Update: Bredefeld, Chavez maintain leads in Fresno County supervisor races

There remain more than 49,000 votes left to count across Fresno County from last week's general election , but the leads that Fresno City Councilmembers Garry Bredefeld and Luis Chavez hold over incumbents on the Fresno County Board of Supervisors appear to be holding strong.

Bredefeld is challenging incumbent Supervisor Steve Brandau for the District 2 seat to represent northeast and northwest Fresno on the county board, while Chavez campaigned in southeast and southwest Fresno against incumbent Supervisor Sal Quintero for the District 3 seat .

In the latest vote totals released Thursday evening, Bredefeld has received 34,865 votes compared to Brandau's 28,996 – an advantage of 5,869 votes, or 9.2 percentage points.

Bredefeld has maintained a lead over Brandau in each update of results since Election Night, and his percentage of the vote total has remained relatively stable in the range of 54% to 56%.

Bredefeld, a retired clinical psychologist, served on the Fresno City Council representing northeast Fresno from 1997 to 2001, and then two more terms from 2017 through now.

Bredefeld, who is term-limited from seeking re-election to the City Council, campaigned heavily for the county's District 2 seat with a promise to bring transparency and change to the county Board of Supervisors, which he has criticized repeatedly as a "good old boys club."

The sometimes-combative Bredefeld complained about the county not immediately going public last year with revelations of a clandestine Chinese-owned laboratory in a Reedley warehouse, as well as the board's approval in 2023 to move a needle and pipe program for drug addicts from a mobile unit in central Fresno into the county Department of Public Health's lobby on Fulton Street in downtown Fresno.

Brandau and Bredefeld served as colleagues for several years on the Fresno City Council, often representing a solid pair of conservative votes on many issues before Brandau was elected to the county board in 2019. Brandau was seeking a second full four-year term on the board.

Chavez, who is midway through his second full term on the Fresno City Council, has 15,898 votes in Tuesday evening's update, compared to 12,539 for Quintero. That represents an advantage of 3,359 votes, or 11.7 percentage points, over Quintero.

Like the District 2 race, the percentage of the votes for Chavez has been stable since Election Night, increasing slightly from 54.8% on Nov. 5 to 55.6% Tuesday evening.

Chavez and Quintero are both political figures long familiar to south Fresno voters. Quintero served on the Fresno City Council for two terms from 1994 to 2002. In 2010, when his successor was prevented by term limits from running again, Quintero ran and won a return ticket to the City Council. He ran for the Board of Supervisors in 2016, winning the seat midway through his City Council term.

Chavez who was Quintero's chief of staff at Fresno City Hall, won the 2016 special election to replace Quintero. He was re-elected to full four-year terms in 2018 and 2022. He previously won a four-year term on the Fresno Unified school board in 2012.

Chavez said he expects to work on the homeless issues facing both the city and county of Fresno, describing District 3 as "the most urbanized district we have in the county."

"I want to chip away at the stigma that the city and county have an adversarial relationship," he said. "Residents don't distinguish between the county on one side of the street and the city on the other."

One issue on which the pair have disagreed is on the renaming of Kings Canyon Road/Ventura Street/California Avenue which span east-west across south Fresno. As a member of the City Council, Chavez was among the sponsors in 2023 of changing the name of the 10-mile stretch to Cesar Chavez Boulevard, riling residents and businesses and spurring a still-pending lawsuit to reverse the change.

Quintero, as a member of the county Board of Supervisors, voted against applying the name change to portions of the roads that are within the jurisdiction of Fresno County rather than the city of Fresno.