The Fresno City Planning Commission meets Wednesday at 6 p.m. at City Hall to decide whether to recommend to the City Council Mayor Jerry Dyer’s SEDA mega-development plan.
On the table: 45,000 new homes in southeast Fresno, carrying a $4.3 billion infrastructure price tag.
Last November, the planning commission recommended a thumbs up to the city council. But the city council sent it back to the planning department in December demanding, among other things, a real accounting of who will pay for the first phase of SEDA, called South SEDA.
Dyer’s team has yet to deliver that financial plan. But at Wednesday’s hearing, commissioners may hear for a second time why they should recommend approval for SEDA anyways.
Fresno is caught in an annexation war with Clovis and Sanger over SEDA, Dyer says, and needs to shoot first or face the consequences.
At the heart of the threat is an obscure local agency called LAFCo, which Dyer claims could facilitate a Chinatown-style land grab.
“What worries me, that if we don’t approve an environmental impact report [for SEDA], that LAFCO may take this away from us as a growth area,” Dyer told The Fresno Bee in June.
“And when that happens, who’s going to get it? Clovis or Sanger. And so we’re going to see Sanger and Clovis grow, but we’re not going to be able to control that growth.”
A review of city, county and state records — along with interviews and written statements from the officials in Clovis, Sanger and Fresno LAFCo, who would actually have to execute such a takeover — shows that Dyer’s argument does not hold up.
And yet, despite no evidence that either Clovis or Sanger has the political will or the capacity to take on SEDA, planning commissioners and Planning Director Jennifer Clark continue to push claims about LAFCo taking a slice of the mayor’s mega-development proposal and giving it to another city.
“If we don’t pass it, LAFCo will take the land and give it to Clovis or Sanger and they’ll develop it,” said Planning Commission chair Kathy Bray last year.
Dyer’s office did not respond to a request for comment on his statement about LAFCo.
What would it take for Sanger or Clovis to steal SEDA?
Fresno’s Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo) is the county agency that calls balls and strikes on where cities can grow. Primarily, cities have to prove to LAFCo they have the cash lined up to grow into new places. LAFCo does not take land from one city and reassign it to another. First, somebody has to ask LAFCo if they can grow on new land.
The first problem is that neither Clovis nor Sanger is asking.
Consider Clovis. The city is in the middle of drafting a general plan meant to guide the next 20 years of growth. SEDA is not in it.
“There is no expansion of the SOI [sphere of influence, which is where a city can grow] as part of the General Plan Update, which is currently underway,” said Chad McCollum, a spokesperson for the city of Clovis.
Clovis already has three growth areas with 53,000 zoned housing units ready to go, according to McCollum. The three areas are meant to handle growth needs into 2047. After that, the state projects Fresno County’s overall population to decline.
“The city’s plans do not include any of those areas in SEDA,” Clovis Mayor Vong Mouanoutoua wrote in an email to southeast Fresno resident Brett Thompson, which was shared with Fresnoland.
“In order to change any planning area, it would take the property owners, not the city, to make such a change,” the email said “The process would be many, many years.”
What about Sanger? One problem is that they are growing in the opposite direction.
Their adopted growth area is the North Academy Corridor — roughly 285 acres in north Sanger. Sanger’s city limits cover about 3,680 acres, with 3,200 acres to grow.
In other words, Sanger’s footprint can nearly double in size without ever looking west toward SEDA.
“We have no plans to develop anything other than what we have already annexed,” Sanger Mayor Frank Gonzalez wrote to Thompson in an email, shared with Fresnoland.
David Fey, the former Fresno LAFCo executive officer, said Sanger’s geography alone makes annexing SEDA a non-starter. Annexations have to be contiguous — a city cannot take an island of land miles from its border.
“They couldn’t do it as an island, so the growth has to be contiguous,” Fey said. “So they would have to start getting land deals outside of their sphere, working west.”
Such a turnaround is about as likely, Fey said, as a Forrest Gump fantasy come true.
“I’d say it’s possible. Just like it’s possible that you or I could walk across the country from coast to coast. That’s entirely possible, right?
“Is it probable? Not in the least.”
Could Sanger or Clovis pull off what Fresno hasn’t?
But say Sanger or Clovis ginned up the desire anyway.
The next hurdle is the one Fresno itself hasn’t cleared: proving to LAFCo that the city can actually deliver services to the land. Since 2006, Fey said, LAFCo has required a service plan from Fresno for future annexations, including a demonstration of capacity to provide water, sewer, and other services to the area.
The hardest part is sewage.
Take Sanger. Its wastewater system is in a declared state of emergency. The Sanger City Council voted unanimously in July 2024 to declare a crisis at both the city’s domestic and industrial wastewater treatment plants, a step that let Sanger skip competitive bidding to move faster on repairs. A Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board review of city records from 2020 to 2022 had documented more than 100 violations across the two facilities.
Digging out is going to take years, City Manager Nathan Olson told The Fresno Bee in July 2024.
“The new plant — when and if it does come – is years out,” Olson said – possibly, The Bee reported, in the next 15 years.
13 miles away from SEDA, Sanger is simply not poised for a land grab, said Fresno LAFCo Executive Officer Brian Spaunhurst – the person who would review any SEDA steal.
“Sanger is less likely — about as close to impossible as one could get,” Spaunhurst wrote in an email to Fresnoland.
Clovis is the more plausible of the two, and it still doesn’t pencil, according to newly released planning memos.
The sewer mains that carry Clovis’s wastewater south to its treatment plant are already short on capacity in places, the city’s consultants wrote last month — and there is no room left in the roads to lay bigger ones.
“Capacity of existing mains to convey wastewater to the Clovis ST/WRF in the south is in some cases constrained, and there is insufficient space within existing road rights-of-way for additional mains,” the consultants wrote to the city’s General Plan Advisory Committee.
The memo describes Clovis’s existing growth plan, not SEDA. But the pinch point it identifies runs along the city’s southern edge — the side that faces SEDA.
Even without reaching for SEDA, the general plan implementation committee is already asking whether a third waste treatment plant is needed to service its three growth areas – a near certainty if the city added a fourth by bolting for SEDA.
Even then, Clovis residents would need to sign off on higher tax rates to build that treatment plant.
Spaunhurst said Clovis is relatively more likely than Sanger to go hunting for SEDA – but that the city has shown no evidence it could or even wants to pull it off, politically or financially.
“While Clovis is more realistic than Sanger, the fact remains that the financial burdens pertaining to infrastructure that exist for Fresno would also be about the same for any other city to develop in this area,” Spaunhurst said. “The costs of infrastructure do not go away simply because it is a different city that is responsible.”
“I have yet to see any data or interest from Clovis that shows they would be the better option.”
Political realities
On Wednesday, commissioners will decide whether to recommend approval for SEDA, which still lacks a funding plan for its $4.3 billion price tag. Neither has the Dyer administration produced a requested financial plan for SEDA’s first phase, known as South SEDA.
That first phase has a $440 million funding shortfall, according to a city-commissioned report in May 2025. Its infrastructure will cost $672 million, according to city documents, and developers fees will cover only $233 million.
Who will plug the shortfall is still unexplained. One LAFCo requirement is a Master Service Delivery Plan — a document that shows SEDA’s sources of funding for its infrastructure costs.
Fresno has never submitted one for SEDA, according to LAFCo.
“They have not submitted anything directly to us for the MSDP,” Spaunhurst said.
And yet, mention of that plan is part of the LAFCo resolution that will be in front of the Fresno Planning Commission on Wednesday, highlighted alongside other documents like the SEDA Specific Plan.
As the Planning Commission weighs its recommendation, it should not decide through fear of losing the land, said ex-LAFCo chief Fey.
Both Sanger and Clovis have thousands of acres of raw land already inside their spheres, with infrastructure far closer to ready.
Neither town has an obvious reason to make a dash for an unfunded project with a hornet’s nest of organized opposition, Fey said.
“There’s already a ready-made buzzsaw,” Fey said, “and it’s all the folks who are against it.”
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