Gorging at the Public Trough

While covering the recent special election win by Brandon Vang to the Fresno City Council District 5 to replace newly elected Fresno County Supervisor Luis Chavez, I dug into the campaign finances of Vang’s main opponent, Chavez’s wife, Elizabeth Jonasson Rosas, a trustee on the Fresno Unified School Board.

There, laid out in black and white, was a blatant violation of campaign contribution limits. While her $120,000 failed effort confined its spending to printing and distributing yard signs and mailers, two separate—supposedly independent political action committees—spent another $85,000 on digital advertising and canvassing (see “Endorsements ‘Sweep’ Fails Jonasson Rosas,” April 2025, Community Alliance).

Behind the scenes, things were even worse. Local campaign consultant Alex Tavlian, it has since been reported by Fresnoland’s Julianna Morano, sent a political hit piece to District 5 voters targeting Vang and his wife of 32 years and tried to hide its source. Improper and incomplete paperwork was filed with the City of Fresno, an amendment later submitted and a $1,000 fine issued by City Attorney Andrew Janz, the proverbial drop in the bucket.

But Tavlian was not paid by the Jonasson campaign for any services. Apparently someone other than Jonasson, whose campaign filings also show no money spent on polling, realized she was in danger of not just losing to Vang but of him surpassing the 50% voter support mark and avoiding a runoff, which he did. Tavlian, and presumably others, decided in early March to indulge in some very dirty politics.

What remains unanswered is who paid for the hit piece and what motivated Tavlian to send it? Might it have been the promise of indirect repayment? There’s no proof of such, but a $100,000 contract was signed in December between the City of Fresno and a Tavlian company, Park West Associates, to conduct community outreach in District 5 on behalf of outgoing City Council Member Chavez despite his imminent departure.

The money was to come from the district’s discretionary budget. Clearly, confidence was high that Jonasson was going to win and honor the contract. Besides, she needed the help, having told the Fresno Bee that she planned to serve part-time on the Council at $123,000 annually in order to keep her $150,000 per year job as the Westlands Water District’s deputy manager of external affairs. (Westlands is a quasi-governmental agency subject to state transparency laws.) Her spouse Chavez now pulls down $216,000 annually as a county supervisor, a nearly $100,000 raise in his annual income as a City Council member.

Chavez likes Tavlian. Apparently, they all do. In 2022, the Fresno Bee’s Tim Sheehan reported Chavez and his fellow City Council members voted unanimously to throw a $450,000 contract Tavlian’s way under another of his entities, Local Government Strategic Consulting.

Weirdly, the Council was convinced it would be legal for them to spend taxpayer dollars on a “public education” campaign during an election. The threat of legal action stopped the misguided venture, but local veterans were left to pay the cost; they could have benefited significantly had Measure M gained voter approval and a veterans district established in Fresno like that of Clovis.

The hit piece on Vang in March was similar to one sent last year by the Mike Karbassi campaign, which paid $45,000 to Tavlian-owned Park West Associates for “campaign literature, mailings, signs, text messages, etc.,” giving full meaning to “etc.” Heavily racist in its overtone and designed to instill fear of Black people, its target was Karbassi’s opponent, fellow Democrat Mathew Gillian.

So it came as no surprise when Karbassi rose to Jonasson’s defense shortly before the election as the scandal broke, and in his usual bombastic style accused her accusers of dirty politics. It was Trump-level gaslighting.

Tavlian’s fondness for public funding extends to Madera County. According to a complaint filed in July by a group called Sierra Citizens, his Local Government Strategic Consulting firm received $60,000 in taxpayer dollars to work on renewal of Measure T, the countywide transportation sales tax. He is accused of taking advantage of his publicly funded position to circumvent a promised public process and of not disclosing his role as a paid campaign consultant to Madera County Supervisor Jordan Wamhoff.

The complaint alleges that “days after the May 24, 2024 public release of the Expenditure Plan developed by the [Measure T Renewal] Steering Committee and the ordinance prepared by staff and others, the sub-contracted consultant, Alex Tavlian, commandeered those two documents. He recruited five people as co-signers of the paperwork, all living within a half mile of each other in a new housing development. He also created a new Political Action Committee funded by a secret LLC, FrontPoint Partners LLC, formed in Las Vegas, and he personally filed the paperwork with the County for the so-called citizens’ initiative.”

Rounding out Tavlian’s activities is his San Joaquin Valley Sun website where he is promoting his latest campaign customer, Fresno City Council candidate Nav Gurm. Like Jonasson Rosas before him, Gurm is the Democratic Party establishment candidate with many endorsements. He’s running on the familiar “Fresno brain drain” theme, according to an opinion piece published last September by Tavlian and repeated in October by the Fresno Bee. 

Gurm is running to replace his former boss at City Hall, Nelson Esparza. He and Tavlian are a good fit. Gurm put his name to a Tavlian-style hit piece leveled at me a few years ago, largely for some spoof videos I produced of Esparza on the topics of homelessness and lying and for a long blog I wrote about Esparza’s ugly start in politics.

To silence me, Esparza and Gurm then led the Fresno County Democratic Central Committee to ban this publication from their office and pull their advertising unless I was dropped from its pages (see “Local Dems Reiterate Opposition to Free Speech,” Community Alliance, March 2025).

Here’s hoping law school has taught Gurm how to follow the rules, but you can judge a candidate by the company they keep. And it doesn’t look promising.