Fresno County's Rural Cities Back Rival Measure C Transportation Tax Plans

The city councils of Mendota, Parlier and Huron voted in the first week of March to formally endorse Better Roads, Safe Streets, a signature-gathering campaign to renew Fresno County's half-cent Measure C transportation sales tax, drawing a clear geographic fault line in a countywide fight over how to spend billions on roads and transit.

"For small cities like Huron, maintaining our local streets is one of the most important responsibilities we have," Huron Mayor Rey León said. "This measure will help cities like ours repair aging streets, improve safety in our neighborhoods, and make sure transportation funding reaches the communities that need it most."

The three councils' endorsements set up a direct rivalry with Fix Our Roads, the competing renewal plan led by Fresno County Supervisor Garry Bredefeld and a coalition of elected officials, labor representatives and transportation experts. Both campaigns must collect 22,000 valid signatures from Fresno County voters to place their respective measures on the November 2026 ballot.

Better Roads, Safe Streets is backed by a coalition of county mayors, nonprofits and transportation advocates, with financial support from the Central Valley Community Foundation. Its funding percentages mirror a plan that a county steering committee and a majority of Fresno County mayors, including Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer, endorsed last year.

Fix Our Roads presents a sharply different set of priorities. The plan, unveiled February 20 by a coalition of transportation and political consultants, is structured as a 20-year initiative projected to generate an estimated $3.9 billion. It dedicates 50% of those funds to local road repairs, 16% to major streets and highways, 16% to a flexible pool that local jurisdictions can direct as they choose, and 18% to public transit. Bredefeld has argued that the Better Roads proposal allocates too much to public transportation and not enough to fixing local roads, a criticism that drove his coalition's decision to launch a separate measure.

The political alignment is not uniform across the county's smaller cities. While Mendota, Parlier and Huron moved to support Better Roads, the mayors of Selma, Reedley and Kingsburg have not backed the plan's funding formula, putting some Central Valley communities on the same side as Bredefeld.

The stakes for both campaigns extend beyond ballot positioning. Measure C project signs are visible across the county, marking completed infrastructure work from southeast Fresno to the west side. If neither renewal effort qualifies for November or if voters reject both, that funding stream stops, and the projects those signs mark could be among the last completed under the existing tax.

Both campaigns now enter a months-long signature race, with November's deadline pressing each coalition to mobilize enough registered voters to clear the 22,000-signature threshold and force a November choice between two competing visions for Fresno County's next generation of transportation spending.