Fresno used to be a sensible, responsible community. Good schools, family values, fiscally responsible and conservative. Now it is possible that the 2026 elections will see THREE tax increases on the ballot—after the voters said No to tax increases in 2022 and 2024.
“Voters in Fresno could potentially vote on three taxes funding transportation next year if local leaders can’t figure out how to get in the same lane.
Efforts to renew Measure C – Fresno County’s multi-billion dollar sales tax funding roads, transit, bike lanes, and even the airport – have officially begun again, after a contentious showdown between two rival political factions resulted in failure at the ballot box in 2022.
Despite multiple attempts to bridge the divide, the two groups – one headed by county transportation leaders, the other by social equity advocacy organizations – are currently on track to run separate ballot measures funding transportation in November of 2026. Fresno city leaders are still in discussions on whether they’ll pursue a general tax, also in 2026, funding public safety and transportation.”
Is Fresno trying to be the San Fran of the Central Valley? Defeat all three and maybe it can return to being a responsible community—pass them and you kill the economy.
‘A multi-billion game of chicken’: Could Fresno voters face three transportation taxes next year?
Two potential rival countywide ballot measures focused on roads and transit — along with a potential city tax next year, could be headed to Fresno voters.
by Danielle Bergstrom, Fresnoland, 5/1/25 https://fresnoland.org/2025/05/01/a-multi-billion-game-of-chicken-could-fresno-voters-face-three-transportation-taxes-next-year/
Voters in Fresno could potentially vote on three taxes funding transportation next year if local leaders can’t figure out how to get in the same lane.
Efforts to renew Measure C – Fresno County’s multi-billion dollar sales tax funding roads, transit, bike lanes, and even the airport – have officially begun again, after a contentious showdown between two rival political factions resulted in failure at the ballot box in 2022.
Despite multiple attempts to bridge the divide, the two groups – one headed by county transportation leaders, the other by social equity advocacy organizations – are currently on track to run separate ballot measures funding transportation in November of 2026. Fresno city leaders are still in discussions on whether they’ll pursue a general tax, also in 2026, funding public safety and transportation.
The community-led effort, dubbed “Transportation for All,” decided to move forward on their own after requests from their representatives to include more community oversight over the countywide spending plan were rebuffed amidst negotiations with an informal ‘Group of 10’ last year.
No matter what’s happening in Sacramento or Washington, we will continue to do what we’ve always done: hold our local officials accountable and report the stories that affect daily life in the Central Valley.
“If we’re going to ask the community, going to choose to tax ourselves for a service, we should have a direct say in how those tax dollars get spent,” said Veronica Garibay, co-executive director of Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, one of the transportation advocacy groups leading the effort.
Transportation for All – a coalition of several local organizations, including Cultiva La Salud, Fresno Building Healthy Communities, Youth Leadership Institute, the League of Women Voters, and the Northern California Carpenters’ Union, officially kicks off this Saturday, with a community visioning workshop at the Veterans’ Memorial Hall in San Joaquin.
The county’s official effort, led by the Fresno Council of Governments, or FCOG, kicked off in April. They’re considering taking an approach similar to Madera County, where a petition drive to get the plan on the ballot helped lower the threshold to pass from a two-thirds supermajority to a simple majority, a quirk of California state law around taxes.
Several Fresno County mayors were taken by surprise by the rival ballot measure during a routine informational update at a recent FCOG policy board meeting on April 24, chiding staff and transportation advocates for not telling the board about the alternate plan.
“I think we were out of the loop,” said Clovis Mayor Vong Mouanoutoua. “I would have appreciated, ‘Hey COG, this is what’s happening. There’s a group, they’re doing it [a ballot measure]. What is your direction?”
Many, including Parlier Mayor Alma Beltran, expressed a desire to merge efforts with the community-led group. “The directive [to staff] will be that we work together and merge, if that’s what we need to do to get this to pass, then that’s what we need to do to work together.”
But Fresno COG Executive Director Robert Phipps reminded the board that previous efforts to find common ground with the community coalition were rejected in late 2023.
The ‘Group of 10’ compromise approach to Measure C renewal was supposed to be formally discussed with the COG policy board in late 2023. But, the proposal died after former supervisor and industrial lobbyist Henry Perea criticized the framework for going too far and stripping away too much authority from government planners, Fresnoland reported in August.
“Some call it sabotage, others call it simply pointing out the flaws in the process,” Phipps told the board on Thursday.
He admitted that their staff was aware of rumblings of a separate effort, but didn’t proactively investigate.
Several community leaders spoke at the April 24 meeting, urging the board to find a way to merge the two ballot measure efforts.
“If we do not merge these two, there will 100% be two ballot measures, and they will both be citizen-driven, and they will both fail. There is power money on both sides,” said Dave Rivas, a senior field representative for the Northern California Carpenters’ Union.
Alan Pierrot, representing the Central Valley Community Foundation, told the policy board that the foundation is ready to pay the $400,000 necessary for signature-gathering efforts to qualify the tax for the ballot – but only if the two factions can merge together.
“Everyone is playing a multi-billion dollar game of chicken, waiting to see who will blink first,” said J.P. Shamshoian, CEO of Realty Concepts, and a Central Valley Community Foundation board member, to the COG board.
Phipps, along with consultant Kendall Flint, committed to meeting with representatives from the community-led coalition to find common ground and report back to the board in May, with the potential for a final decision to be made.
Flint emphasized that the choice to merge would ultimately need approval from both the COG policy board as well as the Fresno County Transportation Authority board, in an email to Fresnoland.
While there weren’t any staunch opponents to joining forces with the community coalition at the policy board, two members of the Fresno County Transportation Authority board – Supervisor Garry Bredefeld and Fresno City Councilmember Mike Karbassi – are some of their greatest foes.
“I would encourage you not to focus on the environmental justice advocates who are not interested in getting anything passed, but have their own political agenda,” Bredefeld told the consultant, Flint, during a presentation to the Board of Supervisors at their April 22 meeting.
Groups split over ‘penultimate boss’ of spending plan
The two factions have essentially split over how to handle the steering committee, a core group of people helping guide how to interpret community feedback into a realistic plan.
Traditionally, past Measure C steering committees have been made up of people nominated by local mayors along with representatives from different industries and sectors, from agriculture to environmental justice, alongside county transportation planning leaders.
They’re the ones that decide how to interpret community priorities – like fixing roads, or improving road safety – into funding categories. It’s a deeply political process, because decisions like how to fix Fresno County’s multi-billion dollar backlog of road maintenance – bring up questions of who should bear the tax burden, when a lot of the damage has been created by heavy-duty trucks, not just your average car.
Their recommendations still have to go through several layers of city councils, transportation boards, and ultimately the board of supervisors before getting in front of voters.
What the community groups have proposed – and got initial agreement in the ‘Group of 10’ for – is to replace a nominated steering committee with an open community forum for decision-making on the spending plan. People who show up consistently to these meetings would be considered a voting member.
Like the traditional process, the community forum plan would still have to face 15 city councils, two transportation boards, and the board of supervisors as the ‘final boss.’
That change was too radical of a departure from the norm for Perea, who served on the ‘Group of 10’.
“[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,” he told Fresnoland last August.
“I think this is about control,” Karbassi told Fresnoland, in an interview. “What frustrates me, is our democracy is a republic, which means we elect people to make decisions, because not every citizen can be everywhere all at once, and there is a public trust there to make those decisions. Is it perfect? No. But it’s organized and representative.”
But Garibay points to a history of broken trust and neglect by public officials as a reason to be skeptical of putting too much power in the hands of a few transportation planning executives and their chosen representatives.
She points to her 15 years of experience facing headwinds with Fresno County transportation leaders in an attempt to improve roads and transit options in rural communities. “We’ve supported community leaders engaging in these [transportation] processes, and they’ve always been told, ‘the resources are not there to support your priorities.’”
But behind the philosophical debates over governance, there’s a clear distaste for Garibay, her organization, and other outspoken environmental justice advocates who have used a combination of pressure campaigns and litigation to try to bend the will of local government to better serve underinvested communities.
“Leadership Counsel is elected by nobody, but they’ve been effective at throwing a wrench into everything,” said Karbassi. He called her organization ‘economic terrorists’ last November, referring to a successful lawsuit her organization filed against the city.
In Garibay’s defense, Rivas, from the Carpenters’ Union, surmised that the breakdown between the two factions came down to personalities. “I’m going to tell you right now what this is: it’s a stigma of Veronica. If you take Veronica out of the picture, would we all be together?”
Garibay – and others in the coalition – raised concerns about the new steering committee for Measure C renewal, which met for the first time on Saturday, criticizing the lack of a public roster nor transparency in how members were selected. (The website has since been updated to include the steering committee roster.)
Fresno Unified trustee – and member of the Transportation for All coalition – Andy Levine told the board he applied to serve on the steering committee, as did Fresno State economics professor Kevin Capehart, but neither ever heard from staff after submitting their applications.
Fresno city representatives on the committee include Brooke Ashjian, a paving company owner, Karen Musson, an executive at Gar Bennett, an agricultural services firm, and Chuck Riojas, executive director of the Fresno-Madera Building Trades Council.
FCOG’s consultant, Flint, defended the steering committee in an email to Fresnoland, stressing it is “representative of the diverse view of the region,” and that members were ultimately chosen by FCOG and FCTA staff.
Garibay was asked to join the steering committee, but she told the board she declined to participate since she “can’t possibly represent all of Fresno County.”
Will Fresno still go its own way?
While county leaders contemplate two rival measures, Fresno city leaders have continued to explore whether they chart their own path with a third potential tax hitting Fresno voters in 2026, Mayor Jerry Dyer told Fresnoland in February.
With a $20 million dollar budget deficit to close – mostly due to escalating public safety labor costs – the council and mayor have got Clovis envy once again, after the neighboring suburb breezily passed a general tax in 2024, funding more cops and firefighters while attaining one of the highest tax rates in the county.
Dyer declined to comment for this story.
Councilmember Miguel Arias said last year that he’d support the city going its own way after expressing frustration that the logistics industry isn’t paying more of the burden for the toll of heavy-duty trucks on local roads.
Karbassi told Fresnoland it may be possible for the city and county to move forward with both taxes, while keeping Fresno’s sales tax rate lower than Clovis – since renewing Measure C wouldn’t add a new tax.
“We don’t know what’s going to be in Measure C yet, but I’m in favor of a countywide measure, than the city going on its own,” said Karbassi, adding that he wasn’t fully committed to a specific approach yet.
The next month is a crunch time to figure out future transportation spending – with Mayor Dyer’s budget coming in mid-May, along with over two-dozen community meetings and public workshops on Measure C scheduled.
The Fresno Council of Governments policy board will reconvene to discuss the two countywide measures at their next meeting on May 29. The next Measure C Steering Committee meeting to discuss renewal is on Thursday, May 8, at 3:00 p.m. The meeting will be webcast for the public at MeasureC2026.com.
