After redistricting, this northeast Fresno intersection becomes city’s political crossroads
Where First and Bullard avenues intersect may look like a typical convergence of Fresno arterial roads — strip malls on three corners, business offices on the fourth — but don’t be fooled.
On the map of national politics, this seemingly ordinary northeast Fresno intersection might be the most strategic in town. Because following California’s once-per-decade redistricting process, it’s one of the few locations where three different congressional districts share a common boundary.
The political crossroads of Fresno, if you will.
Neighborhoods south of First and Bullard are located in Congressional District 21, where longtime House Democrat Jim Costa is the odds-on favorite to win a 10th term. Nearly three out of four Fresno residents — including nearly everyone south of Shaw Avenue — live in this district. (The exact figure is 73.3%, according to the final report submitted by the California Citizens Redistricting Commission and approved by the Secretary of State.)
The northwest corner of First and Bullard lies within CD 5, a safe Republican seat being contested in the June 7 primary by Congressman Tom McClintock, Fresno County Supervisor Nathan Magsig and four longshots. All northeast Fresno residents living north of Herndon Avenue reside in CD 5, as do northwest Fresnans north of Shaw and east of the BNSF Railway tracks (the lines are kind of squiggly). Together, they make up 19.4% of the city’s total population.
The remaining 7.3% of Fresno residents live in CD 20, which from the northeast corner of First and Bullard carves out a small chunk of the city that includes Fresno State and neighborhoods surrounding the campus. CD 20, which also contains Clovis, is new territory for Congressman Kevin McCarthy, the Bakersfield Republican and House minority leader.
For anyone who ventures to First and Bullard, I recommend the southeast corner where you’ll find a uniquely Fresno blend of restaurants serving pizza, sushi, ramen, seafood, Thai and Hawaiian. There’s even an African place where the house special is pounded yam.
But why draw the three-way congressional district boundary line at that intersection?
“There’s not really an easy answer to that question,” said Faith in the Valley founder Trena Turner, a Stockton resident who served on the 14-member redistricting commission.
Before tackling the why, let’s do a better job contextualizing the what.
Fresno outnumbered in 2 of 3 districts
Each of California’s 52 congressional districts contain roughly 760,065 people — large enough so that only 35 cities are split into multiple districts. In 30 of those 35 cases, that number is two.
That leaves five cities carved into three or more congressional districts. Los Angeles, with its population of 3.9 million, is split into 10 of them. The others are San Jose (four districts) and San Diego, Fresno and Lakewood with three apiece. (Yes, Lakewood.)
Everyone reading this knows the population of Fresno (545,000) is considerably smaller than both San Diego (1.4 million) and San Jose (1 million). So when those cities get divided into three or more congressional districts, they still hold sway.
For Fresno, that’s simply not the case. Of the three congressional districts that converge at First and Bullard, only one (CD 21) is a true Fresno seat. In CD 5, Stanislaus County’s 43% share dwarfs Fresno County’s 16%. In CD 20, Fresnans are vastly outnumbered by residents of Bakersfield, Clovis, Visalia and Tulare.
That tells me Fresno, until the maps are redrawn in 2031, will wield less per capita voting heft on Capitol Hill than any large city in California.
In other words, we got shortchanged. To use polite diction.
The job of ensuring the right ballots get mailed to the right mailboxes, both in the vicinity of First and Bullard and everywhere else throughout Fresno County, falls to County Clerk and Registrar of Voters James Kus.
And quite a long, tedious process it is. According to Kus, so many changes were made to the congressional district boundaries in redistricting that it took eight staff members two full work weeks just to update the GIS mapping software, the voter registration system and crosscheck the two for accuracy.
“What links the two systems are addresses,” Kus said. “They better darn well match up or we have to do it over again.”
No Fresno voice on redistricting commission
Now back to the unanswered question: Why is First and Bullard the place where three congressional districts meet?
The easy answer is that Fresno was going to be carved up regardless, and that intersection turned out to be the place that allowed the redistricting commission to fulfill its legal obligation of balancing populations while considering communities of interest.
As explained by Turner, the commission member from Stockton, one of the biggest reasons the maps look the way they do is because the districts are initially drawn in Southern California, the state’s most populous region.
“After you start in one area, the rest becomes a ripple effect,” said Turner, who fought a losing effort to start the drawing process in the Central Valley.
The Fresno area lacked a voice in on the redistricting commission, in no small part due to our own political infighting. The candidacy of one local candidate, Richard Gallegos, was torpedoed by an opposition letter penned by nine left-leaning activist groups insisting the Clovis Republican was unfit to serve … well, largely for those reasons.
This isn’t to say having Fresno representation (or Gallegos’ in particular) on the nonpartisan redistricting committee would have prevented the city from getting carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Merely pointing out that nonsensical boundary lines like the ones at First and Bullard are what happens when we don’t.
This story was originally published May 23, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
