The Courier sat down with City Manager Doug Dunford for an hour long interview Friday morning. The interview took place in his temporary office on the second floor of the Ceres Police Department as City Hall is undergoing replacement of flooring.

CC: Where were you born and raised?

DD: I was born in Missouri, raised in Kansas City so I’m a Kansas City Chiefs fan. I was in Kansas until age 13 and my dad got transferred so he moved the family out to Los Angeles. So I’ve been in Los Angeles from age until 13 until 32. Then I got married.

CC: How long?

DD: 35 years.

CC: How many kids do you have?

DD: I have two sons.

CC: Education?

DD: I have a master’s degree in leadership.  I got that at Bellevue University in Omaha, Nebraska. It’s one of the leading online schools.

CC: Out of college, where’d you go?

DD: I went to college when I was already employed.  I started in police work in 1978 as a reserve deputy for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. And then in 1979, I went full time. So I was in the Sheriff’s Department from 1979 to 1989 and then from 1989 to 1993 I was with Turlock PD.

From 1993 to 2001 I was with the BNSF Railroad Police.

And then from 2001 to 2010, I was in Escalon as their chief of police.

And 2010-2011, Chief of Police in Livingston; 2011 to 2017, the Chief of Police in Gustine; in 2017 to 2022 city manager of Gustine. Then 2022-2023 the city manager of California City and now here.

CC: Let me go back to LA Sheriff’s Department. What was that experience like?

DD: It was great. It’s a great training ground. I mean, you got to experience all kinds of crime. I worked the Industry Sheriff’s station; we controlled 110 square miles and we put out 40 cars a shift. It included Hacienda Heights, Diamond Bar, Walnut, Rowland Heights, La Puente, West Valinda, East Valinda and Bassett. 

CC: You’re approaching your second year since you became city manager to replace Alex Terrazas. How does this fit feel for you?

DD: I’m still having a blast. I enjoy the job to begin with and Ceres is a challenge because we’re trying to make the city sustainable and everything, but we’re still living on 2005 funding. And so we’re trying to change that. Because if you think about it, in 2005 you made only so much money. If you made that same amount of money now, what would that look like? And that’s basically the city of Ceres, because we haven’t gone after any sales tax increase or any user fee regulatory fee increase. We just did that, and now we’re going after impact fees.

CC: Ceres has a problem, though, being so close to Modesto and so close to Turlock which has grabbed most everything, right?

DD: Well, I was in a city manager meeting and one of the city managers made a comment that each city’s known for different things. Like Oakdale’s the chocolate festival, Patterson, I guess was peach festival or something. And Ceres? “Modesto’s next door neighbor” and it really hit home. We’re trying to change that because we’re more of a pass through town than a destination. Our goal right now is to say, okay, we want you to come and stay and shop, not just get gas and go. We did a study a while back – the Community Development did – that 85% of the shoppers in the Gateway project area don’t live in Ceres so we have fresh money coming in. We need to capture that and have people stay.

So with Copper Trails – hopefully when that goes to a LAFCO and finally gets finished here within the next 18 months or so – we can start building to put in … a Sam’s Club or a Target or something that is more of a destination than ‘let’s stop and get food.’

CC: So you came from California City. What was that experience like?

DD: It was it was a learning experience. They didn’t have a set system for a vision of what they wanted that city to be. They were allowing to people to build wherever they wanted to, because they didn’t really have a vision for their planning the future for the city. They were looking after the almighty dollar trying to make ends meet. They’re letting that dictate it and that was part of the problem.

There was a lot of hard working staff and everything and the council was trying to do the right thing. It’s just it was an uphill battle. I was there six months.

CC: Tell me about California City. That’s a weird community, isn’t it?

DD: Yes it is. It was supposed to be like Los Angeles north and it never took off. They have an abundance of water underground, but they never were able to really get everything together and it just isn’t close to anything. It’s too remote. I mean, you have Lancaster and Palmdale, which in the old days, that seemed like it was ‘out there’ and that’s when Boeing went into Palmdale. The only reason you moved to Palmdale was to work for Boeing. And now they’ve grown so wide and they’re bedroom communities of Los Angeles because of all the freeway systems. California City is just so remote because it’s out by Mojave, there was nothing close and nobody’s gonna move there.

CC: Describe for our readers in your words, what does the city manager do?

DD: A city manager is similar to a CEO of a company. You have the city council which is kind of like a board of directors, and then the CEO is responsible make sure that he’s carrying out the vision and the desires of the city council.  I oversee 11 different departments so I have basically a lot of people I depend on to get the job done. And if they’re not then I hold them responsible for making sure those jobs are done. We have 154 employees.

CC: Maybe tell readers what you don’t do or cannot do.

DD: I cannot change the law or muni code just because I’m a city manager. I have to go through the whole process. They think that I have a lot of power and stuff and I have to follow the same rules as everybody else.

CC: Most of the issues that residents may have with the city are settled by department heads, but give me an example of why you might have to call a resident and respond to some kind of issue that they’ve brought up.

DD: I’ll give you an example. We had a resident that had a water bill that was really exceedingly high and they called up and said her grandmother broke her back and so she had just turned on the water before it happened and it was running while she was gone. They found it out when they got back and they fixed it and they go, ‘Can you help us out’? And so those things I can sit there and go, okay, we can adjust that a little because there were circumstances.

I’ve got a couple of phone calls because of carports, not because they feel it’s illegal, it’s because their parents are wheelchair bound or they’re in Hospice or whatever, and it’s like, can you give us help on this?

The whole thing with carports is all we just want compliance. Every carport that’s pretty much pretty much built, they knew they had to have a permit and they didn’t get it. And that’s one of the big problems.

CC: I think if the city had been more diligent about Code Enforcement years back and nipped things in the bud, because once one goes up and they go, ‘oh, my neighbor’s got one I can put one up.

DD: It’s just like the broken window theory. Once you see one … so now we’re playing catch-up and now we’re the bad guys going, hey, we need to follow the muni code.

CC: A woman recently asked if the city was going to start cracking down on people parking on lawns. They already do that, don’t they?

DD: Yeah, we do. 

CC: So of these scenarios – I just picked out a few – which are the most difficult to deal with: citizen complaints, the budget, personnel issues or employee contracts.

DD: Right now, the budget. Yeah, we’re looking at – I said it earlier, we’re living off of 2005-2010 funding, and it’s 2025. So imagine your salary in 2005, but you’re spending like 2025 and that’s what we’re doing, and so we have to make that work.

CC: You don’t have ARPA to rely. So what happens?

DD: Well, we’re looking at how we make ends meet. And so we’re looking all kinds of options to say, this is what we’re gonna do. Last year we had to use reserves. But that’s probably the hardest. (As far as) citizen complaints, my job is to listen. If somebody wants to complain, then come and talk to me, or come talk to the department heads. Employee issues are pretty straight forward; we’ve got rules, regulations, policies, that we need to follow. 

CC: You kind of answered this, but for a while, city management was kind of shaky and your predecessor Alex Terrazas was only here for two and a half years and there’s been a lot of changes, but would you say that things are fairly stable the city now? 

DD: Well, stable as it can be. We’re past the election, but, I mean, there’s always issues popping up.  I always say I’m only as good as my last decision, because I have five bosses and I carry out their desires as a whole not as individuals. And so you know, trying to get them to work together and make them a force. We’ve seen that some of the decisions they’ve made; they’ve come across very strongly. They don’t have to agree on everything, but they have their discussion and once the decision’s made, then they all are together on the same plate which makes everything a lot easier though.

CC: What do you feel are perhaps one or two of the accomplishments that you’ve achieved since coming here?

DD: I think one is the stability within the workforce within the whole city. We’ve stabilized it some and brought in some department heads that are very strong in their areas and have really been able to kind of turn the city around from not doing anything to move the city forward. We’re getting a lot of things accomplish. We’ve got some parks done, we’re getting some other projects done and so I think that’s one of the things instead of us being so stagnant, we’re actually getting some things moving forward.

The other one is we’re trying to bring us up to speeds in getting us more current on financing as far as user regulatory fees, impact fees. We’ve engaged a person to look at our unfunded accrued liability, which is the amount of money we have to pay retirees and everything, and we have to keep that moving forward and pay into the fund. The reason that’s important is when we get that down hopefully eliminate that with a bond and save about $400,000 to put back in the general fund, but also shows us our debt service and how much what we can really do move it forward. I think those two things are those things I’ve really kind of proud of.

CC: You’re not talking about a bond measure?

DD: No, it would be like a private bond through a bank.

CC: I’m assuming that you keep abreast of social media and some of the knee-jerk comments people post about city decisions, but do you think the residents have a good understanding why certain decisions are made?

DD: No. I think people make their own judgment on that. They get on Facebook, whatever social media they are and make their own comments and then people run off of that, and they don’t actually ask the city and show up the council meetings to figure out really what we’re doing. A lot of things they complain about we’ve already made a decision months ago, and it’s already in process. That’s partly the city’s fault because the lack of communication in getting stuff out there to help educate them, but also them come into the council meeting to find out really what’s going on. We’ve got five councilmembers that really make a lot of big decisions for this city and we have, what, five people maybe show up in in the audience and five online? And three of those are relatives of employees and you.

CC: Well, it’s funny because, let me give you an example, people seem to think that the Planning Commission can say “yea” or “nay” to a business because people maybe don’t want that business or because we’ve got too many taco shops or too many gas stations. When it’s zoned for it, the city can’t say no.

DD: Well, there’s a thing called restriction of trade, which is illegal. So we can’t sit there and say, we don’t like this, we don’t want it. No.

And the other fallacy people think is, we go out and recruit people in, which we do but we don’t have any say so on who’s coming. For a lack of better terms, we “wine and dine” different, businesses, sit there trying to get them into town. I want a Cracker Barrel here so bad I can taste it, but they’re sitting there going, ‘why are we coming there?’ So were trying to talk them into this and we’re trying to get another hotel in if the other one holds up, but we can’t demand them to come in. They have to want to come in. What a lot of residents don’t understand is companies do a lot of studies before they put a company in because they want to make sure they’re not going to fail.

This Hatch road exit that we have off of 99 is the third busiest roadway in the county for money wise. And so Hatch Road is a very big moneymaker for people wanting to put in a business there.

So we’re looking at it and going, okay, how do we how do we accomplish this? And so that’s why we’re trying to educate them. We have about a million cars a week going through Gateway so let’s bring some businesses in.

Maverick looks it and said we’re bringing in $700,000 in sales tax revenue to you. That’s phenomenal for us, because if they know there’s gonna … be a constant flow come in, that’s an anchor then they’ll want to build there.

I can’t snap my fingers and make certain businesses come here, because I’d have a Sam’s Club going in right across the freeway in a second because the nearest Sam’s Club is Fresno or Sacramento. There’s no other one around. Costcos are diamond a dozen.

CC: Charlie Wood was the city planner decades ago and wined and dined Applebee’s. So Applebee’s came up here, looked around and said, hey, we like Modesto so they built the one along the freeway in Modesto. He was really frustrated about that. And I think the same thing, if you brought Cracker Barrel here and they’d look around, they’d probably rather be in Manteca by Bass Pro. The closest one is Rocklin and then Bakersfield, so why isn’t there something in the middle? This is like farm country. You would think it fits with who you would attract because it’s a Midwest kind of thing.

DD: Our big joke is that we want Buc-ee’s here now.

CC: Yeah, it’s massive, like the Walmart of truck stops.

DD: My wife and I went back to Texas two years ago and there’s all these signs “Go to Buc-ee’s” and I went there, it’s like, oh my God. It was like, you can buy anything here. 

CC: Let’s talk about Lions Park. There was some comments on social media that people in that area are upset that there’s no Lions Park and that basically the city took the funding for that to finish Guillermo Park. Is that something the city’s working on?

DD: Yeah, we’re trying to find some funding because to put in a park, just grass and irrigation is about $2 million

CC: Why is it so expensive?

DD: Prevailing wage.

CC: How can you spend that much for grass?

DD: It’s the planning to lay it out and actually putting all the pipes in and then putting the grass in. It’s not cheap. But if we didn’t have to pay prevailing wage, we could save a lot of money and get a lot more stuff done. But everything has to be prevailing wage and if not, then the (state) government comes after us.

CC: Residential growth seems to be taking off in Hughson and Modesto. Why hasn’t the same happened here?

DD: We’ve had West Landing annexation out there for 10 plus years. The problem with that is we annexed that area but we didn’t put any infrastructure in. And so when home builders would come out there, we’d say yeah, you can build your houses here, but oh, by the way, you have to put it in a lift station to get your sewage out of there, and then you got to put it in a mile of pipes to get it to our nearest pipeline. We, Ceres never put in any infrastructure to assist this.

So this year our director of Engineering is redoing an entire pipeline from Whitmore to Service Road down Crows Landing, put in a brand new sewer line because it needs to be done, put all that in, and so now, instead of having put a mile of pipeline it, which is expensive, because it’s like a 16-inch line, all you have to do is put a lift station in.

For us, and give an example, would be $8,000 for them, a home builder it’s $4,000. 

The other thing we found out is when they annexed West Landing two of the parcels are still in the Williamson Act. The Williamson Act can’t be inside the city limits but nobody told these people that you couldn’t do it. And so they just renewed it. Well, now, when somebody wants to come in and build, to get out of the Williamson Act you have to pay a 30% fine. This is rough numbers where like you give like $237,000 to be in the Williamson Act, so you have to pay 30% of that back, which is a substantial amount of money that the developer doesn’t want to pay. The landowner doesn’t want to pay so it just sits there.

But like I said, we’re trying to put in the infrastructure to try to encourage people to come over and do that. 

And then we’ve got Copper Trails, which half will be commercial the other half of it would be residential, and that’s moving along so hopefully we’re hoping in October to take it to LAFCO and get it annexed into the city. We have a 90-day appeal process, and once we pass that we can actually start building something there. The developer is very aggressive on that.

Copper Trails is south of Service Road, from the freeway out to Central Valley High School, Turlock Irrigation District lateral 2 to Service Road.

(To avoid making a county island the annexation also takes in the Collins Road area north of Service Road).

CC: Asking residents to pay for more sewers is probably one of the most unpleasant things the city council is going to be faced with. So, that’s coming up soon, right?

DD: The tertiary plant? Within the next two months. What a lot of people don’t understand is Ceres right now for wastewater is dependent upon Turlock and Modesto, and we send close to 100 million gallons per day to them. And we pay a lot of money. Actually, we pay Turlock to take it, they process it and they sell it to Del Puerto Canyon. 

What we’re trying to do is become independent of those two because we pay them a lot of money and I’ll give you example. Turlock just raised their rates to us by 30%. They cut the rates to residents. In return we cut our flow to them by 30 percent.

We haven’t raised our sewer rates in almost 10 years.

We’re looking at saving all the money we’re paying the two cities and put it in solar to help cut the costs there. We’ll become independent of Modesto and Turlock and we can run an own sewer plant through 2055 to 2060.

CC: You’ve got a big police background. How would you assess the employee morale at the Ceres Police Department and the dispatchers now?

DD: The moral has improved. Interim Chief (Trenton) Johnson is doing a really good job right now and he’s making things happen. He’s doing a great job, so morale has actually increased over the last 30 days or so. And dispatchers also because we’ve actually been bringing people in, and so they’re no longer, you know, working 12 hours on 17 days in a row or whatever.

It could get better, you know, but the problem is we’re not paying them enough. We’re paying less than Turlock. We’re paying less than the county. I can’t compete with Modesto. They can go to Modesto and make $13 more an hour than they make here. And so we’ve been losing people to Modesto, but I don’t want to lose them to Turlock and the county, so we got to be competitive with that. Modesto can take only so many.

We took a lot of people from Los Banos. Los Banos pays more than us, but because of our benefits they take home more in their pocket here we started educating about that.

CC: So as far as the department heads go, things seem pretty solid now. How much credit do you take for that? Were you the one that recruited them?

DD: The council only proves the contract. I hand pick whose here.  I’ve handpicked half my leadership team. I’ve got I have a real good team right now that is I put it up against any city right now, because we’re really strong.

But we looked at level of expertise and experience, personality, ability, ambition and stuff like that, and would they fit, because my leadership team is more like a family; we all have to work together and get along together. 

CC: The condition of the Ceres water tower is an issue with some, but does the tower bother anyone at City Hall? Do you have any thoughts, like should it be store taken down? Just let it fall, rust through, and fall?

DD: We have to make sure it’s structurally sound. I had our grant writers looking for different grants. What I want to do is put like an electronic sign on it so we can change it during at Christmas time or whatever.

I’d like to get it refurbished and make it an icon Ceres because it’s right there, you see it and we’re one of the few cities on 99, where you can get off and go right into downtown. If we could just mend the holes and stuff and then they do they had wraps, then let’s turn it into something that’s eye catching.

We’d like to see it fixed. It’s just costly and to make sure it’s structurally sound is the important thing.

It’ll probably come up as a council discussion in July after we get through the budget.

CC: City managers come go and seeing how you appear to be moving towards retirement, how long do you plan to stay in Ceres?

DD: As long as the council lets me. I enjoy it.

CC: Who is Doug Dunford at home or with the family? Any hobbies or weekend projects?

DD: When I’m not here on weekends I’m farming. I have a hundred-acre farm. I farm almonds and walnuts. Walnuts aren’t worth squat.

My wife and I have a farm down there that we do most the work but contract out like harvest stuff, but we do all spraying you.

I tell the council and my staff, if you call me on weekends or whatever, when I answer and you hear a tractor running, I’m shutting everything down so I can talk to you. So yeah, that’s my stress release on a tractor.

CC: You like to be busy. 

DD: I do, I like being busy and I like mentoring people. That’s my thing. I had a mentor that saw stuff in me that I didn’t see and he helped me and I always asked him, how can I pay you back? He was just “pay it forward.” I’ve been a police chief for 15 years and I can point to a lot of people who have succeeded and gone on and I helped them start their career.

CC: You seem to be very personable.

DD: My parents always taught me, no matter who you talk to treat them with respect because they may be your boss someday.

I try to do the best job I can and make it pleasant for each.

CC: Would you say that’s Midwestern values?

DD: Part of it, yeah. Yeah, where your parents, like did they grow up in the Midwest? Both of my parents were born in Oklahoma.