Fresno City Council votes for three new Measure P positions

By Doug Hoagland

In a move finalizing the City’s takeover of Measure P arts funding, the Fresno City Council on March 26 approved adding three positions to the city’s parks department. The vote was 7-0. Parks Director Aaron Aguirre estimated that the new positions would cost nearly $300,000 for the remaining three months of the 2025-26 fiscal year, with a full year costing about $500,000.

Aguirre said the money would come from both Measure P and the city’s general fund. Measure P is funded by a ⅜-of-a-cent sales tax increase that Fresno voters approved in 2018.

The saga of Measure P: See past coverage in The Munro Review’s comprehensive archive

Aguirre had barely finished giving the numbers to Councilmembers when City Manager Georgeanne White walked back his figures. “I think the numbers Aaron told us are worse case on the upper end. I don’t think it’s going to be that high.” She said it’s unlikely the City will spend $298,336 on the positions in April, May and June, which are the remaining months in the 2025-26 fiscal year.

The salary range on the three new permanent, full-time positions is about $45,000 to $80,000, Councilmember Miguel Arias told The Munro Review. He explained that the $298,336 cited by Aguirre goes beyond salaries to include health benefits, pension costs and start-up expenses associated with new employees such as office furniture and supplies.

The general fund will contribute $75,000 to the cost of the new positions, according to Aguirre. He did not provide a dollar amount coming from Measure P, but it would take $223,336 to make up the difference between the $75,000 from the general fund and the $298,336 total cost. Neither Aguirre nor City Communications Director Sontaya Rose Schmidt responded to an email seeking confirmation or clarification on the numbers.

Meanwhile, Arias told The Munro Review that he believes the City will spend more money “doing the back office work” in administering the Measure P arts grants than it paid the Fresno Arts Council to do that job beginning in 2023. The work carries major responsibility: Measure P generates at least $5 million each year for arts grants and will continue to do so for more than two decades.

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“From the day that the Arts Council contract [with the City] was approved, I advocated for more money to be distributed to the Arts Council to do the administrative work of awarding these funds,” Arias said. The city’s contract called for the Arts Council to receive 2% of Measure P funds to cover its administrative costs, but, Arias said, he doesn’t know a dollar figure on that percentage.

There was pushback at City Hall to his idea of giving the Arts Council more money for administration, Arias added. Some at City Hall believed that the City should oversee the program and could save money doing so, Arias said. (City Manager White said recently that the City wanted to run the grants program but the arts community successfully lobbied for the Arts Council. The Council lost the administrative job in early February when it was disclosed that a former employee had allegedly embezzled $1.5 million.)

Now, given the $298,336 and $500,000 cited by Aguirre as costs associated with the new positions in the parks department, “It’s clear to me that there is no cost savings,” Arias said.

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Meanwhile, Amy Kitchener, executive director of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, based in Fresno, urged councilmembers not to approve the three positions. In a letter sent before the Council voted, Kitchener said three new positions – a Project Liaison/Program Administrator, Community Outreach Specialist and Community Coordinator – don’t indicate “the level of leadership” or expertise needed for the City to successfully administer Measure P.

Kitchener added: “We have heard city officials argue that arts expertise is needed only for the review of the grants, which in itself illustrates the lack of experience coded in this assumption.” She recently began advocating for the City to hire a Director of Cultural Affairs with arts expertise.

Kitchener’s letter continued: “The administrator of the grants program needs to understand the local arts and cultural ecology in which art is being practiced and produced in order to effectively design a funding program, make needed changes, and structure outreach. The City needs to do better for its citizens with the tremendous investment by the taxpayers before us.”