CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Little Clovis Throws a Curve at Its Big City Neighbor Fresno

Try as it might, with its Western motif and all-night poker dens and annual spring rodeo, Clovis was never much more than an appendage of Fresno.

Then in the 1980s, as its slumbering neighbor became mired in big city crime, poverty and red tape, Clovis began parading its small-town virtues--a nationally recognized school system, a can-do business spirit, a bigger and better rodeo.

But in its zeal to carve out a bold future and retain some flavor of a cowboy past, this bullish town of 57,000 may have outdone itself. Two weeks ago, the City Council adopted a controversial plan to build a baseball stadium, basketball arena, performing arts center, convention facilities and hotel on a corner of the Cal State Fresno campus in town.

The $130-million “University Village” project--which would duplicate facilities located just five miles south in Fresno’s struggling downtown--was cloaked in secret negotiations for months and unveiled only hours before the council vote.

Indeed, so many public powers--the university president, the mayor of Clovis, the future mayor of Fresno, the Fresno Bee, a dominant TV news station--helped keep the project concealed for different reasons that the whole mess has been dubbed, predictably, “Village-gate.”

“It’s a rather remarkable thing when you have so many players involved in one game and they’re able to keep it out of the public view for so long,” said David Provost, CSUF professor of political science. “You’re talking about most of the major institutions around here.”

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The plot began a year ago with a sports reporter for KFSN Channel 30 News who wanted to bring minor league baseball back to Fresno. “My Dad took me to Fresno Giant games at Euless ballpark,” said KFSN Sports Director Dan Taylor. “It was a great bonding thing.”

To lure a professional team, Fresno would need a new stadium. Taylor says his vision of a domed facility was rebuffed by Fresno officials. So he went next door to Clovis, “where they get things done.”

Clovis had been eyeing 69 acres of dairy and alfalfa land that belonged to CSUF’s agriculture department. The city’s vision of a hotel and convention center meshed with Taylor’s stadium idea and the university’s desire to turn the land into a cash cow.

It was at Taylor’s urging that all parties agreed to strict secrecy. They wanted to avoid the fate of the university’s football stadium, which had been delayed for years by nettling residents.

If this meant sitting on one of the biggest local sports stories, Taylor said, so be it. His bosses supported his role in the project, he said, and pledged that the news side would keep the story under wraps, too.

“Sure we’re journalists,” he said. “But in television, you’re encouraged to do something for the community. We’re marketed. I feel good about my role.”

Last January, Taylor brought in Fresno developer Bill Tatham Jr., whose family owned the Oklahoma Outlaws of the now-defunct U.S. Football League. But the 38-year-old Tatham had his own small conflict: He was serving as finance chairman and chief contributor for Jim Patterson, a religious broadcaster who was the leading candidate to become Fresno’s next mayor.

Patterson was campaigning on a platform to rebuild Fresno’s dying downtown. Revitalization hinged on keeping the city’s convention center and sports arena afloat while building a minor league ballpark nearby.

Tatham told Patterson about the competing Clovis project several weeks before his April 27 election, sources said, and “he liked the idea.” Patterson said he found out about the project only 10 days before and gave Tatham neither blessing nor rebuke.

“The information came to me in confidence,” Patterson said. “What was I supposed to do? Stand up and wave a bloody red shirt and say horror of horrors was coming? There was no firm proposal. It was in the feasibility stage.”

But as the project grew more firm, word still did not leak out. Not from John Welty, the CSUF president known for his candor. Not from the mayor or city manager of Clovis. Not from any of the 19 people who met at the Clovis Chamber of Commerce with a stadium and arena builder.

The Fresno Bee eventually got wind of the project but couldn’t get anyone to talk. At the time, Patterson was coming under increasing attack for his ties to developers. The news that Tatham was proceeding with a project possibly detrimental to Fresno--with candidate Patterson’s knowledge--might have changed the election.

By April 27--the day Patterson was elected mayor by a margin of 10 percentage points--the Bee had assembled the broad outlines. But Welty agreed to talk only if the newspaper would hold the story for six days. That’s when the project would be unveiled at a party to be followed by a vote of the Clovis City Council.

The Bee, the only daily paper in town, agreed in the interests of getting the whole story first. The paper voided the agreement the next day when a radio talk show host broke the story.

“Readers will remember being kept in the dark,” Executive Editor Beverly Kees told the paper’s ombudsman column last week. “To the extent that editorial decisions contributed to that, I’m sorry.”

Ombudsman Lynne Glaser examined the episode in a Sunday editorial page column: “Yes there are times to make news deals . . . but such was not the case here.”

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“Village-gate” shows no sign of flagging. Clovis and Fresno have all but dug trenches on their respective sides of Shaw Avenue. The day after Clovis voted to move forward with a study of the project, Fresno responded by threatening to kill Freeway 168, a downtown-to-Clovis artery that would run past the development.

The controversy has been a hot topic on radio talk shows and in letters-to-the-editor columns, as well as grist for widespread speculation and rumors. What did Patterson know and when did he know it? Did the Bee fail to pursue the story to ensure his victory?

One false rumor has Bee columnist Jim Wasserman, a critic of the project, signed on as a half-percent partner. “You mean me?” Wasserman said with a laugh. To avert further political damage to Patterson, Tatham has backed out as lead player in the project. Last week, after being sworn in as Fresno’s mayor, Patterson tried patch up relations with Clovis.

There has been talk of Clovis dropping the baseball stadium and scaling back the convention center. Mayor David Lawson isn’t so sure.

“We don’t take marching orders from Fresno. People who didn’t care about this project one bit are now unified. They’re saying, ‘When can we play baseball in Clovis?’ ”