Two candidates vie for Clovis City Council’s southwest district seat

Mason Magsig, 22, and Malina Sayasane are running to represent District 1 on the Clovis City Council in the Nov. 3 election — the city’s first district-based council race.

District 1 covers Clovis’s southwest corner, from Willow Avenue east to Clovis Avenue and Highway 168 south to Ashlan Avenue, reaching toward Dakota Avenue. It includes some of the city’s oldest neighborhoods.

Magsig, a commercial lender and the son of Fresno County Supervisor Nathan Magsig, works with businesses across the Valley. He grew up walking precincts for local campaigns, starting with his father’s 2016 supervisor race. He spent nearly four years working at Scoops, Soups & More in Old Town while attending Clovis Community College and Fresno State, and is finishing a business degree online.

Sayasane moved to the Fresno area in high school, graduated from McLane, and earned a political science degree from Fresno State. She spent years with Fresno Police Department as a cadet, community service officer, and crime analyst before taking a GIS planning job at Fresno City Hall. She’s lived in Clovis for more than a decade on the city’s western edge — “right across the street from my house is Fresno” — and chairs the Winery Warriors neighborhood watch group.

Both candidates say public safety is their top priority. Both supported Measure Y, a sales tax increase to rebuild police staffing.

Magsig says the city needs to pay for public safety by attracting more industrial and blue-collar businesses — HVAC companies, construction firms, service businesses — particularly in the north and east, rather than raising taxes. “Politicians talk all the time about public safety, but they don’t talk about how they’re going to pay for it,” he said. Business clients tell him “we would love to be in the city of Clovis, but there’s nowhere for us to go.”

Sayasane says the city grew faster than it hired the needed staff. “In 2019, I talked about that. I said, we are expanding at a quick rate and we’re not filling and hiring the police and fire to follow that expansion.” She says growth decisions need to start with public safety: “Before we start anything, we’re always planning, well, where would we put a police station if we’re doing this or where would we put fire.”

Both candidates say District 1 has been underserved. Magsig says it has the city’s lowest household income and needs investment: “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” Sayasane says at-large elections left the area behind: “All of the council members live very north, in the northern part of Clovis. And not to say that that was a bad thing, but sometimes when things are happening in Clovis, it felt like our area was left out.”

On what they’d want voters to see after a first term:

Magsig says streetlights where there aren’t any, because “creating light at night mitigates crime more than people realize.” He wants more events in Old Town — “the heart of the city” — and sidewalk, pothole, and street repairs.

Sayasane wants canal trails connecting District 1 to the rest of Clovis, more green space and shade along the Willow corridor to mark the transition from Fresno into Clovis, and big trucks off residential streets near Old Town. She also wants the city to fix broken sidewalks instead of requiring elderly homeowners to submit repair plans and pay for work themselves.

Neither candidate supports building a homeless shelter in Clovis. Magsig says he’d rather the city support nonprofits like the Fresno Mission: “Government is not great at fixing issues. The smaller the government is, the better.” Sayasane says Clovis is “still too small” for its own shelter infrastructure and should help pay for Fresno’s services instead.

Sayasane says the city needs to hold affordable housing property managers accountable for crime at their complexes. She pointed to Butterfly Gardens, an affordable housing development where “unfortunately, there has been a lot of crime associated with the people living there,” and says residents at another complex are dealing drugs to homeless people. Her model: fine property owners until they evict tenants who cause repeated problems, the way Fresno PD’s Northwest district did. “The city has a lot of power. They do. They can implement fines.”

On rising costs from Clovis’s recent water rate increase and the Measure Y sales tax: Magsig says the water increase was steep because the city went so long without one — since 2008. “Life right now is already super expensive. I don’t see another water rate hike happening.” Sayasane says rising costs come with a growing city, but wants Clovis to look into community choice energy to let residents shop for power instead of using only PG&E. “If there’s something I can do by help mitigating one cost to help them afford other things, that’s something I’m willing to do.”

As of Sept. 30, Magsig’s top campaign donors include Nathan Magsig ($1,000), Fresno County Sheriff John Zanoni ($500), developer Terance Frazier ($500), and Granville Homes ($1,000). Sayasane’s campaign filing from Sept. 28 showed no money raised.

The Breakdown

• This is Clovis’s first district-based City Council election — District 1 covers the city’s southwest corner, including its oldest neighborhoods.
• Two candidates are running: Mason Magsig, 22, a commercial lender and son of County Supervisor Nathan Magsig, and Malina Sayasane, a GIS specialist (a mapping and planning professional) who worked as a crime analyst for Fresno PD.
• Both say public safety is their top priority and that District 1 has been underserved under at-large elections.
• Magsig wants to fund public safety by attracting industrial and service businesses rather than raising taxes; Sayasane wants the city to plan for police and fire infrastructure before approving new development.
• Neither supports building a homeless shelter in Clovis; Sayasane wants property managers fined for crime at affordable housing complexes.
• Election day is Nov. 3.

What This Means for You

If you live in Clovis District 1 — the southwest corner from Willow to Clovis Avenue, Highway 168 to Ashlan and toward Dakota — this is the first time you’ll vote for a council member specifically representing your neighborhood instead of voting citywide. Both candidates say the district has been left behind under at-large elections, but they differ on how to fund public safety as Clovis grows, whether fines and evictions are the right tool for managing affordable housing, and how aggressive the city should be about bringing in new business versus planning infrastructure first.

Your vote on Nov. 3 decides which candidate takes the seat — one of five council members who vote on zoning, development approvals, tax measures, and police and fire budgets.

What You Can Do

The election is Nov. 3. If you’re a registered voter in Clovis City Council District 1, your ballot will include this race.

What to Watch

Both candidates frame public safety as their top concern, but the real policy difference is in how they’d pay for it and what they’d trade off to get there.

Magsig’s plan — attract more industrial and service businesses to grow the tax base without raising taxes — depends on businesses actually wanting to locate in Clovis and on zoning decisions that make room for them, neither of which a single council member controls. It also raises the question of what the city gives up to attract those businesses: tax breaks, expedited approvals, infrastructure commitments that could compete with the sidewalk and streetlight repairs he says District 1 needs.

Sayasane’s emphasis on planning infrastructure before approving development sounds prudent, but the real tension is in her stance on affordable housing. She wants property managers fined until they evict tenants who cause repeated police calls — a model she says worked in Fresno PD’s Northwest district.

But that approach treats affordable housing as a problem to be managed through enforcement rather than a benefit to the community, and it puts the burden of policing on property managers rather than asking why a community needs so much affordable housing in the first place or what happens to tenants who get evicted under threat of fines.

Who benefits from this policy? Property managers avoid fines; neighbors see fewer service calls. Who suffers? Tenants facing eviction, potentially without due process, based on police-call volume rather than a lease violation or a conviction. Does making it easier to evict low-income tenants actually reduce crime, or does it just push the same people somewhere else?

A broader question worth asking: both candidates say District 1 has been underserved. If that’s true, is the answer more streetlights and canal trails, or is it a council member willing to ask why Clovis let one part of the city fall behind in the first place — and who benefited while it did?