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New chapter for Turlock economics
Mayor touts citys success in enticing new businesses in annual State of the City address
mayor pic
Turlock Mayor John Lazar delivered his 8th annual State of the City address on Wednesday, joining together with business leaders and city officials during the 2014 Turlock Chamber of Commerce breakfast. - photo by CARA HALLAM/The Journal

Turlock has a new way of doing business, making the local economy stronger each day, says Mayor John Lazar.

During the 2014 State of the City address given at the annual Turlock Chamber of Commerce breakfast held on Wednesday, Mayor Lazar highlighted several successes the City has made over the past year as Turlock continues to make strides in economic recovery.

“This is a new chapter in our community,” said Lazar, as he took the podium for his 8th State of the City address. “Turlock is becoming one of the most business friendly cities in California.”

Alongside a changing culture at City Hall, Lazar credited the tremendous efforts made by city staff as the backbone for the City’s recent accomplishments, including a streamlined permitting process that has helped secure a multitude of new businesses.

Noting the recent announcement of Hilmar Cheese Company’s new multi-million dollar milk powder processing plant coming to Turlock, the Mayor emphasized the continual progress witnessed in Turlock’s Regional Industrial Park as the City steadily draws in large industrial facilities.

“As our City Manager has stated before, Turlock is on track to becoming the Silicone Valley of the high-tech food processing industry,” said Lazar, as he discussed Turlock’s Blue Diamond facility and the plans announced by Hilmar Cheese. “He coined that phrase, and I think that it’s certainly true.”

Partnerships with organizations such as the Stanislaus Economic Development and Workforce Alliance and the Turlock Chamber of Commerce have also helped strengthen Turlock’s economic recovery, says Lazar, as they work together to support business development and job creation within the community. 

According to Lazar, developments in the business community are not the only achievements made by the City, as he acknowledged the successes made in other city departments such as public safety.

“The opening of the new public safety facility was made possible over a six year process, where the police and fire departments worked alongside city staff to develop a facility that was based on assessments to meet the current and future needs of Turlock,” said Lazar. “Additionally, crime prevention has seen an increase, as well as the number of neighborhood watch groups and attendance in our National Night Out.”

Theft related crimes have seen an increase in Turlock, however, as Lazar pointed out the capacity issues local jails are experiencing due to realignment. As a result, Lazar shared that the Turlock Police Department has increased their probation efforts to help offset the impacts from early inmate releases due to overcapacity.

Other prioritizations in the City of Turlock include water and transportation issues, as the Council considers various measures on both topics this year, including water rate increases and a possible countywide transportation tax.

“The drought is on the forefront of everyone’s concerns. Over my eight years as mayor, we’ve taken bold steps in water conservation, such as installing water meters that saw a significant reduction in water usage,” said Lazar. “Roads will also be a big issue in 2014, as we consider various options in the city, and a countywide transportation tax that would help stabilize road conditions. If the countywide transportation tax is approved, I will make sure that Turlock got its fair share of the funds.”

To echo Lazar’s sentiments, Stanislaus County Supervisor Vito Chiesa also touched on the road improvements and the countywide tax, as he advocated that it would help enhance the local economy.

“I’m not one for taxes, but I am strongly for this transportation tax,” said Chiesa. “As the county, we don’t create jobs, we make it so that we don’t get in the way of private enterprise. But what we can give you is quality and reliable transportation to get to and from work, and help boost the economy.”

Other areas highlighted by Chiesa included realignment, the County’s new Psychiatric Health Facility, water issues, unemployment, and healthcare.

“The county doesn’t win without the cities winning,” said Chiesa, noting Supervisor Jim DeMartini’s recent State of the County address.

Although there are still improvements to be made, the general consensus among all the speakers during the breakfast is that Turlock has lead the way for economic recovery within the region.

“Turlock is the prime example of private and public sectors being equally yoked for the purpose of economic growth,” said Stanislaus Alliance CEO Dave White. “It’s a great model not only for the rest of the county, but for the State….Be proud of who we are. We should love our community, and be proud of our community.”

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.