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Who’s running to represent Turlock?
Candidates step forward for federal, state office
election 2022 art

With new electoral maps set and the new year upon us, it’s officially election season — and candidates are lining up to run for office at all levels of government. 

Voting will be a bit different for Turlockers this year as they prepare to cast their ballots first in California’s primary election, set for June 7, then in the November general election. The redistricting process brought big changes and resulted in new maps which mean new representation.

Once represented in Congress as a unit, the city of Turlock is now split in half as part of Districts 5 and 13. In the State Assembly, Turlock will no longer be represented by Heath Flora and instead is part of the new District 22, along with Modesto and Patterson. Turlock’s Senate seat is now in District 4, which stretches from Lake Tahoe, down through the foothills and all the way into Inyo County.

Rep. Josh Harder’s recent announcement that he will run in the new District 9 rather than Turlock’s District 13 means Turlock will elect someone new to the City in both of its districts. There are currently four candidates who have stepped forward to run in District 13: three Democrats and one Republican. 

District 13 includes downtown and the west side of Turlock, as well as some surrounding neighborhoods, and reaches up to Lathrop, down through Patterson and Mendota, and into Coalinga of Fresno County.

Following Harder’s decision to move districts, Merced Assemblyman Adam Gray last week launched his own campaign for District 13. He’s joined by two other Democrats in the race, Angelina Sigala of Modesto and Phil Arballo, a Central Valley native who was defeated by Republican Devin Nunes in the 2020 election. 

Arballo announced his candidacy on Thursday after originally intending to run in the special election for Nunes’ empty seat in District 22. 

Phil Arballo
Phil Arballo is one of three Democrats running to represent the new Congressional District 13, which includes downtown and the west side of Turlock.

“For too long, the Central Valley has been poorly represented by career politicians with connections to special interest groups and who put the people second, which is why I’ve never taken a dime of corporate PAC money,” Arballo said in a statement. “It's time for a change in leadership. We need a representative in Congress who understands what it's like living paycheck to paycheck. We need someone who will fight for clean air and clean water, greater access to quality health care, and a strong economy that includes lower housing costs and gives hardworking people the opportunity to succeed.”

The lone Republican in the District 13 race is David Giglio, a former high school teacher and Connecticut transplant who now lives in Madera. 

David Giglio
The lone Republican in the District 13 race is David Giglio, a former high school teacher and Connecticut transplant who now lives in Madera.

“Once elected, I will fight to pass a comprehensive water solutions package to once and for all solve California’s water crisis. I will oppose COVID lockdowns, support tax cuts for hard working Americans and oppose wasteful spending. I will defend small businesses, fight for deregulation and work to limit governmental power and secure our southern border,” Giglio said in a statement. “And now, more than ever, I will fight to give parents and local communities more control over their children’s education and be a constant advocate for school choice and work to strike down the divisive critical race theory. I pledge to work tirelessly for our Valley to help ensure it remains one of the best places in California to live and raise a family.”

In District 5, Republican incumbent Tom McClintock is running along with fellow Republicans Scott Giblin and Anthony Estrada, as well as Democrat Mike Barkley and Steve Wozniak, presumably not of Apple fame. Kelsten Obert, who previously ran for Modesto City Council, has also filed papers for District 5. 

In the State Senate, Turlock’s representative, Republican Andreas Borgeas, announced on Jan. 11 that he would not be running for re-election. Borgeas had been considering a run for the District 5 Congressional seat prior to McClintock’s confirmation that he would in fact be running. 

“It has been an extraordinary honor and privilege to serve the nearly one-million residents in the eleven counties of the 8th Senate District,” Borgeas said. “Our team is beyond proud of what we have been able to achieve legislatively and politically in Sacramento as well as the results delivered for our community and the State of California. Anna and I would like to express our deepest appreciation to our family, friends, and everyone who has supported my tenure in public service. I look forward to remaining politically engaged and keeping up the good fight for our community in a future capacity.”

Those who have filed papers to run in the new Senate District 4 include Republicans Jack Griffith and Jolene Daly, both of whom had previously announced Congressional campaigns. 

“It is quite large, however, I am up for the challenge,” Daly said in a video posted to her campaign Facebook page. 

Griffith also made his announcement on social media.

“Our backyard’s getting a little bit bigger,” he said. 

Running to represent Turlock in the State Assembly so far are Sean Harrison of Modesto, Joel Gutierrez Campos and Turlock resident Paul Danbom, an almond grower and Realtor. 

The Journal will dive into each race individually in the coming months with features on each candidate. To stay up to date with candidates from Stanislaus County who are running for office in the meantime, visit stanvote.com. 

 

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.