It was a sad day back in July when Libelula, one of Fresno’s most beloved breakfast and lunch spots, announced that they were leaving their long-time home on Broadway and Fresno streets downtown. Owners Ian Cookson and Kim Sarabia said at the time that they were committed to staying in downtown Fresno, but since they cited construction and parking issues in the area as their impetus for closing, Libelula’s future generally, and its future in downtown specifically, were up in the air.

The Fresno Police Department arrested an off-duty Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent early Friday morning in the south Tower District. The police responded to several calls of a single gunshot being fired in the area around the intersection of East Dudley avenue and North Broadway street. The calls came around 3 a.m. Officers arriving at the scene found a man in handcuffs with a gunshot wound in his midsection.

A current Fresno City Councilmember, a rancher, a retired school administrator, a social worker and an education advocate are running to represent the Edison region to the southwest of Fresno Unified, a seat held by outgoing trustee Keshia Thomas since 2018. Miguel Arias, 48, has represented district three on the Fresno City Council since 2019 and is the current vice president.

An incumbent board trustee and two challengers are vying to represent Fresno Unified’s Area 4, one of three seats up for grabs on the school district’s board of trustees. Incumbent Genoveva “Veva” Islas was elected in 2018 and is the board’s current president. Islas has also served as executive director of Cultiva La Salud, a local nonprofit organization she founded in 2005 that focuses on public health equity.

A Fresno County Supervisor pledged $100,000 of his district’s operating budget to provide relief for the Shaver Springs community’s poor quality issues. It wasn’t immediately clear Tuesday how the money might be used. Tuesday’s motion by Supervisor Nathan Magsig, backed unanimously by the board, directed county staff to study possible solutions for the community’s poor water quality. Providing water bottles, and paying off debt from unpaid residential water and sewage costs were among the listed ways the money could be used.

Fresno County voters will decide on Nov. 3 whether to replace Measure C, the half-cent transportation sales tax that has paid for the county's freeways, road repairs and bus service since 1987 and expires next summer. Measure S — the "Fresno County Transportation Improvement Act" — would keep the same half-cent tax as Measure C for 30 more years, starting next summer.

A Fresno City councilmember and the mayor of Kerman are vying for the District 1 Fresno County Board of Supervisors seat. The winner will be one of three new supervisors the five-member board expects to see at the start of the new year. Mike Karbassi is a Fresno City Councilmember and small business owner. Karbassi has been a councilmember since 2019.

Two candidates are running in the Nov. 3 election to vote on a representative for District 4 in the Clovis City Council's first district elections. District 4 stretches across northeast Clovis, roughly north of Bullard Avenue and east of Sunnyside Avenue, out along Highway 168 past Harlan Ranch. It also includes the city's landfill island about five miles north of city limits.

Two longtime elected leaders in Fresno are in a rematch this November to decide who represents the city’s urban core, including southwest Fresno, downtown, Chinatown and parts of the Tower District. Joaquin Arambula, a state assemblymember representing Fresno and surrounding communities since 2016, finished first in the June primary with 2,117, or about 30%, of the vote. But a slim margin of fewer than 200 votes separated the assemblymember from Keshia Thomas, a Fresno Unified trustee who has represented the Edison High area since 2018.

A former federal prosecutor and a nonprofit leader, both of whom also serve on local school boards, face off a second time this November in the heated race to represent the Fresno City Council district home to Tower, Fresno High and the neighborhoods west of the 99 freeway. Naindeep Singh, executive director of Jakara Movement and a Central Unified School District trustee since 2018, finished first in the June 2026 primary with 4,535 votes in the four-way race, or about 38.7%.

Two candidates are vying to unseat incumbent Clovis City Councilmember Drew Bessinger in the race to represent northwest Clovis in the newly created District 5 in the Nov. 3. general election. District 5 covers northwest Clovis, roughly from Willow Avenue east to around Sunnyside Avenue, and from Highway 168 and Sierra Avenue north to Behymer Avenue. It includes the Buchanan High School area.

Two candidates are running in the Nov. 3 election to vote on a representative for District 1 in the Clovis City Council's first district elections. District 1 covers the city's southwest corner, roughly from Willow Avenue east to Clovis Avenue and from Highway 168 and Shaw Avenue south to Ashlan Avenue, with an arm reaching south toward Dakota Avenue. It includes some of the city's oldest neighborhoods.

Join F3 Local and local food entrepreneurs for a special consumer tasting experience featuring new products from Central Valley food businesses. You can taste flavored almonds from Eco-Family Farms and traditional homemade breads from Carmelita’s Pan Casero and many other products. Your feedback matters! Consumer testing helps food entrepreneurs better understand what people enjoy, test new ideas and make informed decisions about their products and business strategies.

Fresno County’s efforts to study privatizing their library system appear to be caught in a holding pattern. Not only does the move lack the required supermajority of the board to push any future efforts forward this year — they’ve now backed away from a public workshop, letting the new crop of supervisors take it up after the November election. Instead, county officials will post the study about the possible privatization move on their website later this fall, county spokesperson Sonja Dosti confirmed Tuesday.

Jamie Gomez’s work on a habeas petition helped free a man from immigration detention. But the case didn’t end when immigration enforcement released him. A district court granted a temporary restraining order that led to the man’s release. Gomez then continued representing him in immigration court, with support from Centro La Familia, where his case remains ongoing. The man was reunited with his family in Fresno, including his six U.S.

Money, construction, and a lawsuit are at the center of the latest public fight inside the State Center Community College District. State Center attorneys have been defending trustee Rob Fuentes against an anonymous complaint filed with the California Fair Political Practices Commission in July. The complaint, signed by the anonymous group the SCCCD Avengers, suggests Fuentes violated the Levine Act, a state law designed to prevent elected officials from weighing in on decisions involving major campaign donors, also known as “pay to play.”

Everything starts with a tractor. That’s the mantra of grape grower Albert Smith, whose family has been farming in southwest Fresno for generations.  “ Everything you do starts with a good machine,” Smith said. Purchasing new equipment, however, can be an exorbitant expense, especially for small-scale farmers like Smith. Modern tractors can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But what if growers could borrow or test out machines, rather than risk a big purchase?

After a vigil was held in August in front of Fresno High School to honor the death of Daniel Padilla, Kristina Holmes-McIntyre received an email from Superintendent Misty Her, who wanted to meet and listen to concerns from parents in the district. Holmes-McIntyre, a parent of three kids at Fresno Unified schools, has spent the last year rattling the cages of anyone at Fresno Unified who will listen.

An embattled Fresno Taqueria owner is absent from his flagship restaurant again.

From Chinatown to Old Armenian Town to Germantown and the diverse communities of West Fresno, they all have stories. Before the 99 or 41 freeways were built, these neighborhoods were places of culture, history and belonging for communities banned from living in the housing tracts being built on the north side of town through a good part of the 20th century.

The Fresno Bee laid off up to 40% of its workforce today as part of a nationwide sweep of papers in the McClatchy Media Company. The Bee's labor union lead worries the cuts are part of a push to have AI write Fresno's news.  Seven reporters and one editor were laid off Thursday, according to Josh Tehee, a Bee reporter and co-chair of the Bee News Guild.

When you grow up surrounded by farms, it’s kind of a no-brainer to want to buy your produce directly from the neighbors who grow it. Hence why so many born-and-raised Central Valley-ans have so many memories of farmers markets. Back in olden times (gather round, kids…), farmers markets were even cheaper than supermarkets, cutting out the middleman as they do.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, April 8, Aleksey Dvorkin sat down and wrote to the leadership of Granville Homes, one of the largest homebuilders in Fresno, to say that its financial statements could not be relied upon. Granville's reviewed reports for 2023 and 2024, he wrote, "may have been materially misstated." He was the company's controller, by his own claim the last certified public accountant at Granville, the man whose signature outside accountants were supposed to take as assurance that the books for some of Fresno’s biggest subdivisions were accurate.