‘Unring this bell.’ Lawsuit threatened to overturn Fresno’s Cesar Chavez street renaming

Residents and business representatives along Kings Canyon Road, Ventura Street and California Avenue in south Fresno offered impassioned pleas for the Fresno City Council to reconsider their vote in March to rename a 10.2-mile stretch of the streets for labor leader Cesar Chavez.

A newly formed advocacy organization, 1 Community Compact, has coalesced over the controversial renaming decision and held a press conference Thursday prior to the Fresno City Council’s meeting to air their grievances over the issue.

And, if the council ultimately chooses not to respond to their demands, coalition member and southeast Fresno resident Karen Musson said they are willing to file a lawsuit and challenge the city’s action in court.

“We believe the March 9 vote by our city council … can and should be reversed,” said B.T. Lewis, pastor of the Rising Star Missionary Baptist Church in southwest Fresno. “Our city council has the power to unring this bell and begin the healing process in our city.”

Lewis and others described the renaming, which was co-sponsored by Councilmembers Miguel Arias and Luis Chavez, as divisive to the community, particularly in southwest Fresno where California Avenue is subject to the change.

“Democracy should never be manipulated or molded to fit our personal agendas,” Lewis said of the councilmembers. “It should always represent the will and the desire of all people impacted by our decisions and our choices.

Among the organization’s objections are that prior to the March 9 vote, Arias and Chavez indicated to their council colleagues that the decision would come back to the elected officials and have another round of public comment before it became final. But after Mayor Jerry Dyer opted not to veto the passage, Arias told The Fresno Bee that a second vote would not be needed.

The necessity of a second vote, Arias said, was based on the presumption that Dyer would veto, which would prompt a council attempt to override a mayoral veto. “Since the mayor didn’t veto it, it’s final,” Arias told The Bee last month.

That was one of the factors, along with what the organization described as a lack of community engagement prior to the vote, that triggered some of the hue and cry by opponents of the name change.

Lewis said there was no public planning, no interaction with stakeholders or notifications to community advisory committees. “Doing so without robust community engagement is an injustice,” he said.

Bredefeld: ‘Simply terrible public policy’

Councilmember Garry Bredefeld, the lone vote against the Chavez renaming, called the actions of his colleagues “misguided” and “simply terrible public policy.”

“When this was first discussed over a year ago, our citizens were promised to be included in the discussions,” including citizen committees to examine the issue. “None of those promises were kept and the people were clearly blindsided by the council’s actions.”

Another southwest Fresno pastor, Paul Binion of the Westside Church of God, said he was troubled by the apparent lack of “consideration for the cultural and historical context in which they made the decision” to change the street names for Kings Canyon Road, Ventura Street and California Avenue – monikers long etched on maps of Fresno and in the consciousness of residents across south Fresno and beyond.

“The city council are our elected officials. Elected officials are to be representatives,” Binion said. “If you represent me, you should consider me. If you represent me, you should consult with me. If you represent me, then I should be one in which you take time to see my response to your decision.”

A representative from another church, the Holy Trinity Armenian Church at the corner of M and Ventura streets, also objected to the change. “You don’t destroy one history to start another one,” said Ara Jerian, a member of the church. “Our church is historic. Everyone knows the red brick church on Ventura.”

Kings Canyon Road business owner Sarah Pilibos, whose family owns and manages a shopping center on the street between Winery and Willow avenues, called the decision “an affront to our business owners, tenants, operators, franchisees, employees and customers without any consultation, without any communication, without any notification whatsoever.”

Potential for a lawsuit

For the decision to be reversed, one of the six council members who voted for the name change would need to ask for the issue to be reconsidered, “if there is a council member who has the courage to bring it back and allow these people to come and address this in the right way,” Bredefeld said.

If that doesn’t happen, however, Musson said the organization is willing to go to court.

“You have to remember there’s 3,150 addresses (on the affected streets), and about one-third of those or more are business owners,” Musson said. The $1 million allocated by the City Council to relief the financial burden “isn’t going to come close to covering their costs, changing their deeds, their contracts with property owners. We’re talking about millions of dollars in lost revenue.”

A couple of hours later, during the council’s meeting at which several people spoke out over the Cesar Chavez street renaming, Arias sought to counter some of the arguments, denying that there was no consideration of cost, that other alternatives were not considered, or that there was insufficient community engagement on the issue.

“The fact that there was no stakeholder committee — that’s not a requirement of our city process, nor was it ever used when we recognized African American leaders, Punjabi, Hmong and Armenian heroes by naming places and streets after them,” Arias argued. “In my view, this is simply an attempt to set a new standard when recognizing a Latino hero in our community, and I don’t think that is fair, just or equitable in a city this diverse.”

Threat of violence against councilmember

Prior to the press conference, Bredefeld said, a woman attending the event confronted him and verbally threatened him and his chief of staff with violence.

Bredefeld said the woman “walked up to me and she said something to the effect of, ‘There’s a bullet waiting for you.’”

“And then she walked up to my staff person ... and got in her face and started cursing at her ... ‘There’s two bullets waiting for you,’” Bredefeld said. “This is beyond the pale. … I’m not going to tolerate that and I’m not going to tolerate anyone threatening my staff.”

Bredefeld added that he was filing a police report over the incident.