Chavez defeats Quintero in Fresno County District 3 supervisor race
In a contest between two political figures long familiar to south Fresno voters, Councilmember Luis Chavez successfully unseated his former boss, incumbent Supervisor Sal Quintero, for the District 3 seat on the Fresno County Board of Supervisors.
Unofficial returns reported at 12:30 a.m. Wednesday showed Chavez with 54.4% of the vote compared to 45.2% for Quintero.
Quintero first served on the Fresno City Council for two terms from 1994 to 2002. In 2010, when his successor was prevented by term limits from running again, Quintero ran and won a return ticket to the City Council. He ran for the Board of Supervisors in 2016, winning the seat midway through his City Council term.
Chavez, who was Quintero’s chief of staff at Fresno City Hall, won the special election to replace Quintero, and was re-elected in 2022 to a full four-year term.
Typically – but not always – returns compiled at the end of Election Night reflect percentages similar to the final confirmed result when all of the counting is completed and the election certified. That could take up to four weeks after Election Day.
“I’m incredibly proud of the lead we have right now,” Chavez said of the early returns Tuesday evening. “It’s symbolic of the hard work we put in. I went to every single part of the district and saw firsthand the challenges, and that made a list of priorities to make sure we’re delivering results for our constituents.”
Chavez said he expects to work on the homeless issues facing both the city and county of Fresno, describing District 3 as “the most urbanized district we have in the county.”
“I want to chip away at the stigma that the city and county have an adversarial relationship,” he added. “Residents don’t distinguish between the county on one side of the street and the city on the other.”
Quintero and Chavez have both won multiple elections to represent southeast Fresno on their respective agencies, “so it’s not like either one of us are strangers to the voters in the district,” Chavez told The Bee last year when he announced his candidacy.
One issue on which the pair have disagreed is on the renaming of Kings Canyon Road/Ventura Street/California Avenue which span east-west across south Fresno. As a member of the City Council, Chavez was among the sponsors of changing the name of the 10-mile stretch to Cesar Chavez Boulevard, riling residents and businesses and spurring a still-pending lawsuit to reverse the change. Quintero, as a member of the county Board of Supervisors, voted against applying the name change to portions of the roads that are within the jurisdiction of Fresno County rather than the city of Fresno.
The election cycle that began in 2023 for the post included a lawsuit filed by Fresno County to bar Chavez and another City Council member, Garry Bredefeld, from moving funds from their City Council campaign treasuries to their respective campaigns for the Board of Supervisors. A Fresno County judge ultimately ruled in favor of Chavez and Bredefeld.
Campaign finance disclosures filed by Chavez indicate that he transferred almost $89,000 from his City Council committee to his Board of Supervisors camapign committee last year. Including that transfer, Chavez raised more than $296,000 for his supervisorial run in 2023 and 2024, while Quintero raised about $153,000 for his re-election bid.
Despite being outspent by Chavez in late 2023 and early 2024, Quintero was the leading vote-getter from a field of five candidates in the March primary election with 37.1% of the votes cast. Chavez came in second with 26.1% to earn his way into the November general election runoff.
Over the entire 2023-24 election cycle, Chavez had spent almost $297,000 on the campaign, compared to about $203,000 for Quintero.
This story was originally published November 5, 2024 at 8:48 PM.
