Measure S is not a new tax. It continues the half-cent sales tax Fresno County voters have relied on for four decades to fix roads, run transit and keep people moving. Measure C, the current version, expires in June 2027. If S fails, that money stops, and every community in the county falls further behind on repairs it is already behind on.
That is the practical case. There is a larger one.
Transportation is how a farmworker gets to the packing shed, how a student in a west-side town gets to class, how a manufacturer moves product to market and workers to the line. It is what ties our rural towns and our cities into one region. It is the connecting thread the Internet can’t replace.
Who it serves
If you run a business, your workforce is only as large as the distance people can reliably travel. Employers locate where roads and transit move goods and people. Measure S is economic development infrastructure.
If you live in a rural community, you know what it means to be an afterthought. Measure S invests across the whole county, not just its largest city.
If you are a parent, you want sidewalks, safe crossings and safe routes to school. Measure S pays for them.
If you are skeptical, I understand. I served on the Measure C committee when that initiative passed. The group agreed to abide by a set of Community Values. Yet at the last meeting, a deal had been cut between a developer and the City of Fresno to elevate one project, and only two of us objected. Promises on paper are not enough. Measure S requires annual audits and a citizens oversight committee that meets in public every quarter.
Is it perfect? In the world of policy, perfect is an illusion. It’s where compromise is vital. Not compromise of core values, the humility to acknowledge your lens is incomplete.
Opponents say we can do better if we wait. Waiting has a price. Supporters estimate a delay could cost the county more than $100 million in transportation funding, and the roads do not stop crumbling while we deliberate.
This is about more than pavement. In 2006, a conference in Fresno called Worlds Apart, Futures Together changed many minds. We realized that working harder, longer and faster to treat the symptoms of dysfunction would never move our region out of poverty. National journalist Neal Peirce, author of Citistates: How Urban America Can Prosper in a Competitive World, urged us to link economic development and neighborhood revitalization. Business and community are interdependent. Measure S is a test of whether we learned that lesson.
Neal later wrote the foreword to our first book about that journey. Like me, he was inspired by John Gardner, considered one of America’s greatest citizens. He said, “The key is to get people talking and working together across the boundary lines that traditionally divide and diminish a community.”
Measure S was built that way. Students, teachers, mayors of large and small cities, business, labor and neighborhood groups are at the table. To those used to top-down control, a broad coalition can look like noise. But we have learned how often narrow fixes, even well-intended regulations, fragment effort and add cost without changing the underlying conditions.
We have done this before. In 2004, CEO Dave McDonald stepped up to lead the first Measure Z. It passed with 73.4 percent of the vote. The spirit of unity was real, and it got results.
We can do it again. We are one community. Restore the spirit of the barn-raising: you live here, you do your part. Vote yes on Measure S on November 3, and make it proof that this region is building prosperity everyone can share.