Buddy Mendes represents District 4 on the Fresno County Board of Supervisors, covering southern Fresno County including Selma, Reedley, and Coalinga, having served since 2015. He grew up on his family’s dairy farm in Riverdale and has operated the family farming business, growing cotton, wheat, safflower, corn, and almonds, since 1991. He has served as a trustee of the Riverdale Unified School District and on the boards of the Southwest Transportation Agency and Riverdale Public Utility District, and chairs the Fresno County Transportation Authority, which oversees Measure C transportation-tax funds. In October 2025, he announced he will not seek re-election in 2026 and endorsed a former county sheriff as his successor.
Mendes faced public allegations of racial bias over a 2021-22 county redistricting map, which he denied, telling reporters critics “can get sued by a ham sandwich.” In 2023, local Democrats publicly questioned an appearance of conflict after the county district attorney appeared in a radio advertisement for Mendes’s re-election campaign around the same time her office was scrutinized over other prosecutorial decisions; no findings against Mendes specifically resulted from that episode.
