This story was originally published by Fresnoland.
Mayor Jerry Dyer wants to unleash a new Clovis in southeast Fresno — and text messages obtained by Fresnoland show he personally pressured the Fresno Unified school board to stay quiet about what it could cost the district.
Hours before the board voted to shelve a resolution opposing the 9,000-acre Southeast Development Area (SEDA) plan in February, Dyer sent a barrage of text messages to trustees warning them not to take a position against his signature development plan, according to documents obtained by Fresnoland through a public records request.
In an identical message sent to at least four trustees on Feb. 24 — the day before the board’s vote — Dyer wrote: “It is my hope that FUSD does not take a position and oppose SEDA development. That would open the door for the mayor to start engaging on educational issues which I have avoided in the past when media ask for my opinion.”
When Trustee Andy Levine pushed back, writing that he saw it as his responsibility to voice concerns about what was not in the best interest of students and families, Dyer escalated.
“Let me be clear,” Dyer wrote to Levine. “If the FUSD takes a formal position against SEDA the relationship between the city and FUSD will be damaged. No way around it.”
The next evening, four trustees — Susan Wittrup, Keshia Thomas, Elizabeth Jonasson Rosas and Claudia Cazares — voted to indefinitely table the resolution in a 4-3 vote, blocking Superintendent Misty Her from taking any public stance against the project.
The district’s financial team has estimated that the buildout of the SEDA plan could force the closure of as many as 11 schools in Fresno Unified, drain $200 million a year in funding and push California’s third-largest school district into a new era of mass layoffs.
Fresno Unified is already losing students without SEDA. The district’s own projections show enrollment dropping to 60,522 by 2030, and three to five school closures already on the table.
SEDA has faced criticism on multiple fronts beyond its impact on schools. The project carries a $4.3 billion infrastructure price tag, with developer fees covering only about 20% of the cost — leaving a $3 billion shortfall with no financing plan. The city’s own environmental review found the project would increase air pollution in the area by roughly 600%.
None of the four trustees who voted to table offered a substantive defense of SEDA itself. Cazares, Davis, Levine and Thomas, who is running for Fresno City Council in this upcoming June election, did not respond to requests for comment via phone.
Jonasson Rosas told the district she had no responsive documents to the records request. Wittrup, according to district official Teresa Plascencia, tends to delete text messages on her phone after more than a week.
The board has no guidelines on how long to retain emails and text messages. But legal experts say it’s a problem for officials to routinely delete text messages and aren’t in full agreement on whether it’s in violation of state law.
In an interview with Fresnoland, Dyer defended the messages he sent.
“It wasn’t intended to be a threat. I worded it in a way as a friendly reminder,” Dyer told Fresnoland. “When we start, as government entities, making comments about each other’s operations, all it does is create a divide. And the last thing we need in government today is a divide.”
Dyer said he had learned “at the last minute” that the board was going to take a position on SEDA and had not had an opportunity to meet with trustees on the latest proposal.
But the resolution was not a surprise. It had been two weeks in the making and had already passed the board’s legislative committee.
Board Chair Veva Islas rejected Dyer’s appeal in her own text reply. “As written SEDA would be detrimental to our district and as such it does require us to oppose.”
“Sad to see for sure,” Dyer replied.
Second peek behind the scenes of mayor’s push for SEDA
The messages are another rare glimpse into how Dyer is working behind the scenes on his march to get the SEDA plan approved.
Last spring, when SEDA appeared politically dead, Fresnoland reported that Dyer met privately with developer Darius Assemi and other builders at City Hall. There, Assemi pointed to Clovis Unified’s new $500 million Terry Bradley Education Center as the project’s selling point — a “gorgeous, brand-new toy” that would drive demand for homes built in competing school districts.
“They’re winning,” Dyer told the developers last spring about SEDA’s opponents. “I’ve done a good job. We’re on the defense.”
Dyer then launched a months-long campaign to line up city council votes, including biweekly private “training sessions” between the planning department and the two councilmembers he identified as swing votes.
Now, the Fresno Unified text messages show Dyer didn’t just coordinate with developers pushing to build near Clovis Unified’s new campus. He personally intervened to stop the school district with the most to lose from SEDA — Fresno Unified — from saying anything formally about the mega-project.
The political effect of the trustees’ tabling vote was to bar the superintendent from acting on her own office’s assessement. That analysis, sent to trustees in February, warned of large-scale sprawl development “redistributing families within a region instead of generating net population growth, resulting in declining enrollment in long-standing neighborhood schools.”
The resolution would have directed Her’s team to communicate the district’s opposition to the city council, the mayor and all relevant public agencies. Without it, the superintendent has no board authorization to oppose SEDA publicly — even as the city continues to advance the project.
Islas said Dyer’s pressure campaign on Fresno Unified, while successful, is still a sign that SEDA can’t stand on its own merits.
“He was so triggered by even the thought that the district might speak out against it,” she said.
Dyer said that his opposition to FUSD’s potential anti-SEDA vote was because of his procedural concerns.
“I didn’t think it would be helpful for the relationship between the city of Fresno and the school board,” he said.
Islas saw it differently.
“None of us are against economic development. But his failure to see that there’s a different path forward — that this could be about strengthening neighborhoods where our existing schools are — he only sees the expansion of the border of the city into undeveloped areas as the win.”
Islas said some of the trustees who voted to table have political ambitions that depend on staying in the mayor’s good graces — and that those ambitions came at the district’s expense.
“Unfortunately,” she said, “they’re selling out our kids and our district for that.”
