Madera County District 3 candidates take credit for growth. Read about their claims
The race for Madera County’s District 3 supervisor seat is playing out at a time when major development plans are moving forward in the county.
Thousands of homes are planned to go up in the county in the coming years, so the Board of Supervisors will have to figure out how to navigate the priorities of a growing population as interested developers begin to float plans for major developments in the county.
In the March 5 election, District 3 voters will decide whether to re-elect Supervisor Robert Poythress for a third four-year term, or to give west side Madera City Councilmember Cecelia Gallegos a shot at the office. The county’s District 3 covers most of the city of Madera: almost all of the city west of Highway 99 and a sliver of the city to the east of the highway.
In an interview with The Fresno Bee, Poythress touted the county board’s work to improve safety on Highway 99 and credited the county’s progress to the supervisors’ becoming more structured during his term. He said the county has accomplished a lot in the city of Madera.
If she’s elected, Gallegos told the Bee, she wants to strengthen the relationship between the city and county governments, which she said is nonexistent today. She touted the addition of fire service and a mega-residential development in her city district during her council time.
Here’s an overview of what Poythress and Gallegos said about their backgrounds, their successes while in office and what they envision for the future of Madera County. The Bee used a digital random selector to decide the order in which the candidates are presented in this story.
A ‘clean-up pitcher’ in local government
Gallegos, 56, teaches hundreds of children each week as an art specialist with Madera Unified School District. She’s been with the district for 32 years, mostly teaching general education.
She first won a Madera City Council seat in a 2016 special election and has since represented District 1, in the city’s northwest area.
Gallegos considers herself the “clean-up pitcher” in local government.
“I had to go into the city with a mess: Still cleaning it up after 8 years,” she said.
Gallegos said she worked on solutions for the city’s once-failing wastewater treatment plant – a debacle she said threatened emergency service for all of its residents.
“I got into this political world because I want to leave my city, your city, our city better than I found it,” she said.
The construction of Madera Fire Station 58 – the first one built in the city since 1978 – is another example Gallegos gave of what the council has accomplished during her time there. Its construction was funded through sales tax revenue intended for public safety projects.
“Took me a couple years to get it rolling,” she said. “We got to name it the ‘People’s Station.’”
During her term, the city also approved The Villages at Almond Grove, a residential development spanning 1,883 acres around Avenue 16 and Road 23. The city annexed the area and is in the process of redistricting to include it in Gallegos’ council district.
This development is planned to include 10,800 homes and multiple schools, and would be larger than Tesoro Viejo off Highway 41 in south Madera County at full build-out.
However, while she said she loves teaching and serving as a city councilmember, Gallegos also thinks she’s at “a point in my career where I need to step up and do more for my community.”
Gallegos said she’s seen a lot happen at the county level that leads her to believe District 3 and the city of Madera have been cast aside by the county.
“We’re not partners with the county,” she said. “We’re like the red-headed step-sister and that’s got to stop.”
The difficulty the city went through in getting a permit to clean up fire debris and vegetation near the Fresno River, which runs through the city of Madera, was one of her breaking points, Gallegos said. She previously said the county stalled in giving the city a permit, but it was actually the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, not the county, that had the authority to issue the permit.
In a phone call with the Bee on Feb. 19, Gallegos said she previously misspoke and meant to say the county didn’t take the initiative to get a state permit to clear the river banks in the years before the fire.
“City residents are county residents,” Gallegos said. “A lot of our county funding has been going to Avenue 12 and Highway 41’s development, which is great. But we got to take care of the house, which is District 3.”
Gallegos, who criticized county decisions to allocate public funds to the failing Madera Community Hospital, also wants to push for a voter-approved special hospital district. Poythress has also said that idea is on the table.
The lack of stable health care services in the county will only inhibit its growth, Gallegos said.
“Without a hospital, we can’t have more development in the city and county,” she said. “We won’t have more people wanting to buy homes here.”
A ‘thermostat’ in local government
Poythress, 68, grew up chopping weeds on his parents’ ranch 7 miles west of the city of Madera.
He’s retired from a 39-year career in banking, but still farms. Poythress was elected in 2004 to the Madera City Council, where he spent 12 years and was mayor for six.
Poythress considers himself a “thermostat” in local government.
“When things get a little bit crazy or things need to kind of be brought back on the rail, I’m that guy to bring it backwards,” he said.
A big council accomplishment during his time there, he said, was Vision Madera 2025, a plan intended to provide a path to “what we want to be in 2025.”
“It helped us focus on our parks and recreation, how we deliver services to our community as well as what we want to look like,” Poythress said.
As a supervisor, he said he wants to influence the city to reinstate some of the project’s programs, such as Neighborhood Watch.
Poythress won the District 3 supervisor race in 2016. He wanted to “bring a corrective course” to the board.
“We really needed to become more focused,” he said. “There were a lot of ancillary things that we really needed to look at more as, ‘How does this fit into the business model.’ If it doesn’t ... we need to forget it.”
Poythress said the county has worked on homelessness in the city by allocating funds to build six tiny homes at the Madera Rescue Mission.
A major county accomplishment he’s worked on is gathering more than $100 million to eliminate traffic bottlenecks on Highway 99 between Avenues 7 and 12. The project will “promote public safety and goods movement,” he said.
“It kind of led to me being selected president of the California Association of Councils of Governments,” he said. “Somebody from Madera has never served in that role before.”
Transportation and traffic safety work will remain one of his priorities in District 3, where he said a lack of traffic control resources are a concern for city residents and police. He called Gallegos’ claims that the county does not work in District 3 “laughable.”
If he’s not re-elected, “a voice for transportation and safety and roads would be lost, not only for Madera County, but also for the valley,” Poythress said.
He also listed groundwater sustainability in the Madera subbasin and economic growth as top priorities. As the county’s Economic Development Commission chairperson, Poythress said he’s already worked with a team that has brought new companies to the county.
For the future, he envisions jobs outside of agriculture for the county’s youth.
“I’m a farmer,” he said, “but we also need to diversify.”
Despite tech jobs being concentrated elsewhere in the state, and the downfall of Bitwise in Fresno, Poythress thinks the region is still a potential hub for the industry.
He said he’d look to local education – Fresno State and the State College Community College District – to develop a workforce that attracts those jobs to Madera County.
“More jobs are becoming automated,” he said. “That’s the future.”
This story was originally published February 16, 2024 at 12:30 PM.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that it was a state agency, not Madera County, that had jurisdiction over permitting the city of Madera’s efforts to clear debris and vegetation near the Fresno River.
