City of Fresno starts renaming three streets to Cesar Chavez Blvd despite lawsuit from residents

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- Portions of California Avenue, Ventura Avenue, and Kings Canyon Road in the city of Fresno have been renamed after the late labor leader Cesar Chavez.

However, some city residents filed a lawsuit against the name change-- claiming there was no community discussion about the change.

"Our city council would not listen and they would not hear people in our community," opponent of the name change and Fresno resident, Booker T. Lewis said.

The lawsuit is a second attempt at stopping the renaming.

Back in March, a judge denied a preliminary injunction against the name change, but the lawsuit was then amended and set to be re-heard June 18th.

Despite pushback, address change notifications were mailed out to those impacted at the end of May and the signs began to change June 12th-- a week before the new motion would be heard.

Opponents argue that there are other streets that should be named after Chavez, rather than ones that they say hold value in the community.

"Our concern, our issue is not with Cesar Chavez," Lewis explained. "Our concern, our issue is that these are streets that are over 100 years old in our city and when you have streets of that magnitude, with that kind of history they are woven into the fiber the history of our community."

The streets run through both city and county-owned land, but the county will not be changing the street names as county residents asked the board of supervisors not to follow suit with the city.

"Some of the things that they were raising up to the board of supervisors was with the changes the city is making with the streets, it's going to impact driver's licenses that they have, business names, registrations that they have with the state of California and that really is going to cost them a lot of money to make these changes," Fresno County Supervisor, Nathan Magsig said.

With the county not changing street names, there will be pockets along the 10-mile stretch that alternate names.

"There's potential for confusion to be caused since we don't have continuity with the names," Magsig said.

Action News reached out to the city council for comment, but did not hear back as of Wednesday afternoon.

The community's amended lawsuit is set to be heard August 1st.

In the meantime, street signs in the city of Fresno will continue to be replaced.

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