Fresno County employees who are hired for temporary jobs routinely work longer than what they are recruited for -- and more than county policy allows -- a practice that is driving up labor costs and raising questions about oversight.

A federal program to step up deportations of criminal illegal immigrants routinely misses its mark in Fresno County.

Former Orange Cove Mayor Victor Lopez ran the city for 28 years with nearly unchallenged authority. He used his power, some city officials and residents say, to mold the eastern Fresno County farm town into a remote kingdom all his own.

Move over, Granite Park and Fresno Metropolitan Museum. Fresno City Hall may have another publicly funded, multimillion-dollar boondoggle on its hands. More than $5 million has been spent over the past seven years to build a gymnasium in southwest Fresno that still isn't finished and has no guarantee of opening.

A federal financial-aid program for low- income college students doles out millions of dollars every year to Valley students who don't keep up their grades.

When Fresno City Hall was flush with money, it declared war on graffiti -- sending out crews to cover the markings and assigning an attorney to prosecute criminals. Now the city is losing one of its most important weapons: an effective criminal justice system.

Devices that were supposed to make diesel school buses pollute less are costing school districts and bus agencies thousands of extra dollars and creating major maintenance problems.

Fresno's district police stations may disappear because City Hall decided -- even as its budget was collapsing -- to borrow millions of dollars to build a $14 million regional police training center that almost no one in the region uses regularly.

For the first time, a Fresno Unified official is acknowledging mistakes in launching the school district's trouble-plagued $2 million computer system for tracking grades and other student data.

For every dollar Fresno County spends on pay, it will spend another 53 cents on pensions in the next budget year, making the retirement system here the most expensive among 20 county-run systems in the state, a new survey finds.

Trustees are concerned that Fresno Unified School District will miss a key deadline and lose out on $18 million in state funds to help pay for improvements at three high schools.

Fresno County will lose out on at least $3.7 million of savings annually by choosing not to outsource government jobs, although critics contend the hidden costs of privatization would have eaten up the savings.

Blanca Espinoza talks to her 2-year-old in a blend of Spanish and English. She's offering a motherly reminder on manners, which little Avelino grasps quickly, responding with the magic word: "Please." This scene might not have happened without California's Safe Surrender law, which gives parents an alternative to abandoning their newborns. In 2006, Espinoza and her husband adopted Avelino, who was surrendered at a Fresno hospital.

The Fresno Bee spent three months trying to dissect how council members have used "discretionary funds" since 2003. City officials responded with hundreds of pages of financial data that only an accountant could love.