The Ceres City Council voted 4-1 on Monday evening to unfreeze three police officer positions with the use of nearly $700,000 in general fund budget reserves.
The action drops the city’s savings level from $6.1 million to $5.4 million, meaning the reserves will be at 18 percent of its general fund, the bare minimum established by prior city councils.
In June the council dipped into reserves by $635,504 to balance the 2024-25 Fiscal Year budget and partially fill a $2.13 million gap. The city also froze 10 positions, five of them police officers.
City Manager Doug Dunford explained that the council froze the positions to offer raises to police officers and dispatchers to prevent the exodus to jurisdictions which offered better pay. However, Dunford said that “Since that time, staff has seen an increase in is personnel migrating to other departments and the number of active police officers has drastically fallen. Staff is asking council to unfreeze an additional three positions to help raise the number of officers on the street patrolling.”
Currently Ceres Police has approximately two open vacancies with possibly four more pending.
Councilman James Casey was the lone vote against unfreezing the positions, saying the city needs to await an audit.
“I don’t favor transferring money from the reserves until we have a complete audit … before we talk about spending more money on anything,” said Casey.
Ceres resident John Warren said unfreezing three of the five positions would only create about seven unfilled officer positions. He suggested filling the vacant positions first – which could take a while – and then take action to unfreeze the three.
“There’s no need at this time to have seven unfilled positions at the Police Department,” said Warren. “There’s no need to transfer $700,000 in reserves into this current budget until that money is actually needed,” said Warren. “So my thought to you is hire four more people and once those positions are filled come back to the council and discuss this matter again about unfreezing some positions.”
Ceres Police Chief Chris Perry said the city currently has six lateral officers waiting to be hired and are in the process of background checks.
“It does do us good to hire people that we have,” said Chief Perry. “When we won’t hire people then we’re backfilling those positions on overtime which is costing the city time and a half of an officer’s position to fill all those shifts. Not to mention it’s creating burnout on the officers that we do have because they’re constantly working without days off. So I feel it’s very important to hire these positions.”
Perry said new hires will be placed on patrol but the department is down a detective position that won’t be filled immediately.
The department has not been able to stay within the $56,000 overtime cost cap the council set in June, said Perry.
“It is not enough,” he said of the overtime limit. “That’s how much overtime that we are working when we have a decrease in officer positions. We normally run three 11-hour shifts on each squad. We’ve currently moved to two 12-hour shifts on each squad because we’re down so many officers.”
Dunford said Measure H sales tax dollars are funding 10 officer positions when he was asked by Councilwoman Rosalinda Vierra.
“Unfreezing these positions is our steps going forward in trying to get back to full staffing so we can go after the Street Crimes Unit going into early next year hopefully,” he said.
Councilman Daniel Martinez said unfreezing the positions allows Chief Perry to seek applications for trainees to be sent to the local police academy and “puts you ahead of the curve.”
