Frustrated rent control advocates say Fresno leaders aren’t listening, but the fight isn’t over
Community residents and housing advocates are regrouping after an unsuccessful push for Fresno’s new city budget to include a rent control program.
“Community members are disappointed, and there really is this feeling that their narratives, their testimony aren’t being taken seriously,” said Marisa Moraza, a campaign director with Power California Action.
That fight, advocates acknowledge, is an increasingly uphill battle in Fresno, where the mayor and city council have said solving the statewide housing crisis means incentivizing development and courting reinvestment.
Rent control, they argue, would be counterproductive to building new housing units.
“In terms of rent control, I can tell you I don’t support that because I’ve seen what has happened in other cities,” Mayor Jerry Dyer said during a news conference Thursday following the budget’s adoption. “When rent control is implemented, ultimately, you have landlords making fewer dollars, and so they’re not investing in their property. And as a result, we end up with a lot of slums within a city.”
Despite lingering frustrations, housing advocates say they aren’t backing down on their demands.
In May, a coalition of advocacy organizations sent a letter to Dyer and the Fresno City Council, listing a series of budget requests on everything from transportation and infrastructure to housing and, specifically, a new rent control program.
In the letter, advocates said the city should establish a board to enforce rent-control policies, which, they say, would stabilize rents in Fresno.
“We wanted to also wrap in the opportunity to actually allocate funding for something like a rent control program,” Moraza said. “It would be a very low funding allocation, but just having that allocation then opens the door to conversation of building up a policy.”
Mayor, council push to build more affordable housing, remain opposed to rent control
Just before the city council approved the 2024 fiscal year budget Thursday, a group of community residents and housing advocates, with signs in hand, rallied inside the Fresno Council Chambers.
“What do we want? Rent Control!” The group chanted. “When do we want it? Now!”
About 15 seconds into the chant, Council President Tyler Maxwell put the city council meeting into recess for five minutes, and the city’s live feed and audio cut out shortly after.
The chant capped about two months of Fresno residents and housing advocates showing up to public comment before a city council – which they have noted is composed of a majority of landlords – to voice their concerns about rising rents.
“This is really like our final attempt to be able to speak directly to council members because the in-person meetings (with them) weren’t making a shift,” Moraza said. “We’re now seeing that public comment is not making a shift.”
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Dyer said the rent control issue was a nonstarter.
Dyer said passing rent control would send a message to housing developers to leave Fresno, which he said could lead to a lack of housing production and actually drive rents up. Dyer has maintained that the city can resolve its housing crisis by building more units, and rent control does not fit his vision.
Since 2021, 400 new affordable housing units have been built and are currently occupied in Fresno, city spokesperson Sontaya Rose told Fresnoland in May. She said the city plans to add 2,493 more affordable housing units by the end of 2025.
But when new affordable housing developments open up, applications pour in.
One 60-unit affordable housing development in Clovis recently received over 10,000 applications, and another 57-unit development that opened up in Fresno’s Chinatown received 4,000 applications, said Michael Duarte, the chief real estate officer at the Fresno Housing Authority, at a June 15 Fresnoland/CalMatters panel on housing.
Duarte added that the Fresno Housing Authority received 10,000 applications in less than one day for its Section 8 housing voucher waitlist.
Rent control isn’t the only way to help tenants, leaders say
In an interview with Fresnoland, Fresno City Council President Tyler Maxwell said he sees both sides of the issue but said he believes rent comes down to simple supply-and-demand economics.
He added the best way to bring rent down is to increase the housing supply, and that means construction.
“These last three years, I can tell you that we have set a record when it comes to either subsidizing or helping initiate affordable housing projects here in the city of Fresno,” Maxwell said. “It’s a priority for not just this council but the mayor and his administration to really try to expedite as many housing projects as possible.”
In lieu of rent control, Maxwell said the council in recent years has taken steps to beef up some protections for tenants.
The program, which provides legal representation for tenants facing eviction, wasn’t included in the proposed budget that Dyer released in May.
Maxwell, the only city councilmember who rents his home, pushed to save the program with a budget motion to put $2 million towards the program’s third year. He said he hopes the program wouldn’t require a budget motion to get funding in the future.
“Going forward, my hope is that it starts getting baked into the proposed budget,” Maxwell said. “Ether because it’s a priority for the mayor or a priority for the city attorney.”
Maxwell added that another piece of legislation he authored, the Tenant Relocation Assistance Program, helps renters avoid getting displaced due to unhealthy or unsafe living conditions. The ordinance requires landlords to assist with the expense of relocating tenants to complete needed renovations or face fines.
However, the city’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program, a key COVID-19-era effort that provided assistance with rent and utility bills to Fresno residents who met income requirements, is going away soon. The $54 million from federal and state governments that funded the program is almost depleted, and the remaining $2.5 million in funding remaining for the program will likely get spent in the next fiscal year.
With no city funding to keep the program around next year, it will likely end soon.
“There was a lot of community momentum and energy that really shows that folks care about this issue,” said Marisa Moraza, a campaign director with Power California Action. “We will continue to push for this rent control demand.”
Amazon confirms new fulfillment center in Hollister
For those who have been wondering about what was going on north of the Hollister Municipal Airport with all the blue tarps and 9,000 pilings driven 50 feet into the ground that will eventually support a 1-million-square-foot fulfillment facility, the wait is over.
Today, Amazon answered BenitoLink’s repeated requests to verify that the new building will be its latest venture in San Benito County. BenitoLink also requested the former city manager Brett Miller to reveal the tenant of the fulfillment center but never responded. A planning department staff member recently told this reporter the city was under a nondisclosure agreement for that project.
“We’re looking forward to opening a new facility in the city of Hollister, which has been a great partner on this project from the start,” responded Alisa Carroll, an Amazon public relations manager. “While we don’t have a specific launch date to share right now, once we have a better sense of timing, we’ll look to begin hiring for hundreds of good-paying jobs for the region.”
Driving by the location that has been mysteriously referred to as Project Almond located on 73 acres in the planned Clearist Industrial Park, the pace of construction has picked up recently as bulldozers and dump trucks are working on a road leading from the site where one wall was hoisted up a few days ago near San Felipe Road.
Carroll was not able to answer BenitoLink’s questions as to the actual function of the fulfillment center. According to Amazon, though, there are six distinct types of fulfillment centers:
Sortable fulfillment center Around 800,000 square feet in size, sortable fulfillment centers can employ more than 1,500 full-time associates. In these buildings, Amazon employees pick, pack and ship customer orders such as books, toys and housewares. It adds robots associates often work alongside robots, allowing them to learn new skills and helping create a more efficient process to meet customer demand.
Non-sortable fulfillment center Ranging in size from 600,000 to 1 million square feet, non-sortable fulfillment centers employ more than 1,000 full-time associates. In these centers, associates pick, pack and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment and rugs.
Sortation centers At sortation centers, associates sort customer orders by final destination and consolidate them onto trucks for faster delivery. Amazon’s website states this sort center network provides full- and part-time career opportunities and is powering its ability to provide customers with everyday delivery, including Sunday delivery.
Receive centers Amazon’s receive centers support customer fulfillment by taking in large orders of the types of inventory that it expects to quickly sell and allocating it to fulfillment centers within the network. Full- and part-time roles are available in these buildings, which are about 600,000 square feet in size.
Specialty Amazon’s fulfillment network is also supported by additional types of buildings that handle specific categories of items or are pressed into service at peak times of the year such as the holiday season. Many of these buildings feature part-time opportunities with the option to convert to full-time.
Delivery stations In these buildings, customer orders are prepared for last-mile delivery to customers. Amazon delivery providers enable every day shipping.
Amazon has been operating a delivery station in Hollister since September 2021.
Because of the square footage and the described use of distributing furniture and appliances, the new building will most likely fall into the non-sortable category.
The Planning Commission resolution that approved the project states it will provide an e-commerce fulfillment center and distribution facility. It will operate with approximately 449 employees, including 275 employees during the day shift and 174 employees during the night shift. During the day shift there would be 16 office workers, 169 warehouse workers, 10 security personnel and 80 drivers. During the night shift, there would be 15 office workers, 150 warehouse workers, and nine security personnel.
A robot working at an Amazon fulfillment center. Photo courtesy of Amazon.
If Hollister’s newest facility follows similar Amazon facilities, robots will play an important role. According to Amazon, it has 175 fulfillment centers around the world; 26 have humans and robots working side by side.
“In addition, robotic animation benefits employees, as they take over performance of fulfillment centers’ less desirable, more tedious tasks,” the Amazon website states.
As described by Amazon, one type of robotics or bots are flat, wheeled, 300-pound machines that glide across facility floors, moving small bins and large pallets of products to associates. Other bots called palletizers “provide robotic muscle for the operation” as they identify and lift boxes from conveyor belts before stacking them on pallets for stowage or shipping. Then the six-ton robo-stows are used to lift even heavier items.
Robot stow. Photo courtesy of Amazon.
“Used to expedite the inbound process once truckloads of inventory reach the centers, the robo-stows that are currently employed lift pallets of inventory up to drive units on higher floors within fulfillment centers,” according to Amazon.
There are, though, some claims that robots and humans don’t always get along and there have been injuries.
According to a BBC report based on a study conducted by the Center for Investigative Reporting which claims to have acquired internal records for 150 warehouses over four years, “At the most common kind of Amazon ‘fulfillment center,’ serious injuries are 50% higher for those that have robots than those without.”
According to a Reveal News report, after Amazon debuted therobots in Tracy the serious injury rate there nearly quadrupled, going from 2.9 per 100 workers in 2015 to 11.3 in 2018, records show.
The report said Jonathan Meador watched the transition from his position loading boxes into big rig trailers. The article stated the robots at the Tracy warehouse were so efficient that humans could barely keep up and the pickers and packers were expected to move more products every minute, and more boxes shot down the conveyor belt toward Meador.
“Before robots, it was still tough, but it was manageable,” he said. Afterward, “we were in a fight that we just can’t win.”
As for replacing human workers, in a 2019 Reuters story, Scott Anderson, director of Amazon Robotics Fulfillment, said technology is at least 10 years away from fully automating the processing of a single order picked by a worker inside a warehouse. He also said the technology for a robot to pick a single product from a bin without damaging other products or picking multiple products at the same time in a way that could benefit the e-commerce retailer is years away.
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In Tulare County, officials test new approach to environmental justice
This story was published as a partnership between the Center for Public Integrity and Fresnoland.
When Arlin Benavides Jr. set out to hear residents’ environmental concerns in one of the most marginalized parts of a region facing water scarcity, groundwater contamination, extreme heat and other woes, he wasn’t sure if people would open their doors, much less talk.
He was aiming to engage with people in Tulare County in California’s Central Valley, a region known as the food basket of the world and a place with extreme poverty. Many of the residents live in remote, isolated farming hamlets.
In these far-flung communities, Benavides, an AmeriCorps CivicSpark Fellow working for Tulare County’s Resource Management Agency, discovered that residents felt forgotten by their local government officials. When he explained that he was part of the agency’s effort to develop an environmental justice element for the county’s general plan, he was met with suspicion and skepticism.
“You could see anger rise within them. They would tell me stories of just not having good experiences — most commonly it was the story that they had told previous government agencies what they needed, what were the challenges, and they felt like those changes were not done soon enough,” said Benavides, whose fellowship was part of a CivicSpark program that aims to help local public agencies address community issues such as climate change, water resource management and housing.
What had changed between those experiences and Benavides showing up on their doorsteps: California started requiring local governments to integrate environmental justice principles into their planning processes.
The first such law in the nation, Senate Bill 1000 calls for municipal leaders to engage communities in a meaningful way while doing land use work, such as updating general plans, which set priorities for development. Ultimately, the 2016 law aims to address environmental inequities caused by land use policies, such as poor air quality in communities of color hemmed in by industrial facilities. But on the ground, addressing entrenched inequities baked into urban planning policies can be tough.
In a newly released study, two researchers examined those challenges as municipalities across California implemented SB 1000. It’s an analysis they hope can illuminate efforts across the nation as civic leaders seek solutions for communities burdened by pollution — often Black, Latino, Indigenous and low income.
The study’s authors, Michelle E. Zuñiga and Michael Méndez, said the research was inspired by feedback they heard from community and environmental justice organizations who shared their struggles about how SB 1000 was being implemented and what they described as spotty compliance, particularly in communities facing environmental hazards.
For example: city or county planners who don’t understand institutional and socio-economic barriers facing residents, or planning managers who aren’t supportive of or in some cases are hostile to incorporating environmental justice into their work.
Some municipalities argue that existing land use regulations and policies benefit everyone equally, and that explicit environmental justice ordinances or provisions in a general plan are unnecessary, said Méndez, an assistant professor of environmental planning and policy at the University of California, Irvine.
“Time and time again we see how that is not the case, that urban planning has been used as a racist tool kit to enforce existing disparities within and among communities,” he said.
To determine how the law was being implemented in communities with high levels of cumulative environmental health impacts, Zuñiga and Méndez focused their study on cities and counties with census tracts identified by the state’s environmental health screening tool as the most disadvantaged by pollution, such as toxic releases, groundwater threats, traffic fumes and hazardous waste.
In California, 238 cities and 29 counties have census tracts heavily burdened by environmental health impacts, in the top 25% of cumulative impact as measured by the state’s CalEnviroScreen tool. Thirty-three cities and four counties in the state, meanwhile, have adopted or drafted environmental-justice considerations in their general plans. (Data source: CalEnviroScreen 3.0. Maps generated by Zuñiga and Méndez 2023.)
Results, they found, have been mixed. There are positive outcomes, such as the creation of environmental justice advisory committees in Tulare and other counties. But many obstacles remain. The researchers found that some communities experience ineffective community engagement, little support from elected officials, limited discussions of environmental racism and a lack of resources to implement and monitor the measures needed to comply with the law.
These challenges mean progress toward environmental justice will be slow and uneven, the authors wrote: “Environmental justice will not be fully realized without strong oversight and political leadership, and racial diversification of urban planning institutions.”
Their research also affirmed the need for the type of guidance that the California Attorney General’s bureau of environmental justice has issued to local governments about the law. The bureau has done this via comment letters that point out shortcomings in local approaches, but it also provides feedback on how to comply with the law. One of those letters to Tulare County, for example, urged officials not to rush through their general plan amendments before fully engaging with disadvantaged communities.
Attorney General Rob Bonta has also intervened in Fresno, saying in 2022 that Fresno County’s draft general plan raised “civil rights and environmental justice concerns” and pressing Fresno city leaders not to approve a rezoning proposal that would add pollution in “some of the most over-burdened and under-invested environmental justice communities in all of California.”
In some cases, Zuñiga and Méndez discovered a lack of understanding among planners on how to define environmental justice, so they outlined in the paper how environmental justice is measured, observed and defined.
Last fall when they presented their preliminary findings at the American Planning Association conference, some planners shared that they’ve faced pushback from leaders in politically conservative municipalities, while others described challenges with implementation in areas with historic under-investment, said Zuñiga, an assistant professor of urban and community planning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Increasingly, she’s seen more planners across the country take on the task of addressing environmental injustices through local government plans, even without laws such as SB 1000.
“This work is very important, not only for California, where there is a policy mandate, but for other planners in other areas of the country that are taking on this charge as well,” she said. “Because of the push of the community organizations prioritizing environmental justice, they also are pushing for environmental justice plans.”
When Benavides first began his fellowship in Tulare County in late 2019, he decided to reach out to Sacramento County, which had already approved an environmental justice element in their general plan. He wanted to know how they involved community organizations in the process. He learned that Sacramento opted to create an environmental justice advisory committee, a process that he knew would also reinforce the requirements of SB 1000.
But first Benavides set out to conduct outreach to understand the issues — from housing and food justice to public utilities and transportation — that residents faced. Benavides, a resident of the more affluent Marin County near San Francisco, was shocked by what he found.
“I didn’t really realize that there were people that didn’t have potable water; that the conditions which [farmworker advocate] Cesar Chavez was trying to improve or ameliorate are still existing in Tulare County,” said Benavides, who was particularly struck by the stark disparities in wealth between farm owners and the working class residents living in unincorporated areas of the county.
The geographical distances between the county seat of Visalia and these small communities were further deepened by a lack of regular visits from county officials. One woman Benavides spoke to was initially angry as she described how, despite repeated efforts to share the problems facing her community, living conditions either don’t improve at all or don’t improve fast enough. “I think that this is also an ongoing cycle where planners go out into a community to really try to understand people, and then, the moment a plan is developed those relationships are not maintained, those stories are not valued,” said Benavides.
He knows that often this happens because planning agencies may lack the bandwidth or resources to maintain these relationships. But that day, as he spoke to this resident, he decided that no explanation could excuse what she had gone through.
So rather than offer an excuse, he apologized. The woman was so overcome with emotion that she started crying. “I felt like as a representative of local government, it was my due diligence to say, ‘I’m sorry for everything that you’ve experienced,’” he said.
But he also explained that there was something he could do to help in that instance, and that was to invite her to participate in the environmental justice advisory committee that was being formed as part of the general plan process to develop an environmental element.
“There is something that I can do for you, and that is to guarantee that you have a seat at the table,” Benavides told her.
Ultimately, Tulare County did create an Environmental Justice Advisory Committee in 2020 to advise its Resource Management Agency. Key to that is providing feedback on the county’s draft environmental justice element and ensuring that it improves the quality of life for disadvantaged communities throughout the county.
When Benavides ended his fellowship in 2020 and passed the baton to the next AmeriCorps CivicSpark fellow, he was glad to know the committee would continue the relationship-building work.
It’s that level of engagement, he said, where residents’ experiences are not only valued but are imprinted in the land-use planning documents, that can transform lives for the better.
Inviting residents to collaborate on land use and development was a first step, he said. Equally as important for real change, he told residents, is that “we continue building a relationship after that is done.”
‘Everybody assumes that it’s like the rest of California and it’s not’: Rural LGBTQ students and administrators describe campus strife.
In rural Siskiyou County, where California meets Oregon, the local community college is hiding its LGBTQ+ center behind closed doors. Queer students are scared for their safety.
“We are a very conservative county, and we have many students that are out at school but not at home,” said Ty Speck, who goes by “Mama Ty” among students and serves as the advisor to the LGBTQ+ club at the College of the Siskiyous. Instead, she said, the three students in the group wanted to meet in a rotating set of undisclosed locations.
All across California, but especially in rural areas and small cities scattered across the Central Coast, the Central Valley, and the Far North, community college leaders push back at the notion that California is an easy place to be queer.
In a report from last year obtained by CalMatters, college administrators across the state expressed their support for LGBTQ+ students but said that setbacks persist.
The report came as a follow up to a 2021 state grant of $10 million — the first of its kind geared specifically towards LGBTQ+ students in community colleges. But colleges consistently said that the money, less than $100,000 per college on average over five years, was not enough to hire staff positions or to set up a LGBTQ+ center on campus, even in places where many students want it.
Only 30 of California’s 115 brick-and-mortar community colleges had a designated LGBTQ+ space on campus at the time of the report. Eighteen colleges said they would use the state funds to help develop an LGBTQ+ center. The remaining 67 schools, including the students and faculty at the College of the Siskiyous, chose to invest the state’s dollars in training for staff, special graduation ceremonies or mental health support for LGBTQ+ students, who are significantly more likely to commit suicide than their peers.
Culture wars put LGBTQ students on edge
Allie Harrison, 25, knows what it’s like to live on the margins. A self-described witch who grew up kissing girls and boys in rural Lassen County, more than two hours north of Lake Tahoe, she is now one of the three members of Lassen Community College’s LGBTQ+ student group.
“Everybody assumes that it’s like the rest of California and it’s not,” she said.
When Harrison attended Lassen High School a decade ago, she said the church would co-opt the school cafeteria after hours to run events. When that same church found out about her sexuality, the pastor told her mother that she was a “bad influence” and couldn’t attend the youth group anymore, Harrison says.
Later, she says her mother kicked her out of the house in part because of her sexuality, and Harrison moved to San Jose with her dad, where she embraced the more open-minded culture at the high schools she attended.
Now, back in Lassen for college, Harrison says the culture is more accepting than it was just 10 years ago. There’s a Facebook group for LGBTQ+ people in Lassen County that counted Harrison as its 100th member, and the group regularly meets at a local bar.
But the culture wars that have swept the country have come to Lassen County. In April, residents came to a “showdown” over an effort to remove LGBTQ+ books from the children’s section of the public library. Weeks later, someone stole a pride flag from a local organization and spray-painted allegations about pedophilia on its walls.
The College of the Siskiyous took down its pride flag temporarily in 2019 after someone claimed it was illegal to fly it. The college’s new leadership has since purchased additional flag poles and made a point to fly the flag every May, when the school observes its annual pride month (most students are gone in June).
On the coast, similar challenges pervade, according to the report issued by colleges last year.
“Although California is known for its liberal acceptance and support of diverse communities, the small cities within the Central Coast of California are heavily conservative and do not host a large population of LGBTQ community members,” wrote an administrator at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, just south of Pismo Beach.
In Watsonville, between Santa Cruz and Monterey, community college administrators reported that the pride flag has been stolen or defamed multiple times and that the “vibe” on campus is not welcoming to LGBTQ+ students.
Many LGBTQ+ students never make it to community college at all, wrote an administrator at Golden West College in Huntington Beach: “The most at-risk LGBTQ students often find themselves homeless during high school and struggle to make it to college.”
Small in number, rural LGBTQ students see gains
Outside of major cities, attendance and participation in LGBTQ+ groups can be sparse.
“We are a small rural college and often do not have a large enough population of any one group to have a center specifically for that group,” administrators at Lassen Community College wrote to the chancellor’s office.
With the state funds, the college initially proposed hosting a “dinner banquet” with a keynote speaker, but with just three students in the LGBTQ+ student group, college director Jennifer Tupper decided to take them out to a nice dinner instead. Each student got a “very nice classic pen,” she said. The college also hosted a “Diversity Summit” that included representatives from various communities on campus.
Cecil Dexter, a member of the Lavender Initiative at Bakersfield College, stands at the entrance of the Campus Center on June 14, 2023. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local
While rural communities across the state have smaller queer populations, support in general has increased over the years.
In Bakersfield, home to Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the LGBTQ+ community has grown and services have become increasingly available in recent years, said Bakersfield College student Cecil Dexter, who identifies as transgender.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dexter used to drive more than two hours every month in order to meet with a doctor who could prescribe testosterone. Today, he can see medical providers in Bakersfield or in his hometown of Tehachapi, which has nearly 13,000 people.
The Bakersfield College campus lacks a physical space to meet, and the LGBTQ+ student group only began last fall. However, recent pop-up events such as the lavender prom — a dance for the LGBTQ+ community — attracted nearly 200 people, and even smaller events get “a pretty huge turnout,” Dexter said.
Growing the coffers for LGBTQ centers
The 2021 state grant — $10 million spread across the community college system — was never supposed to fund LGBTQ+ centers, said Jacob Fraker, a consultant for the Legislative LGBTQ+ caucus. Instead, the money was meant to help with small projects, such as hiring queer-friendly mental health professionals or supporting the events that Dexter hosts in Bakersfield.
Setting up a safe space on every campus where LGBTQ+ students can gather is urgent, he said, especially in the case of rural community colleges and certain California State University campuses that are known to be less welcoming. He pointed to the case of CSU Maritime, where female, transgender and nonbinary students reported “widespread sexual misconduct, racism, and hostility.“
But he said local community college districts, not the state, should be the ones to pay for it.
This year, the proposed state budget from the Legislature includes another $10 million over three years for LGBTQ+ services to be divided among the state’s 115 community colleges. CalBright College, which is entirely online, did not receive funding. Fraker said the governor has signaled to the caucus that he’ll approve it.
In the first allotment of funding from 2021, the $10 million was divided up based on how many students each district had and what percentage of students were considered low-income.
College of the Siskiyous got a little more than $10,000 a year, for five years, starting in 2021. It was not enough to even hire a part-time staff member or set up a center, the college wrote in its report.
The state also made it so that no district could receive more than $500,000, which meant that large urban districts with multiple colleges received fewer dollars per student.
This year, Los Angeles Community College District lobbied to get the state to raise the maximum to $900,000, according to the district’s spokesperson, Juliet Hidalgo.
“SF, Los Angeles, San Diego — they eat up all that money and there’s never enough for the rural colleges. They (rural colleges) want to do stuff, but they don’t have the population,” said Fraker. He said the new funding will also include provisions that ensure rural schools get a fair share.
Except the math doesn’t work.
If Los Angeles and other large districts get more funding in this year’s budget, some smaller community college districts will inevitably see less. Neither Fraker nor the Community College Chancellor’s Office could identify who the losers might be. Determining final funding allocations for each college can take months, Fraker said.
In an interview with CalMatters, administrators at the College of the Siskiyous were surprised to learn about the new grant in this year’s state budget: In the governor’s earlier proposal, there was a typo that said only Los Angeles would receive money for LGBTQ+ students.
Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education.
All remaining lawsuits against Betabel project and county dismissed
The two-year legal battle to stop theBetabel Commercial project concluded June 9 when attorneys for the three petitioners filed to dismiss the non-CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) claims against the project and the county over zoning issues.
The petitioners were the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, the Center for Biological Diversity and Protect San Benito County. The non-CEQA claims were the only ones remaining after Superior Court Judge Patrick Palacios dismissed the CEQA claims May 24.
“The [non-CEQA] claims didn’t make much sense as the property has a Regional Commercial designation in the General Plan for this very kind of use,” said Betabel attorney Peter Prows, adding, “All claims are gone. There won’t be another suit.”
Prows said the dismissal will take effect immediately, adding that the petitioners can still appeal the dismissal of the CEQA claims.
“The project can proceed in the meantime,” he told BenitoLink on June 14. “I don’t expect those appeals to be successful as California Supreme Court authority squarely holds these claims are time-barred [past CEQA statute of limitations]. We’ll also be filing a motion to recover our attorney fees against the petitioners”
He said the lawsuits against the county and Board of Supervisors were also dismissed.
The county did not respond to BenitoLink’s request for comment on whether there will be a lawsuit to recover court and legal costs.
Rider and Victoria McDowell, owners of the Betabel property, have stated all along that their incentive to remain steadfast was that the project would eventually become a funding mechanism for the charityCancer-A-Gogo to honor their teenage son who died from brain cancer.
Rider McDowell did not respond to BenitoLink’s request for comment.
Supervisor Kollin Kosmicki is the only supervisor to take a position against the project. Kosmicki has been adamant that the project did not need to be rushed and suggested that a compromise between the developer and opponents would be a better approach. He questioned the concept of using cancer research “as the pitch to sell this project to this county, to soften the blow with regard to land-use concerns to sell this to the public. We’re setting a really dangerous precedent by allowing this to be considered.”
The Center for Biological Diversity and Protect San Benito County, formerly known as Preserve Our Rural Communities or PORC, filed the lawsuit against the county and the project on Dec. 9, 2022. The commercial project is located along Hwy 101 on the northern tip of the county.
In their lawsuit, both Protect San Benito and the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band argued, “The project’s EIR [environmental impact report] fails to adequately identify, evaluate, and/or require mitigation for all significant direct and cumulative environmental impacts the project will cause.”
Andy Hsia-Coron, one of the founders of PORC and Protect San Benito, did not respond to BenitoLink’s request for comment on whether he intends to appeal the decision or come back with another lawsuit.
In March, the California Department of Justice filed a motion to intervene in the case but Judge Palacios denied it at the May 24 hearing. Deputy Attorney General Yuting Chi attended the May 24 hearing on Zoom but did not comment during the hearing. After the judge’s ruling, the attorney general’s office did not respond to BenitoLink’s request for comment on why it got involved or whether it will take any future action.
We need your help. Support local, nonprofit news!BenitoLink is a nonprofit news website that reports on San Benito County. Our team is committed to this community and providing essential, accurate information to our fellow residents. It is expensive to produce local news and community support is what keeps the news flowing. Please consider supporting BenitoLink, San Benito County’s public service, nonprofit news.
San Juan Bautista gets a new full-time deputy sheriff
Attention San Juan Bautista: There’s a new sheriff in town! Well, a new full-time deputy sheriff anyway: Deputy Desi Villanueva has been with the San Benito County Sheriff’s Department for two years, after having previously worked at the Merced Police Department.
“I realized I wanted to work for a sheriff’s office a lot more,” Villanueva said. “I was so excited to come here. Hollister is a great place for me because I really appreciate small towns. And obviously, when the assignment came up for San Juan Bautista, I jumped at it as fast as I could.”
Villanueva first became interested in law enforcement because he liked the structure, and he found that he got considerable satisfaction from getting the chance to help people.
“I like that people trust us,” he said. They pretty much call us when all else fails or when they can’t get the help that they need. We can then exercise every resource we have, and I really like being able to solve problems, especially here on patrol.”
“Our new deputy is awesome,” said San Juan Bautista City Manager Don Reynolds, “and he’s really excited and enthusiastic about working for our town. He’s a lot more visible than we had in the past, and we’re so excited to have him on board.”
Villanueva was officially stationed in San Juan on May 24 but has worked in the city before that, both on regular patrols and for events like the recent Rib Cookoff. Currently, he will be scheduled to patrol at least on Wednesdays through Saturdays from 2 p.m. to midnight.
“There’s a lot of extra days that I will be working,” he said, “so you might see me here on a Sunday or on a Tuesday. We want the San Juan deputy to be visible and out on the street. I don’t want people just to see a patrol car. I want people to see me working, so I am going to be walking around as much as I can.”
One reason for the constant patrolling is to monitor some of the more common problems in San Juan, such as tourist traffic and visitors who might not understand how small the town is.
“We see them coming in here speeding,” he said, “and we have a lot of traffic and parking issues. I’m working with code enforcement to combat some of these problems, pretty much like any normal law enforcement agency. But things can be a lot different because we’re very small.”
Villanueva is also hoping his presence on the street will make people more comfortable about approaching him with law enforcement concerns.
“The businesses all have my cell number and can flag me down if there is a problem,” he said, “but anyone can come up to me and talk on a personal level. 100% of my effort, time, and energy is going to San Juan, and I am here to help solve its issues and make sure everything that the residents need me to do is handled the best I can.”
While he intends to be a visible presence in town if he is needed and cannot be found, Villanueva said that residents could reach him through existing channels by either calling 911 for emergencies or 831-636-4080 for non-emergencies.
“If there’s anything that the people of San Juan want done or they want us to look at something,” he said, “call in and let us know. That’s what I’m here for, to help people combat the problems that they have.”
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Back from the Dead: Shasta County Fountain Wind Project Could Be Approved Under New California Bill Designed To Fast Track Renewable Energy
Protest sign at the June 2021 Shasta County Planning Commission. Photo courtesy of the Pit River Tribe Documentary Project.
In October 2021, Shasta County supervisors voted 4–1 against providing a permit for the Fountain Wind project, denying Houston-based corporation ConnectGen the right to erect forty-eight massive turbines up to 610 feet tall throughout the mountain ridges of Eastern Shasta County.
For the Pit River Tribe and a diverse coalition of Intermountain residents who mounted a strong resistance to the project, it was a stunning and momentous victory, the culmination of years of arduous organizing and researching. For ConnectGen, it represented the frustrating defeat of a project they argued was critical to reduce the impacts of climate change, which has already contributed to catastrophic fires and droughts throughout the state.
But the community coalition’s victory against the project, which some activists compared to David slaying Goliath in the Old Testament, proved to be short lived. This February, ConnectGen was able to file yet another Fountain Wind application, this time under a recently passed state law designed to ramp up the construction of new renewable energy sources.
State officials say that ConnecGen still needs to submit more required documents about the project before the new “opt-in” licensing process can begin. But assuming ConnectGen completes their application, Shasta County won’t have the power to veto the project the third time around.
That’s because under the recently passed AB 205, the Fountain Wind project won’t be evaluated by the county, but by state officials at the California Energy Commission (CEC), who have the power to override the county’s previous decisions. Fountain Wind is eligible for the AB 205 process because it would generate more than 50 megawatts of power (ConnectGen states it would produce about 216 megawatts, enough to power 86,000 California homes).
AB 205 also gives the state the authority to green light the project even if it breaks county law, as long as the CEC determines that the benefits outweigh the costs. That means ConnectGen could still build Fountain Wind even though the county has enacted a ban against giant wind turbines in the proposed project area, located about six miles west of Burney and just south of State Route 299.
A map of the Fountain Wind project location, courtesy of Shasta County Department of Resource Management.
Shasta County supervisors passed the new zoning amendment banning large-scale wind turbines in the unincorporated areas of Shasta County in December. It’s similar to measures other counties have implemented to restrict certain types of renewable energy development.
A significant reason Shasta County officials passed the ban was the testimonies from pilots and community researchers who argued that massive turbines impede aerial firefighting and can increase the threat of catastrophic wildfires to local communities.
Although ConnectGen’s new application for Fountain Wind is still incomplete, the studies they’ve submitted to the state so far suggest the latest version of the project would be about half the size of ConnectGen’s first proposal in Shasta County. In July 2021, Shasta County rejected that original project, which would have erected seventy-two turbines on 4,500 acres of leased land belonging to Shasta Cascade Timberlands, LLC in Eastern Shasta County. Just one month later, the County also rejected Fountain Wind’s second, much smaller, application, for a 48-turbine wind farm, similar to the size of the project now being proposed at the state level.
Shasta County rejected the two ConnectGen proposals only after many months of public meetings and environmental review. It was soundly opposed by the Pit River Tribe, who condemned the project because it would irrevocably damage sacred mountain ridges where the Tribe hold ceremonies, fasts, and gather plants for medicines and basketmaking.
In addition to expressing fears about increased fire risk, other Shasta County residents also told the County that building the turbines would imperil the natural springs they use for water. Many also expressed frustration that the North State’s natural resources already produce significant renewable energy that, like Fountain Wind, benefit corporations and other regions rather than locals.
Joseph Osa, a Montgomery Creek resident, was an organizer for the Stop Fountain Wind coalition. Speaking to Shasta Scout for this story, Osa said that he feels “disheartened” that the project has been resurrected by ConnectGen and could be constructed in Shasta County despite past denials.
In Shasta County, where concerns about disenfranchisement have contributed to dangerous public outrage and dysfunctional government meetings, Osa said the County’s previous decision to deny the Fountain Wind permit provided a rare and encouraging example of Shasta County government officials listening and responding to rural residents.
“If you attended those planning commission meetings, you saw (the officials) expressed concerns, asked questions based on their professional expertise and their knowledge of the local area. They really understood how this was going to impact us because they live here,” Osa said. “The (state isn’t) going to have those insights.”
Fountain Wind will be the very first energy project to be evaluated by the State under the new AB 205 process, making it a significant litmus test for how the CEC will flex its new muscle to authorize renewable energy infrastructure.
The law that gave the CEC its new powers to approve Fountain Wind emerged from growing tension between California’s drive to meet climate-friendly renewable energy goals and the often more locally-focused environmental, cultural and social priorities of the state’s small communities. Fountain Wind is one of several high-profile recent examples of communities rejecting or resisting large-scale renewable energy projects, including Humboldt County’s denial of the Terra-Gen wind farm in 2019.
California is likely to support a mega-project like Fountain Wind because it’s designed to alleviate the increasingly dire impacts of fossil fuel emissions on the world’s climate. Despite that, Tribes and local communities often resist them because their massive footprint can also cause damage to the local environment, endangered species, Tribal cultural sites, and property values.
Governor Gavin Newsom pushed for the passage of AB 205 in June in order to “streamline” the construction of green energy projects despite objections that it would usurp local decision-making power. According to the report, Newsom anticipates the bill will not only help California reach its clean energy goals, but also prevent the state’s recurring summer blackouts.
Newsom is not the first to focus on this issue. In 2018 Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 100 into law, committing California to generating 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2045. “California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change,” Brown said at the time.
While there is scientific consensus that it’s essential the world eliminate its reliance on fossil fuels, how to go about implementing that transition is a source of debate, especially since California’s energy appetite continues to grow. To reach its clean energy goals while satiating the state’s power hunger, one state analysis concluded that California will need to produce 6,000 megawatts of new renewable energy annually for several years, which would mean building the equivalent of 30 Fountain Wind projects each year.
While ConnectGen has not yet completed their state application, the CEC has already reached out to County officials for input about the plan, Paul Hellman, Director of the County Department of Resource Management, told Shasta Scout by email May 26. The County’s full response to the State is pending, Hellman said, but County officials have already told the CEC that they believe it would be “not appropriate” for the State to approve Fountain Wind under AB 205 for a variety of reasons, including the past rejections by local decision-makers.
He also noted that the ban against large wind turbines was a targeted regulation, and the county is interested in other proposals for renewable energy developments that are a fit for the unincorporated areas. Several small- and large-scale green energy facilities have been developed in Shasta County in recent years, he added.
If CEC approves the Fountain Wind energy project, it would contradict a local decision that was based on years of legally required environmental studies, public meetings, and consultations with the Pit River Tribe. Radley Davis, a Pit River Tribal Citizen who was also part of the coalition that opposed Fountain Wind, said the CEC shouldn’t even consider the Fountain Wind project because it was denied after such an extensive review.
Although he doesn’t speak for the Tribe’s government, Davis said he helped interview elders, review old ethnographic reports, and gather evidence of how the project would harm the Pit River people’s spiritual and cultural ways of life. Many other local residents with technical expertise also submitted extensively researched comments pointing out potential flaws with the project, Davis said.
“It’s like literally a do-over. It just doesn’t make any sense,” Davis said of the new application. “It’s incredible that the state can exercise such power; they don’t need permission from the Tribe or the County.”
CEC officials state they are closely examining the environmental studies and comments from the County’s review of the wind energy project. Because they’re aware of Pit River people’s concerns about the cultural impacts of the project, the agency has already begun consultations with the Tribe, far earlier than is required, wrote Louey, the CEC spokesperson.
Under AB 205, the CEC will conduct an entirely independent project review and then make a decision whether to license the project within 270 days, a timeframe that is relatively short considering the massive scale of the project. If ConnectGen completes their application, there will be some opportunities for public comments, according to Louey. These will include, at a minimum, a public meeting within thirty days of the application being accepted and a public meeting upon the release of the agency’s environmental impact statement on the project.
Ally Copple, a public relations consultant for ConnectGen, declined to respond to questions for this story, saying only that the corporation would not have any updates about Fountain Wind or comments about the AB 205 process until the public comment process begins. Copple did not respond to a follow-up question regarding whether ConnectGen intended to complete its application and when that might occur.
In 2021, ConnectGen officials were adamant that the County had made the wrong decision in denying the project. They told Shasta Scout while providing comments for previous stories that studies conducted during the environmental review indicated the project wouldn’t increase fire danger.
ConnectGen officials also argued that they modified the project significantly in response to community input and that the negative impacts of the Fountain Wind project are dwarfed by the dire need to transition away from fossil fuels and slow down climate change.
Despite the well-established need to transition from fossil fuels to cleaner energy, the CEC would have to provide significant justification in order to overturn the County’s previous decision on Fountain Wind, according to Hellman. The State would have to conclude that the Fountain Wind project would provide an overall positive economic benefit to the County, although it’s not clear what metrics they would use to do so. The CEC would also have to confirm that ConnectGen has cooperatively entered into legal agreements to provide benefits to community-based organizations or local Tribes.
In 2021, ConnectGen pledged to invest around $2 million into the local community impacted by Fountain Wind, including a $250,000 allocation for a Pit River Tribe jobs programs and $1 million for Round Mountain and Montgomery Creek community programs. However, the Pit River Tribe and several community members rejected the offer, stating the proposed benefits were paltry considering the potential damage and risk the $300 million Fountain Wind project could pose to the area.
Many also expressed frustration that ConnectGen’s engagement with the community seemed, in their eyes, like an attempt to pacify resistance rather than to truly work together to integrate renewable energy safely and respectfully into the area.
These perceptions of unfairness and disenfranchisement are common among local residents who resist or stop the construction of large renewable energy infrastructure in their communities, according to recent research. Scholars who have examined numerous case studies similar to Shasta County’s rejection of Fountain Wind contend communities may support renewable energy in general, but resist local projects because they aren’t designed with community knowledge, ways of life, or hopes for the future in mind.
These scholars suggest the development of renewable energy sources is not just a technological endeavor, but also a challenge to build new kinds of collaborative relationships among investors and state and local communities. One study recommends weaving community input and decision-making into the earliest stages of conception and design, working with residents to build renewable energy projects that fit their communities’ needs and landscapes.
It’s a new way of planning and development that appeals to Joseph Osa, the Montgomery Creek resident who helped organize the resistance to Fountain Wind.
“The energy projects should fit the local environment,” Osa said. “The state could help the counties zone areas for different types of energy projects to where they’re suited and encourage that development. Then the (environmental review) process might go much faster.”
