0:00 Opening instructions from attorney and interpreter
1:45 Overview
Part 2 – More overview (“Look, Ma! No trucks!”)
“It’s like telling us we didn’t see the knee on George Floyd’s neck. We saw it. We understand this.” –Mrs. Mary Curry
0:00 Eric Payne
2:15 Lisa Flores
4:08 Mrs. Mary Curry “Answer Lisa Flores’s question, please.”
5:30 Ivanka Saunders
11:55 Sylvesta Hall, Blue Ocean Development – “I am the last cotton picker.”
21:20 Kimberly McCoy
24:30 Mrs. Mary Curry “Thank you for your presence.”
27:35 Venise Curry “Thank you for your comments, Ms. Curry.” “Dr. Curry.”
30:55 June Stanfield
34:25 Lisa Flores redux “I’m just a woman with a lot of questions.”
37:30 Rev. B.T. Lewis “This is a slap in the face.”
41:45 Kevin Hall – $28,000 in campaign contributions to Annalisa Perea from ICC
45:50 Debbie Darden “That package does not need to be unwrapped.”
49:10 Bob Mitchell “Good evening, community.”
50:40 Michaelynn Lewis
52:05 Sylvesta Hall – asking city staff to comment
52:45 attorney spin – this meeting was for the applicants to reach out for more comments
54:06 Bob Mitchell – staff was directed to do additional work 54:55 Will Tackett, City of Fresno
55:50 Marina
58:10 Stacy Ferreira, Clinica Sierra Vista
1:02:00 Mrs. Mary Curry “We do matter and you all need to know it.”
1:04:30 Mary Ann Burkes, property owner, Ronquillo eminent domain attempt
Stop the Perea Rezone!
This article first appeared in the March 2021 issue of Community Alliance
Black History Month came with a slap in the face to residents of West Fresno, courtesy of Henry R. Perea. The former mayoral candidate, county supervisor and District 1 Fresno City Council member tried to jam a major industrial rezone proposal through the city planning commission on Feb. 3.
“I feel this is very disrespectful. To overturn what we worked so hard for,” said Kimberly McCoy, project director at Fresno Building Healthy Communities, of the Southwest Specific Plan.
Completed after two years and countless hours of community input, the plan was unanimously approved by the City Council in December 2017 with the aim of ending Fresno’s decades of placing major polluters next to homes in the city’s historically redlined neighborhoods west of Highway 99 by stopping all further industrial growth. Existing businesses were grandfathered in, but not their industrial zoning.
“If you know anything about our community at all, you know the hazardous conditions that our residents must live under because of the inappropriate planning for our community,” longtime advocate Bob Mitchell said to the commission.
Now Perea says he wants to take his clients’ zoning back to where they were “20 years ago”—when he was on the City Council and the Redevelopment Agency—so that they can remodel without environmental review or be subject to the new, more health-protective limitations implemented four years ago.
The item is slated to return to the city planning commission on March 17 under the title “Plan Amendment Application No. P20-01665, Rezone Application No. P20-01665.” For many in the opposition, it is simply known as “The Perea Rezone.” Let’s stand with West Fresno residents to stop it.
Valley Climate 