Miguel Arias represents District 3 on the Fresno City Council and serves as Council Vice President, having reached his term limit at the end of 2026. Raised in Mendota as the child of farmworkers, he studied criminology and Chicano/Latino studies at Fresno State before working as a legislative aide to Congressman Cal Dooley, later serving as a Mendota Unified School District trustee, chief of staff to a Fresno councilmember, and a Fresno Unified School District administrator before his 2018 election to the council. He points to more than $2 billion secured for neighborhood rebuilding and 28 new affordable and market-rate housing projects, including the transformation of the Motel Drive corridor to house homeless residents, as accomplishments of his tenure.
Arias was one of four council members accused in 2022 by colleague Garry Bredefeld of misusing district operational budgets, in Arias’s case including a roughly $66,000 invoice to a graphic designer for promotional materials; Arias and his colleagues said the spending followed the normal, lawful city budget process and had been reviewed by the city attorney’s office without finding of misuse. In February 2026, Arias publicly accused Council President Mike Karbassi and city staff of colluding to schedule two controversial land-use items together in a way he said benefited industrial developers, calling the arrangement “dirty.” He has also been a frequent critic of Mayor Jerry Dyer’s infrastructure funding proposals for south Fresno and, in July 2026, criticized an attempt by Dyer to fast-track a charter amendment allowing a third mayoral term as an effort to “change our constitution on three days’ notice.”
