The Fresno City Council will continue with the same leadership in 2026, albeit with one change.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Councilman Mike Karbassi, who served as the council president in 2025, was reelected by his colleagues on Thursday to remain in the position for another year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The big picture: The council voted 6-0 to elect Karbassi as the council president for 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Councilwoman Annalisa Perea abstained from the vote.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The council also elected Councilman Nelson Esparza to serve as vice president.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Why it matters: Whoever serves as the president of the city council is responsible for setting the agenda for each meeting and for leading the meetings.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The vice president is tasked with filling in when the president is absent.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The backstory: While Thursday\u2019s vote went smoothly without any controversy, the process for picking a leader has changed over the years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In late 2024, the council voted to change the rules for who becomes council president by axing the rotation system to implement a vote.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Councilman Miguel Arias, who served as the vice president in 2025, would have been in line to be president under the old rules.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The city council also changed its rules for several years to prevent former councilman and current Fresno County Supervisor Garry Bredefeld from becoming president.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The council changed the rules in 2020 to give themselves an option to vote on moving away from the rotation \u2013 a notable move given that Bredefeld was in line to become president in 2021.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The council returned to the strict rotation system in 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Fresno City Council will continue with the same leadership in 2026, albeit with one change.\u00a0 Councilman Mike…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135515,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[112,114,113],"class_list":{"0":"post-135514","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fresno","8":"tag-fresno","9":"tag-fresno-headlines","10":"tag-fresno-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}