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State legislature candidates vie for open local seats
election
ANGELINA MARTIN
Updated: Apr 17, 2018, 11:05 PM
Published: Apr 17, 2018, 11:13 PM

Over a month has passed since the candidate filing deadline for both the California State Senate and Assembly elections, bringing forward hopefuls vying to replace District 8 Senator Tom Berryhill and District 12 Senator Anthony Cannella, who are terming out of office, and just one challenger to face incumbent District 12 Assemblyman Heath Flora.

A top-two primary election for both positions will be held June 5 and will mark the first time that Senate District 8 and 12 will have open seats in eight years, with both Canella and Berryhill serving as Senators since 2010. Four candidates have filed to claim Berryhill’s soon-to-be open seat, and another four would like to take Cannella’s.

Fresno County Supervisor Andreas Borgeas (R-Fresno) announced his Senate District 8 candidacy in late January and has earned Berryhill’s endorsement through his work as both a Supervisor and educator.

“Count on me to fight against tax hikes, protect Proposition 13 and work to repeal the unfair $52 billion gas tax,” Borgeas said. “I am ready to solve California’s chronic water problems and lead efforts to provide more reliable water for our farms and families.”

Vallecito Union School Board Member Tom Pratt (D-Murphys) has also launched a campaign for Berryhill’s seat.

“I'm ready to take my experience to bring real leadership for this district to Sacramento,” Pratt said. “I'm running because it's time someone steps up for our community and listens to the residents of this district to address the many issues facing our region and state.”

Also running in Senate District 8 is Paulina Miranda (D-Fresno), who previously challenged Berryhill for the seat in 2014. Prior to that, Miranda ran in a special election for California State Senate District 16 but was defeated as well. Miranda is a businesswoman in Fresno and has served as treasurer of the Fresno Democratic Committee in the past.

Mark Belden of Calaveras County is running alongside Miranda, Pratt and Borgeas in the Senate District 8 race, but declines to claim a political party.

“You can call me an independent,” Belden said. “However, I would rather you call me independent of the two political parties.”

Belden lives in the small community of Railroad Flat with his wife in a home that he designed and built himself. He ran for Supervisor in Calaveras County in 1992, then ran for California State Senate District 5 unsuccessfully in 2012 and 2016.

“Your freedom to choose religion, education, sexual orientation, marriage, women’s choice or the right to bear firearms will always be paramount,” he said.

Senate District 12 voters will also have four options to choose from when voting in June.

 

Currently on her final year and term in the State Assembly, Anna Caballero (D-Salinas) is running for Senate District 12 with a platform that will focus on clean drinking water, quality education, housing and healthcare. Prior to her service as an Assembly member, Caballero served as a Councilmember and Mayor in Salinas.

“In each of these positions, I have been elected by and have represented rural, agricultural communities,” Caballero said. “We need someone who knows how to get things done and who will fight for rural California and for agricultural communities. I am that person. I would be honored to have your vote. You can count on me.”

Fowler Mayor Pro-Tem Daniel Parra is also running for Senate District 12. Parra lost a bitter 2016 primary battle with Emilio Huerta for the No. 2 spot in the 21st Congressional District race, which Republican David Valadao eventually won. In 2014, Parra lost the Fresno County Supervisorial District 4 race.

Johnny Tacherra (R-Fresno) hopes to become District 12’s Senator as well. He ran to represent California’s 16th Congressional District in 2016 and 2014 and his Facebook page describes his political views as “very conservative.” If elected, he hopes to work to decrease the size of the government and protect agriculture.

Madera County Supervisor and farmer Rob Poythress hopes to get rid of business regulations, ensure reliable water supplies and ensure citizens get “more” from their elected leaders if he wins the race for Senate District 12.

“As a county supervisor, I have seen how the big city politicians who run Sacramento raise our taxes but fail to give us our fait share of state resources,” Poythress said.

In the California State Assembly, all 80 seats are up for election in 2018. One candidate, Robert Chase, has filed to run against Assembly District 12 incumbent Heath Flora, while no candidates are opposing Assembly District 21 incumbent Adam Gray.

In an election where Democrats nationwide have promised to flip districts from red to blue, Flora is more concerned about voting for his constituents’ interests rather than party lines ad advises voters to do the same for themselves.

“My job is not necessarily to be Republican, it’s to represent the entire district. People who become focused on the letter behind my name are going to be disappointed in whoever they vote for. We have to represent everybody,” Flora said. “We have to try and be better about being educated on the issues and not be such partisan voters.”

Flora’s first year in office saw many victories, he said, like securing more land for farmers and the passage of his first bill, which created a firefighter apprenticeship program in the area. He sees national politics playing a huge role in the campaign trail this year, like issues with marijuana and immigration, but if reelected, hopes to focus most of his energy on creating a partnership between the Silicon and Central valleys to create more technological opportunities for the area’s agriculture industry.

Chase, an attorney from Modesto, has filed to run against Flora.

“I devoted my entire career to defend the Constitution and ensure that all people obtain justice,” he said.

Chase’s priorities, according to his campaign website, include fighting for tax fairness and equity, education, universal health care and holding government leaders accountable.

“We need to hold our government officials accountable for their actions,” he said. “Our democracy is stronger when everyone participates and no one group has an outsized influence on our politics.”

The top two vote getters in each race following the June 5 primary election will move on to the Nov. 6 general election.

 

 

 

 

 
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.
Published: Apr 2, 2025, 4:48 AM

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.