These county homeowners spent six figures to become Clovis residents. Here’s why
A group of Fresno County homeowners set to become Clovis residents will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to connect to the city’s municipal services amid depleting groundwater resources.
Quail Run, a 41-acre neighborhood with 18 homes located at the southeast corner of North Sunnyside Avenue and East Perrin Avenue, received annexation approval from the Clovis City Council earlier this month.
The merger culminated years of negotiations between residents and city officials. For over a decade, Quail Run residents have opposed housing development plans surrounding their community and Clovis’s northward expansion. Lennar Homes is building more 500 single-family houses at Heritage Grove to the west of Quail Run, and Wilson Homes aims to build 605 residential units on 155 acres of undeveloped land east of the neighborhood.
“We’ve been out there for 20 or 30 years, and all of a sudden, the city was right next to us, that was the first kind of footprint,” said Richard Wathen, a Quail Run resident and owner of a building company. “Then the Wilson started acquiring land and looking to zone things into housing, we realized all of a sudden, the trend was that we were going to be surrounded by the city on three of our four sides of our little 18 homes.”
Wathen and fellow Quail Run homeowners would have preferred to reside outside the Clovis city limits and preserve their remaining rural tranquility. However, a dwindling underground water supply has forced them to, instead, consider joining the City of Clovis.
“Ground water tables have declined for many, many years now, and several of our homeowners are either trucking in some water during the summer to supplement irrigation or cutting back on a lot of water use and not being able to irrigate lawns,” Wathen said.
All 18 households in Quail Run rely on the wells in their backyards, Wathen said. Most of the time, counties do not provide water, sewer, storm drains, or sidewalks and lights. That’s how county properties are developed, he added.
Water resources have always been competitive in the Central Valley, driven by agricultural pumping and population growth. Since 1980, the population tripled from 2 million to approximately 7.2 million, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.
Annual measurements conducted by the California Department of Water Resources show that the elevation of the groundwater surface at a surveyed site near Clovis’s Dry Creek decreased by 9.20 ft from fall 2024 to September 2025.
Wathen said he witnessed the scarcity of water resources over the past 30 years.
“Nobody can control the groundwater. We used to have a lot of water on our property,” he said. “But over the years, it just declined. We drove more wells. We got less and less water. We cut back on irrigation. We got rid of the lawn. We do everything possible to be frugal with water use.”
By becoming residents of Clovis, the Quail Run homeowners will be able to connect to the city’s water ah. But that would also cost each Quail Run household a six-figure bill.
To be eligible to hook up to the city’s water, the neighborhood must be part of the city. Homeowners will collectively pay $54,600 to LAFCo for the annexation. Then, the estimated cost for installing the water line ranges from $600,000 to $700,000, according to the data presented at a council meeting.
Each household also needs to pay Clovis a one-time water connection fee of $57,821, the purpose of which is to support Clovis’s water infrastructure, according to city officials.
For homeowners who don’t wish to hook up the city’s water system at this time, connecting later may result in higher fees, said Marissa Parker, the city’s associate planner.
“One big cost is the hookup fee, and that’s just to turn the key and the fee to say, ‘I want to get access.’ That’s not trenching, that’s not development, that’s not improvement,” Jared Callister, a Quail Run homeowner, told the City Council at the meeting.
The group asked the council to reduce or waive some of the water connection fees, saying they bear a huge economic burden.
“That’s reversing for the city costs that you have for the improvement, I understand that,” Callister said. “We’re paying a lot. We’re not asking for a handout. We’re financing a lot of stuff on ourselves.”
But Clovis worries this will set a precedent for other communities in the county seeking municipal public services.
“If we give any kind of variance to this group, some of that cost is going to be borne by the taxpayers, who are going to say they wanted to marry us, and now they don’t want to pay,” said Councilmember Drew Bessinger. “You guys came to us. We met with you. Our staff has met with you. We didn’t ask you to be annexed.”
Residing right in the middle of the city’s latest housing developments over the last few years, it became clearer to the Quail Run neighborhood that it can make the best given the circumstances, Wathen said.
“If someone wants to buy your home, they may love your house, and they want to live in the country, they may want to live on two acres, but there’s a question mark,” Wathen said. “We estimate that home values would be significantly less, if any home, not just ours, that doesn’t have reliable water. So I think even though it’s expensive to do this work, it makes sense for retaining the value of our homes.”
The neighborhood doesn’t want curbs and gutters, and it still wishes to preserve the country lifestyle, but it would be nice to have fire hydrants for the first time, and a shorter response time for fire and police services, Wathen said.
