Fresno City Council Gives Hearing Officers New Power to Cut Large Code Fines

Fresno’s City Council voted September 12 to let administrative hearing officers reduce certain code enforcement fines that exceed $100,000, a change city officials say could help the city actually collect penalties that would otherwise be thrown out entirely.

The ordinance, approved on the council’s consent calendar, amends the city code for the first time to give hearing officers discretion over fine amounts — something they’ve never had before.

Under the old rule, a hearing officer who found a six-figure code violation fine legally sound but still “excessive” had only one option: dismiss the entire penalty. Under the new rule, that same officer can now reduce the fine to any amount above $100,000 if they conclude the original total would be excessive.

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City Attorney Andrew Janz told the council the change could mean more fines are upheld rather than dismissed, which “may result in an increase of confirmed citations” the city can collect.

The Breakdown

• The city’s administrative hearing officers hear appeals from property owners and others who’ve been cited for code violations.
• Until now, the municipal code gave hearing officers no authority to lower a fine amount, even by a dollar. If the officer found the penalty legally justified but still excessive, the only option was to throw out the entire fine.
• The new ordinance creates a narrow reduction window: fines originally above $100,000 can now be lowered to any amount at or above that threshold, but only when the hearing officer finds the original amount would be “excessive.”
• Fines under $100,000 are not affected — hearing officers still have no discretion to reduce those.

What This Means for You

If you own property in Fresno and face a large code enforcement fine, this change gives the hearing officer a new middle ground — they can now uphold part of the penalty rather than dismiss it entirely if they think the city overreached on the dollar amount. For the rest of Fresno voters, it means the council just handed city officials a tool to collect more money from code cases that used to be all-or-nothing.

Whether that’s a win depends on whether you see those fines as necessary enforcement or as excessive penalties the old rule rightly forced the city to justify. The council made this call without separating it out for individual debate — it passed on the consent calendar.

What to Watch

The city attorney’s staff report frames this as a revenue opportunity, saying the change “may result in an increase of confirmed citations.” That’s the tell: the city expects to collect more money, not less, from code cases once hearing officers can reduce fines instead of dismissing them.

But the ordinance itself offers no detail about what makes a fine “excessive” or how hearing officers should weigh that against the underlying violation. The material gives no examples of past cases where a $100,000-plus fine was dismissed as excessive, no data on how often that’s happened, and no explanation of why $100,000 became the floor rather than any other figure. A voter weighing this council’s judgment needs to know: what cases drove this change, and who benefits most from making large fines harder to throw out entirely — the residents living next to neglected properties, or the city’s budget?

The ordinance also leaves fines under $100,000 untouched — hearing officers still can’t reduce those by even a dollar, no matter how disproportionate they find the penalty. That means the “excessive fine” problem the city attorney described only gets a solution when the fine is large enough. Is that because smaller fines are never excessive, or because the city doesn’t want to open that door? The material doesn’t say, and the council didn’t ask before voting yes.