Measure E supporter says the sales tax proposal will repair Fresno State’s facilities | Opinion

Over the past two years, I’ve served as a volunteer on the Measure E steering committee, a group of a dozen people with broad business and civic experience.

The election on Tuesday, March 5 will be our second attempt to pass Measure E. In the fall of 2022 over 100,000 people voted yes, just 3% short of what was needed to pass.

Measure E will do what the state has failed to do: Maintain and expand facilities & faculty at Fresno State to accommodate demand in the fastest growing region of California.

Today, if you walk the campus, you’ll be disappointed. Leaky roofs, peeling paint, limited classroom space, inadequate bathrooms, poor lighting, issues with security — and everywhere you look; deferred maintenance. The undeniable fact is that the state of California has allowed over $500 million of repairs to accumulate at Fresno State over the past 50 years.

This has created a terrible condition for our best and brightest students. Every year, dozens of 4.0 high school seniors are rejected from the Fresno State nursing program for lack of facilities and faculty. This is happening at a time when our region has a critical shortage of 1,600 nurses.

Measure E is a quarter of a cent sales tax, but more accurately described as a one penny investment for every $4 spent in Fresno County. The need is clear and the benefits are many. Eighty percent of Fresno State graduates stay in our community and become our nurses, teachers, engineers, public safety officials, business leaders and more. When students leave Fresno to attend college, they tend to stay in those communities.

Those who are firm in their position that the state is responsible for maintenance and expansion are missing an important piece of information. Last year, the state made its intention clear in a report that concluded, “There’s no money and no plan for repairs or expansion of the CSU system.”

Measure E isn’t a burden on the disadvantaged or poor. In fact, it’s just the opposite. It will create a $50 million endowment to provide scholarships to deserving local students and veterans; it will also build a new nursing school and triple the number of nurses who graduate.

Our investment will build an agricultural innovation center and water institute and modernize the farm laboratories, including a new engineering school to produce more engineers, architects and construction managers. It will also build new classrooms for criminology, social sciences, and other disciplines.

Measure E will do for Fresno State and our community what Measure Z did for the Fresno Chaffe Zoo. The money will be 100% locally controlled with an oversight committee appointed by our Fresno County supervisors, the CSU chancellor and Fresno State president. Every contract will be subject to competitive bidding with independent audits and public disclosure of all spending.

While it’s true that everything above is the state of California’s responsibility, after 50 years of doing little, and the state leaders telling us they “do not have the money or a plan” to do more, you can be assured if we don’t do this, it will not get done.

Let’s do something big for the generations that will follow us and vote Yes on E.

This story was originally published February 27, 2024 at 10:29 AM.