Fresnans unite against pollution in their neighborhoods. Will the city hear their demands?
Residents living in south Fresno neighborhoods burdened by pollution are demanding the city of Fresno pause industrial development, stop rezoning for industrial use and adopt a general plan environmental report that protects communities from harmful development.
Residents who live near the Amazon and Ulta distribution centers and in industry-heavy southwest Fresno neighborhoods joined forces on Tuesday to speak out against city planning and development policies that harm their health and quality of life. The residents spoke during a news conference at the downtown office of Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability, a policy advocacy organization representing the south Fresno communities.
“It’s from southwest to southeast where everyone is feeling the same pain,” said Gary Hunt, a southwest Fresno resident. “I think us, as a whole, we can finally become one voice and be heard.”
Life before industrial development
Hunt and Panfillo Cerrillo spoke about what their communities were like before factories moved in and freeways were built.
Cerrillo said his family moved to south central Fresno in 1965 because his parents wanted to live in the country. He grew up seeing quail and foxes running around and hearing pheasants.
“All that stuff has been displaced now by factories,” said Cerrillo, who lives near the large distribution centers.
Hunt grew up in southwest Fresno, and at the time, the community had all it needed — clean parks, grocery stores and other amenities.
When the Darling meat rendering plant was first built, Hunt said he and his neighbors thought it was going to be a Happy Steak restaurant. Instead, they got a slaughterhouse, he said.
He noticed the disinvestment in his neighborhood when Highway 41 was built.
“You could see the environmental racism started to take place when the factory started to come in,” he said.
Soon, Hunt and his friends were bused to school far from their homes, and Edison High School rose to become a top school as a magnet school. But he and his friends didn’t get to attend.
Health effects
As an adult, Hunt has asthma. So do his sons, and most other people in his community, he said.
“Even the cats and dogs have asthma,” he joked.
Estella Ortega, who lives in southeast Fresno, said her son suffers from asthma and struggles to breathe at times.
“Hopefully one day he will not have to struggle to breathe and he will not have asthma,” she said. “But, unfortunately the conditions keep worsening. Nothing is improving. So I don’t see that actually happening for him.”
Ortega and Hunt both said they don’t see badly needed changes coming. Instead, more industrial development comes to their neighborhoods in the name of jobs.
“But the jobs that you’re bringing are killing people,” Hunt said.
Residents fighting back
In the area where the distribution centers are located, residents suffer from increased air, noise and light pollution in addition to hectic and heavy traffic. The roads are unsafe for cyclists and pedestrians, many of whom are children walking to school nearby at Orange Center Elementary.
Residents won some protections earlier this year. They negotiated an agreement with city officials for connection to city water and sewer systems, air filtration systems in their homes and trucking restrictions near their home as long as they agreed not to sue the city for allowing a second Amazon distribution center to be built.
City planners are working on what’s called the South Central Specific Plan, which will guide land use in a large swatch of south Fresno. The residents on Tuesday called for city leaders to put a stop to any development in the area until the plan is complete and reflects the desires of the community.
“Today, members of the communities of all parts of south Fresno are coming together to continue to demand for our local and state governments to put a halt to the continual dumping of industrial facilities right in front of our homes and our schools,” said Ivanka Saunders, a policy advocate for Leadership Counsel. “Enough is enough.”
She also called on state and local leaders to work with community members to bring forward solutions so that “being a member of a community in south Fresno does not mean you are a second-class citizen in comparison to our neighbors in the north of Fresno.”
A little further to the west, residents are fighting a proposal to rezone their neighborhood back to industrial use after they for years worked with the city on the Southwest Specific Plan to drastically reduce the industrial footprint near their homes. In September, the developer group postponed their application for rezoning to light industrial after residents made it clear that plan went against the Southwest Specific Plan.
The residents Tuesday called on city officials to stop any rezones that would allow more industrial development in their neighborhoods.
“We continue fighting,” Ortega said. “My question is: When is it going to stop?”
This story was originally published November 16, 2021 at 6:44 PM.