These Fresno schools are in one of the most polluted parts of the state. An enduring shame

Imagine sending your teenage son or daughter to a high school adjacent to the area that is most pollution burdened in the state.

That is what the 2,500 students at Edison High in west Fresno face every day when they head to their campus on East California Avenue.

According to the CalEnviroScreen ranking released last month, the census area just north of the high school is the most burdened in California by multiple forms of pollution — air, water and hazardous waste. The area is bounded by Fresno Street-Kearney Boulevard on the north, Ventura Street-California Avenue to the south, H Street on the east and Thorne Avenue on the west.

Edison High sits just south of the area. Also nearby is King Elementary and its 600 kindergarten-through-sixth-grade students.

Among the dubious distinctions both campuses share is proximity to highways — the campuses are within earshot of the big interchange of Highways 99 and 41. Not far off is a key rail line and diesel-burning trains.

Schools are just one component of west Fresno. More than 40,000 people live in that part of the city, and are daily challenged by pollution, poverty and unemployment.

West Fresnans suffer from acute asthma, babies with low birth weights, and high rates of diabetes and heart disease. The lifespan of someone living in west Fresno is estimated to be up to 20 years less than someone living in the northeast part of the city.

This year The Bee Editorial Board has made improving west Fresno one of its particular calls for action, and the latest data just reinforce that campaign.

Poverty and bad living conditions are not unique to west Fresno. Examples abound across America: from the slums of Harlem to dirt roads in Appalachia, from American Indian reservations in New Mexico to the ghettos in Detroit.

The question facing those places and west Fresno alike is, what are local leaders doing about it?

Action is key for west Fresno

Mayor Jerry Dyer pledges to help make west Fresno better. “I am paying particular attention to bettering the quality of life for the residents of the southern parts of our city,” Dyer said in an email to Fresno Bee/Fresnoland staff writer Monica Vaughn. “Correcting decades of intentional and unintentional neglect and disrepair won’t happen overnight.”

“Won’t happen overnight.” Taken at face value, Dyer is certainly right. Decades of official ignoring of the problems have accompanied west Fresno’s slide into its sorry state.

But the comment could also be seen as code for “let’s change the subject, please.” The proof is in the action.

Dyer said he would work to direct American Rescue Plan money into efforts to improve the area, such as rebuilding crumbling infrastructure like roads.

Some industrial park proposals are also going to test Dyer’s commitment — and that of the City Council and county supervisors — to making west Fresno more livable.

Hold off industrial

Some companies along Elm Avenue are asking the city for rezoning to allow for modernization of their operations.

But a special plan for west Fresno that took years to hammer out does not allow for more industrial development because the area is already home to the city’s major share of such operations. The request is undergoing negotiations.

County leaders want to start studying if 3,000 acres at the southern end of Fresno should become a business-industrial park. The location is east of the unincorporated community of Malaga, south of Fresno and east of Highway 99.

The industrial park would provide jobs, incomes and tax revenues. But the prospect of yet another industrial park, with diesel trucks coming and going at all hours, spewing particulates into the air, is the very kind of development Fresno’s west and southern neighborhoods do not need. The CalEnviroScreen makes that clear.

Mayor Dyer, the Fresno City Council and the county Board of Supervisors should put current residents ahead of proposed development. One way to do that is to convene a summit of these government leaders. The goal is simple: To focus on how to make west and south Fresno better places to live.

Absent such a concerted, coordinated effort, piecemeal decision making will likely continue the pattern of land uses that have made the southern and western sides of Fresno what they are today — highly polluted, rundown areas with little hope of improvement.