Fresno County supervisors created an alternative to June’s Pride Month on Tuesday, approving Supervisor Garry Bredefeld’s resolution establishing June as “nuclear family month.”
Bredefeld’s original resolution declared a family of one husband and one wife “God’s perfect design,” and accused LGTQ groups of “promoting gender mutilation.”
“Today, we’re witnessing young, innocent, and impressionable children being inundated …that transgenderism is to be celebrated rather than treated by mental health professionals, … It’s not OK,” Bredefeld said on Tuesday.
After Bredefeld took out the gender mutilation part, the Board of Supervisors passed the resolution with no dissenting votes.
The county supervisor’s vote came after thousands poured into Fresno’s Tower District earlier this month with rainbow flags, which has been celebrated since 1990.
“This is not governance, this is hateful demagoguery,” said Madison Neil, a Fresno County resident. “This is one man’s obsession with a community that had never done him or anybody harm.”
Roughly 40% of households in Fresno County are led by single parents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau — a stat which many at the meeting used to say Bredefeld’s views did not reflect county communities.
“This resolution isn’t about honoring family. It’s about narrowing family, and in a county as richly diverse as Fresno, narrowing is not leadership,” said Alfred Alredredie.
A stream of support, however, filled in the supervisor’s meeting room.
“Even here there are alternatives to Pride Month,” said Jonathan Keller, president of the California Family Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center identified as a hate group in 2024.
“But ultimately today Fresno County can choose to light a candle instead of choosing darkness.”
“Families are the whole point of life…Charlie Kirk reminded us of this,” said another supporter at the meeting.
“I do believe there is a perfect design. I believe there is absolute truth,” said Supervisor Nathan Magsig.
The county received around 100 emails, the overwhelming majority opposed.
Supervisor Brian Pacheco said he supported family month—not just nuclear family month. “I would agree that in an ideal world we’d have one father, one mother, one family,” he said.
Valley fever up 1000% since 2008
Valley Fever is up 1,000% since 2008, according to data presented to the board.
The infection, which can cause lifelong, debilitating fatigue, even infecting the brain.
“We are seeing valley fever at a higher rate than in previous years,” said public health director Joe Prado.
The county’s 2024 rate of 105 cases per 100,000—about as common as cancer—marked roughly a 1,000% rise in a generation, up from 11 cases per 100,000 in 2008.
Fresno County sits in the heart of valley fever country—a cluster of South San Joaquin Valley counties, including Kern, Kings, Madera, and Tulare, that consistently post the state’s highest rates of the soil-borne fungal infection.
Supervisor Buddy Mendes found the new figures hard to believe, asking whether the figures were inflated by confused diagnoses from doctors. Prado said cases are doctor-confirmed.
“It could be something else similar to valley fever,” Mendes said. “But it gets treated as valley fever, and the treatment works.”
Rate hikes coming to about a dozen Fresno County communities
A dozen small communities around the county are scheduled for utility rate increases, according to a Board presentation.
The hikes will apply to the county’s community service areas (CSAs), which are independently operated districts, often near the Millerton Lake and Kings River area, where homeowners pool together tax dollars to pay for water and sewer.
Mendes recalled Tuesday that many CSAs were created in the 1980s and ’90s under Supervisor Deran Koligian, who “wanted control of stuff” and whom Mendes called “my favorite supervisor of all time.”
The districts could be created by a single vote from a land speculator, then pass water-system costs to future homeowners once the land was subdivided.
“Nobody ever talks you guys into CSAs anymore because they’re just horrible,” Mendes said.
Special districts manager Chris Bump said COVID relief funds were “a big benefit to a lot” of the CSAs, while Magsig noted “a lot of the systems that the county took control of back in 2010 aren’t operating as we hoped.”
Four CSAs raised rates in the past year; two more face Prop. 218 hearings this month—a West Fresno County farm and Auberry’s volunteer fire department.
A list of the 10 other areas with rate increase hearings due in the coming year can be found here.
Final hearing for new home kitchen law coming next meeting
Supervisors also held a first hearing on an ordinance that would allow residents to sell food cooked at home.
Residents would be capped at 30 meals a day, 90 a week, and $100,000 in annual sales.
Up until now, home kitchens have operated unregulated, according to the report submitted to the Board of Supervisors by the public health department.
What the county is approving is a two-year pilot, not a permanent program.
If the board adopts the ordinance after its second hearing on June 30, the Department of Public Health plans a ramp-up period for community education and inspection workflows before an official start date of Jan. 1, 2027, and the pilot would sunset on Dec. 31, 2028, absent further action.
Enforcement would be split—Public Health handling food-safety and retail food code oversight, with county and city code enforcement responding to nuisance complaints in whichever jurisdiction a kitchen sits.
A second hearing is set two weeks from now, on June 30.
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