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City looks at ending police K-9 program
Police, fire asked to make over $900,000 in cuts
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The City of Turlock will face a less severe budget deficit than originally estimated, but cuts still need to be made. On Thursday, the Turlock City Council budget subcommittee took a look at the police and fire budgets, entertaining suggestions that could see Turlock’s K-9 program cut.

The budget gap has fallen from initial projections — dropping from $5.4 million to $4.3 million in 2010-11 and from $6 million to $4 million for the next fiscal year. Those savings come from a reduction in department costs for self-insured workman’s compensation and unemployment insurance, as the subcommittee learned Tuesday it had overfunded those accounts in past years.

Despite the savings already found, Turlock still needs to cut about 16 percent of its budget to break even.

 “That has immediate material and ongoing change in the gap we are facing, but it does not solve that gap,” said City Manager Roy Wasden.

This year’s $4.3 million deficit does not include a line item for unexpected expenditures, which have averaged about $1 million in past years. The budget also does not include equipment replacement savings, which have also been foregone for the past two cash-strapped years.

“We know we’re going to have to replace equipment and that’s the boogeyman sitting out on the ledge right now that no one wants to talk about,” said Councilman Ted Howze, who sits on the committee.

Turlock has about $16 million in reserves — up from a projected $12 million, again due to the overfunding of self-insurance accounts — but hopes to only use about $2 million in reserves this year and next as it approaches a sustainable, break-even budget by the end of 2012.

Police Chief Gary Hampton proposed a relatively status quo budget for the police department, which has already cut $2 million from its operating costs in the past two years. Five officers were eliminated in 2009, while a further four officers were removed from the general fund in 2010, instead funded by a federal grant.

But $87,000 in additional cuts were proposed for this year, including an elimination of the Turlock K-9 program.

Turlock currently spends $47,000 annually to maintain two police dogs.

“The feasibility of continuing to operate the program at the $47,000 does not appear to be cost effective for us,” Hampton said.

Turlock’s dogs are nearing the end of their service lives, which would force the costly process of replacing the dogs and training the new canine police officers. The dogs just aren’t used often enough to justify the cost, Hampton said.

The reduction would also save the police department $100,000 in vehicle replacement costs by repurposing the two current K-9 cars into supervisor vehicles, reducing the police fleet by two vehicles. The supervisor vehicles are due to be replaced because of high mileage.

Howze appreciated the cuts proposed, but asked Hampton to return with suggestions to cut an additional $600,000 from the police department budget.

Over 90 percent of the police department budget is personnel costs, leaving little wiggle room. Of a $17 million budget, only about $450,000 is discretionary, Hampton said, and that’s currently used for everything from road flares to report forms and repairing broken chairs.

Hampton said the department couldn’t cut sworn officers and still be eligible for federal assistance. A federal grant currently pays for four officers. He estimated that six or seven non-sworn officers would need to be cut to realize those savings. The essential services those non-sworn officers currently perform would then have to be assumed by higher-paid sworn officers, reducing patrol levels.

“It will absolutely result in the reduction of services,” Wasden said.

The city remains in negotiations with the police union over possible cost savings which would not require staffing reduction. Hampton said as much as $250,000 in savings was currently under discussion.

The Turlock City Fire Department also hopes to achieve some of their savings through labor group negotiations, with a plan in progress that could cut costs by 9 percent without cutting employees. That’s on top of a 4 percent reduction already realized from self-insurance cost reductions.

But even with the 4 percent savings, the fire department must find some way to save at least another $300,000 if those labor negotiations fall through, according to Howze.

“Labor negotiations may handle a good part of this, but we still need to hear this out,” Howze said.

The fire department did not prepare such a cost-savings alternative for Thursday’s meeting. But a prepared 8 percent reduction — about twice the $300,000 figure —would call for the elimination of four firefighters, one manager, and the dismissal of all part-time staff. Additionally, the proposal suggested eliminating some training, medical assistance and psychological evaluations.

 

To contact Alex Cantatore, e-mail acantatore@turlockjournal.com or call 634-9141 ext. 2005.

Costa, Gray propose congressional bill to address critical physician shortage in rural areas
Costa and Gray
San Joaquin Valley congressional members Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, left, and Rep. Adam Gray, D-Merced, are shown discussing their bill H.R. 2106 in a virtual press conference on Tuesday.

BY TIM SHEEHAN

CV Journalism Collaborative

Two San Joaquin Valley congressional representatives have introduced a bill that could help address the vast shortage of doctors in the region, particularly in underserved areas. 

Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, and Rep. Adam Gray, D-Merced, say the Medical Education Act would, if passed, establish a program of grants to support expanded medical education programs in underserved areas of the nation.

The Valley could be one of the key areas that would benefit from the legislation. California has about 90 primary care doctors per 100,000 residents statewide, the federal Health Resources & Services Administration reported in November 2024. 

That’s more than the ratio in some states, and less than some others. The nationwide ratio is about 84 doctors per 100,000 residents.

But in the San Joaquin Valley, home to about 4.3 million people, doctors are much more scarce – about 47 primary care physicians per 100,000 residents, according to Dr. Tom Utecht, chief medical officer at the Fresno-based Community Health System.

That number is “a little over half of what is necessary to take care of a population,” Utecht said Tuesday in a video press conference. “We have the lowest physicians-per-capita rate in all of California, in the San Joaquin Valley.”

Introduced last month, the Medical Education Act is something of a placeholder for the time being until the Congressional Research Service can weigh in with financial estimates of what is needed in different parts of the country, Costa said. 

A companion version was introduced in March in the U.S. Senate by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-West Virginia, and Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Los Angeles.

At this point, the legislation does not specify how much money will ultimately be sought or how grants would be structured.

Costa said the shortage of doctors in the region “is combined with language barriers, cultural barriers and distances … and that would really go for rural parts of our country regardless where folks live.”

“If you live in rural areas, it’s just more difficult to have access to good quality health care,” he added.

Costa said the legislation, if it can survive a Republican-controlled House and Senate and a Republican president, “would be transformative because it would invest expanded resources to minority-serving institutions and colleges located in rural and underserved areas to establish schools of medicine and osteopathic medicine.”

The bill would also create an avenue for more historically Black colleges and universities, as well as Hispanic-serving institutions, to establish medical education programs, Costa said.

Gray noted that when he was in the state Legislature, he and colleagues “worked to get hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to expand the UC Merced campus, to ultimately secure the funding to put the first medical education building up on campus.”

Gray added that the UC San Francisco’s medical education program in Fresno “is an important part of creating the (medical) workforce of the future for the valley, but more importantly, solving this access to care issue that plagues Valley communities.”

At UC Merced, director of medical education Dr. Margo Vener said there has been a surge of interest in the university’s program that funnels students through an undergraduate program for their bachelor of science degree through a medical school degree in collaboration with UC San Francisco.

“All the students that we are enrolling are from the Valley and for the Valley, because they want to really make a difference in promoting health in their communities,” Vener said. That, she added, is likely to eventually translate to those would-be doctors to stay in the Valley to practice medicine.

“The data suggests that two factors really strongly influence where physicians stay to practice,” Vener said. “One of them is where they’re from, which, of course, is why we’re recruiting students from the Valley for the Valley just to stay (and) be doctors for their community. And the other factor is where you went to residency. Those are the two biggest drivers.”

That’s something that was underscored by Dr. Kenny Banh, assistant dean of undergraduate education at UCSF Fresno. “Regional campuses such as UC Merced and UCSF Fresno not only grow doctors, but they take those doctors, physicians and medical students from their communities in the region, and train them in those regions to go back to be physicians in those areas,” he said.

While the costs of the Costa-Gray legislation are yet to be determined, Banh said there are also costs associated with doing nothing to expand medical education.

“There’s health care costs, regardless of how we work it, if we don’t invest in having an adequate supply of physicians,” Banh said. “There’s a cost on the human that can’t access care” and doesn’t get to a doctor until a condition is not treatable “or with significantly worse morbidity and mortality outcomes.”

“And that cost is borne by health systems taxpayers, one way or the other,” Banh added.

But even if the Costa-Gray bill were to pass in this congressional session, the payoff of home-grown medical schools producing a bumper crop of physicians in the Valley or other deprived parts of the country would be years down the road.

“I think it’s really important to understand why we need to invest now for our future, because it takes so darn long” for a student to go from being a college freshman to a practicing doctor, surgeon or specialist, UC Merced’s Vener said. 

After a four-year bachelor’s degree, a student must then complete four years of medical school, which in turn is followed by a residency of three to five years.

“Then often people will do a fellowship to become, for example, a cardiologist or a gastroenterologist or something like that,” she added.

“If you start investing in just one student now, it’s going to take such a long time before they really are there to take care of you at that moment when you need them to be your gastroenterologist, your cardiologist, your emergency physician, or, dare I say, your family doctor,” Vener said.

That, she said, is why it’s also necessary to expand residency programs that can attract would-be physicians into the region in hopes that they will remain once they complete their training. “We need those doctors now, and that’s why this effort is important,” Vener said, “because this is what will both inspire people to stay, but also inspire people to really come and embrace the communities and serve them.”

In a related development, state Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria, D-Fresno, recently introduced a bill for the University of California system to develop a comprehensive funding plan for expanding the current SJV Prime+ BS-to-MD partnership between UC San Francisco and UC Merced, with the goal of transitioning the program to a fully independent medical school operated by UC Merced.

“We have seen firsthand the impacts of medical workforce shortages throughout the Central Valley,” Soria said in a prepared statement. “AB 58 would help ensure the Legislature is equipped with the information needed to secure appropriate funding for the medical education provided for our community at UC Merced.”

— Tim Sheehan is the Health Care Reporting Fellow at the nonprofit Central Valley Journalism Collaborative. The fellowship is supported by a grant from the Fresno State Institute for Media and Public Trust. Contact Sheehan at tim@cvlocaljournalism.org.