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Three want to be sheriff
Alanis, Dirkse, Letras seek Christiansons job
Lt. Jeff Dirkse
Jeff Dirkse - photo by Photo Contributed
Jeff Benziger
Turlock Journal
Updated: Feb 22, 2018, 8:43 PM
Published: Feb 22, 2018, 8:45 PM

Sheriff Adam Christianson announced last year that he will not seek re-election, an action which has since attracted the candidacies of three. The sheriff, however, has thrown his support behind Jeffrey Dirkse, a lieutenant with the Sheriff's Department.

Stanislaus County voters will choose the next sheriff on June 5. The filing period for candidacies ends on March 14.

Others running are Sheriff's Deputy Tom Letras, a Ceres native, and Sgt. Juan Alanis, a 23-year veteran of the department.

Dirkse joined the Sheriff's Department in 2007 as a patrol deputy, and was promoted to sergeant, detective and now lieutenant. He became Patterson's chief in May 2015 as part of the county's contract with that city to provide police services.

Endorsing Dirkse are 17 sheriffs in the state and the Ceres and Modesto Police Officers Associations, Stanislaus County Sheriff's Supervisors Association, Stanislaus County Sworn Management Association and Stanislaus Sworn Deputies Association.

"I believe Chief Dirkse has the grounded principles and calm decision-making abilities to become the 22nd sheriff of Stanislaus County," Christianson said.

Dirkse, 45, a West Point graduate, a former Army Ranger and National Guard commander who served for nearly a year in Operation Iraqi Freedom, grew up in the Turlock area and graduated from Turlock High School. He, his wife and their three children live on a 40-acre almond ranch east of Denair once owned by his parents.

He joined the Sheriff's Department in 2007 as a patrol deputy and became Patterson's chief in May 2015 as part of the county's contract with that city to provide police services.

At the sheriff's department, Dirkse has been a STING detective, a rural crimes detective, a patrol sergeant and an internal affairs sergeant. He also supervised the Explorers for several years and developed an intern program to bring high school graduates into the department at age 18.

"One of my main goals as chief is to develop my sergeants to replace me," he said. "It takes active work by leaders to create, train and mentor the next generation."

Dirkse took a leave from the department in 2010-12 when he was mobilized in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

"I have a broad background in leadership over the last 25 years," Dirkse said. "I led groups of up to 120 soldiers in multinational settings. I've also run my own ag business and understand the needs and desires of private citizens and business owners. I have been a police chief more than two years in a vibrant and growing community.”

Stanislaus County Sheriff's Deputy Tom Letras, a 1990 graduate of Ceres High School, took on his boss, Sheriff Adam Christianson, in the 2014 election. That campaign blasted Christianson as a bully who intimidates his employees.

Letras began his career in 1997 after being hired by Sheriff Les Weidman to work as a custody deputy in the Sheriff's detention facilities. Letras has served as the Public Information Officer, a patrol deputy, gang detective and many other assignments.

Letras worked as a campus supervisor at CHS, and Mae Hensley and Blaker Kinser junior highs. He joined the Sheriff's Department's jail custody division in 1997. He served a while as a public information officer in 2001. He became a patrol deputy in 2005 after attending the academy and for 18 months served as a gang detective until the department's gang unit was dissolved because of budget issues. Letras' job then took him to transporting inmates. When Deputy Bob Paris was murdered during a Modesto eviction attempt gone awry in April 2012, Letras volunteered to serve evictions.

Letras said he would continue the policy enacted by Christianson of giving out permits for concealed weapons permits for those who demonstrate knowledge of weapon safety and pass a background check. He said no one should "rely on government for personal safety."

Alanis has spent 23 years with the Sheriff's Department and served as Patrol Watch Commander, acting Police Chief in Waterford and Hughson, a patrol sergeant, Hughson Contract City Supervisor and the Supervisor of the Special Vehicle Operations Unit. He worked in the patrol division, as a courthouse bailiff, member of SWAT and SWAT support, a Crimes Against Children detective assigned to the Family Justice Center, a School Resource Officer and was the Deputy Sheriff's Association Vice President.

"It's time for a new generation and fresh ideas to make Stanislaus County a greater place to work, live, visit and play," Alanis said on his website. He pledges to be more involved in communities, bring back school resource officers, community policing, and more juvenile delinquency prevention programs.

"I will embed community policing and problem solving throughout the agency. As your sheriff, I will start with building collaborative community partnerships by hosting face to face community meetings."

Alanis said he believes all law-abiding citizens should have the right to carry a concealed firearm "without burdensome restrictions and will defend to the fullest the second amendment of the Constitution." He pledges to lobby lawmakers in Washington and Sacramento "to ensure every citizens' Second Amendment rights are protected as well as recognizing concealed carry reciprocity in all 50 states."

He also advocates "enhancing and streamlining the concealed weapon permit process to provide equal opportunities for all law-abiding citizens and I will diligently work towards providing free educational opportunities to our citizens who choose to carry a concealed firearm. My goal is to provide the best training, background check, information possible to ensure a safe community through responsible firearm ownership."

Christianson will end a nearly 30-year career in law enforcement, with the last 12 in the elected position of sheriff. He said he plans to spend more time with family. Christianson started his career in law enforcement with the Ceres Police Department, before moving on to the Modesto Police Department, and eventually the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department in 1996.

Christianson's first election to sheriff was in 2006. During his tenure as the head of the organization, the sheriff's department has opened a new detention center using AB 900 Phase II funds. The center provides 480 maximum security beds as well as housing for 57 medical and mental health offenders and 15 hospital beds. Christianson also oversaw the opening of a day reporting center, a new coroner's facility, the Re-Entry and Enhanced Alternatives to Custody Training Center, and the re-opening of the Sheriff's Regional Training Center.

 

 
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.