Suburban sprawl doesn’t cover costs, so Clovis residents implored to tax themselves | Opinion
The bill for Clovis’s explosive, unshackled growth has come due.
One guess who’s being asked to pay.
“What kind of place do we want to live in?” Clovis Mayor Lynne Ashbeck asked Monday evening before she and her city council colleagues placed a 1% sales tax on the November ballot. “We’re at a crossroads.”
Ashbeck was using “crossroads” as a figure of speech, but it’s an apropos choice of words.
Because in essence, this is about crossroads. Crossroads of actual streets that kept moving farther east and north over the past two decades as Clovis leaders gave the nod to large-scale residential tracts away from the established core.
And guess what? Suburban sprawl doesn’t pay for itself. Oh sure, the permit fees and utility charges are nice. So too are increased property taxes. But even those things, combined, don’t cover the long-term fiscal responsibility for public safety, water delivery, sewage treatment, road maintenance, solid waste pickup and other services.
That’s what city leaders have come to realize — and why this group of unabashed conservatives is now pushing for a tax hike.
Along with its borders, Clovis’ population has grown by nearly 40% since the recession. In the meantime, though, staffing for public safety and other services were stagnant. The city employs roughly the same number of police officers and firefighters in 2024 as it did in 2007, resulting in small upticks in crime (shhh not so loud) and emergency response times that are increasingly substandard.
The proposed 1% sales tax would focus on police and fire but also support other city departments. Without it, city manager John Holt forecast a $14.4 million general fund operating deficit by 2028-29.
“We have insufficient resources to maintain our current operations,” Holt told the council.
Dire times indeed for a city that likes to boast about how it’s the safest and most desirable place to live in the San Joaquin Valley.
Which apparently isn’t as safe, or as desirable, as it used to be. As was strongly implied by police and fire leadership.
“I have called Clovis home for nearly four decades,” said Jordan Hunter, president of the Clovis Police Officers Association. “This is not the Clovis I grew up in.”
Clovis Firefighters Association President Trent McGill bemoaned how it took until 2022 for the city to open a fire station in Loma Vista, where new houses have been under construction since the mid-2000s. Emergency response times for newer outlying subdivisions exceed 10 minutes, according to a graphic he showed the council, nearly twice as long as established neighborhoods.
“The Clovis way of life is not just a slogan, it’s a standard,” McGill said. “Decide if you want to keep Clovis, Clovis.”
Sprawl is a financial drain
Monday’s meeting was heavy on gloom and doom but light on introspection. None of the five council members, or the city manager, cared to offer any insight as to how Clovis found itself in such a sinkhole that it requires a $28 million per year helping hand from taxpayers.
Here’s a hint: Building new subdivisions in almost every corner of the city on what used to be ag land or open fields is a financial drain. Unless you’re the homebuilder, of course.
Don’t take my word on that. I suggest reading a recent study by the Urban Institute that analyzed the prior 80 years of fringe development in the Fresno area.
“We demonstrate that land development has occurred at a faster rate than population growth, resulting in an increasingly sprawling, low-density metropolitan area,” the authors wrote. “This development has displaced agricultural land and destroyed natural areas; undermined the viability of city center-adjacent neighborhoods, whose residents are disproportionately people of color; and made it challenging to provide effective public transportation service.”
The population growth in Clovis, from 90,000 to 2006 to 124,500 in 2024, speaks for itself. But it doesn’t take into account how eager city leaders were for that to happen.
In 2007, Clovis went so far as to accept a $230,000 advance from national homebuilder Lennar so that the city’s consultant could complete the master plan for two communities within Loma Vista. The city council voted 4-1 to approve the deal with Ashbeck the lone dissenter.
Ashbeck expressed concerns Lennar would expect favors down the road as Loma Vista grew but was reassured by then-city manager Kathy Millison, who told the council that “creative” financing arrangements are required given the “current budget constraints.”
Clovis faced budget constraints in 2007? Huh. Just wait a year or two – or 17.
“This is a vision of what is to come,” Millison told the council.
Not sure if Millison’s vision of the future included a time when Clovis residents would be implored to extricate the city from its sprawl-induced bind.
But here we are.
This story was originally published August 8, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
