finally, the group [Dyer’s side] got together again at the Chamber [of Commerce], and basically said, ‘Hey, look, we were ahead of our skis,’” Perea said.
In February, Dyer’s side informed Garibay that negotiations were over. Things would proceed the old-fashioned way, Sandra Celedon, president of Fresno Building Healthy Communities, was told.
“They basically said the proposal was no longer on the table, and that FCTA and COG were going to start the process,” Celedon said.
Breakdown over Fresno County’s Measure C
Wednesday’s meeting began where the last battle over Measure C started – in a windowless room above an abandoned casino in downtown Fresno.
Maintenance issues abounded everywhere. The AC was broken in the building and the meeting got hot and stuffy. Before a new version of Measure C was discussed, apathy, delay and uncertainty colored the projects funded by the measure currently.
The board approved the city of Firebaugh’s shrub-planting project near an Autozone which was postponed by sixteen years. Meanwhile, an additional $1.2 million was allocated to Highway 99 projects facing potential cancellation due to legal issues, with no clear refund policy in place. The Fresno County Transportation Authority was created for the sole purpose of administering Measure C. But despite the monumental vote for the next thirty years of the measure, most of the board members didn’t show up on Wednesday.
Only Steve Brandau, Mendota Mayor Victor Martinez, and Sarah Harris attended for the whole meeting. Paul Sahota, Alma Beltran, Ashbeck and Dyer didn’t show up.
Frustrated that board members weren’t there to give direction to new FCTA Director Terry Ogle, Arias walked out in protest. His departure caused the meeting to lose quorum – the minimum number of members required to conduct official business – bringing proceedings to an abrupt halt.
“This was set up in a way that there would be very little discussion on the matter,” Arias said. “It reminds me when Congress sets up a bill for a vote at 3 a.m., after introducing it at 2:30.”
Crossroads: Industry Responsibility and Public Investment
Measure C’s overall breakdown in governance casts a long shadow over the future of the proposed sales tax plan, which, with $5-7 billion, could build light rail lines, public transit, pedestrian trails, and other ambitious goals.
But these visions, and the politics of Measure C, will continue to be squeezed by the numbers of potholes. A closer look reveals a troubling trend: the cost of repairing roads damaged by heavy truck traffic is likely to be outpaced by tax revenues earmarked for repaving.
Truck traffic is outpacing population growth, according to COG, and household incomes, stagnant for decades, are unlikely to make up for the gap. Even a $3-4 billion investment in road maintenance risks not keeping pace with annual wear and tear on roads.
The county could find itself in the unenviable position of potentially sacrificing every planned sidewalk, bus route, and rail line to road repairs, only to still come up short in thirty years.
And yet – there have not been talks on looking to industry to pay for their wear-and-tear, said Phipps.
“This hasn’t been discussed at this point in the process,” Robert Phipps wrote in an email.
Arias said another Measure C spending plan which devotes the majority of its funds to road repaving has already shown itself to be a political loser. He said that Measure C has always been politically ambitious, but a bigger vision is needed.
“At some point you can’t keep convincing residents that patching potholes is the best thing to do,” he said.
Solutions exist which could free up dollars to forge a political consensus on what Measure C could build, the key factor in these negotiations, research shows. In recent years, California researchers have established ways for cities, counties and transit authorities to equitably construct user fees for road maintenance.
Doing so could free up billions in Measure C, potentially to fund what other regions are using their transportation sales tax for. In Los Angeles, for example, after its first renewal attempt failed in 2012, leaders came back to the drawing board with a new consensus to build new light rail lines and expand their public transit system.
Unions invigorated by high-speed rail jobs want to see a coherent vision of jobs, housing, and ambitious infrastructure meant to make cities more livable without cars. They say that this is where state and federal funding is ultimately heading.
Catering the next version of Measure C to what types of projects these larger bodies are going to fund could reap massive dividends, said Ogle, the FCTA director.
Over the last forty years, about two-thirds of Fresno County’s Measure C’s impact has come from matching funds, Ogle told Fresnoland. For example, when the state and federal government was still funding new highway construction, “most of the money” to build Highways 41, 168, and 180 came from the state and federal government, Ogle said.
But unless Fresno can find a way to think outside the box for road maintenance, the future of Measure C, as well as the region, may be stuck in the 20th century.
“Maybe there’s a combination,” said Ogle about funding the pothole problem. “Maybe Measure C and some sort of user tax.”
This post was originally published on Fresnoland, a community-supported nonprofit that provides investigative and policy-centered journalism about the Fresno area. Click here to support it.
