There appears to be a level of dissatisfaction with the leadership of Javier Lopez – if you consider that two are running against the mayor of Ceres.
It appears that the mayor’s coziness with the Condit clan has backfired on him.
The thanks Javier Lopez received for dumping R.J. Jammu from the Ceres Planning Commission in December to appoint young Gary M. Condit, is that he now has a political foe.
Condit is a late entrant to the race, now one of two challengers wanting to claim the mayor’s seat. Condit took a slap at the mayor in a prepared statement suggesting “City Hall has been mired in financial mismanagement, with budgetary freezes, and irresponsible spending…”
Ouch.
Nine months after being appointed to a four-year term on the Planning Commission, Condit now wants to be mayor.
Condit, who left high school five years ago, is green as broccoli. He’s cast only a handful of votes as a planning commissioner and the one vote that stands out was his lone vote in January against the Ceres Self Storage facility on Mitchell Road. Condit said he wanted a traffic study (cha-ching) before he could support the project – after being told that a mini-storage would generate less traffic volume than other uses that are permitted uses for the parcel.
Judging by past history, voters take a gamble in electing Condits to elected city office for they don’t stick around long (the lone exception being Gary A. Condit who served four years from 1972 to 1976 before ladder climbing). Brother Couper was appointed to the Planning Commission in 2015 and not reappointed in 2020 because Mayor Chris Vierra viewed him as a cocky obstructionist. So that year Couper ran for the District 4 seat and won after spending over $10,500 from his family’s political connections to buy attack mailers against Mike Kline. Couper took the oath of office on Dec. 3, 2020 and quit in October 2021 without the courtesy of an explanation to his constituents and his supporters.
Before that in 2020, oldest brother Channce Condit asked voters to elect him to the Ceres City Council. It was a four-year seat but he bailed mid-term to run for Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors in 2022 when he saw Anthony Cannella wasn’t going to run. As surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, Channce will at some point seek a state office, perhaps when state Senator Alvarado-Gil terms out.
I’m not saying Gary M. Condit wouldn’t make a good mayor but his run is most premature. Voters have seen Rosalinda Vierra and Javier Lopez in action. Condit hasn’t served on the council so nobody knows how he would vote on issues or his style of leadership. Right now he only can bank on the Condit name.
Sadly, as we have seen in the past, some voters end up with buyer’s remorse when they fall for those offering empty promises, or the ladder climbers who pure political ambition.
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Monday night was not the best for Mayor Lopez.
Longtime Ceres resident Shirley Rogers stood before the Ceres City Council and asked what the council considers “personal development”? Lopez went with his standby “I’ll make sure that staff reaches out to you in regards to that,” which is code for “I haven’t a clue how to answer this.”
Rogers wasn’t having any of it and said, “Well, I’d like to know now what you think it is” and then mentioned how the council budgeted $6,000 for personal development.
The mayor could have said, well personal development may include attendance at workshops or conferences. But he didn’t appear to understand what she was asking.
“When you decide what personal development is let me know,” Rogers said before curtly walking off.
Within minutes, Randy Cerny came to the podium and explained how he graduated Ceres High 50 years ago and that he “called Ceres home pridefully all that time until now. It’s the most dysfunctional City Council I’ve ever seen. That’s all I need to say because there’s children around.”
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I’m forever stumped as to why many Ceres projects receive approval yet never seem to develop. Granted, the high interest rates have put the chill on recently approved projects, but many on the following list of “never materialized” projects were approved years before the Joe Biden interest rate hikes came about:
• Nothing ever materialized with a proposed $16 million, 47,348 square-foot, 175-bed American Post Acute Care Rehab Center first approved by the Ceres Planning Commission in 2009, again in March 2017 and again in December 2018. Last I heard, proponent Dr. Meetinder Rai was awaiting on approvals through the state Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD). That was years ago and our calls to Dr. Rai have gone unanswered, leading me to think the project was either stymied by state bureaucrats or Dr. Rai had a change of heart for financial reasons.
• In July 2019 the 7,539-square-foot church approved for the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East in July 2019 at 1748 Evans Road was never built.
• Mohinder Kanda’s Jas Plaza approved in 2018, consisting of a 4,500-square-foot two-story mixed use building on the south side of Whitmore Avenue between Fifth and Sixth streets, was never built.
• A 20-unit multi-family residential project approved for 2800-2808 Blaker Road hasn’t built.
• Also never built was a 10-unit multi-family residential apartment project on a flag lot at 3420 Ninth Street in Ceres which was approved in early 2021.
• In August 2009 the Ceres Planning Commission approved a commercial shopping center including a Las Casuelas Mexican Restaurant, gas station and two commercial shell buildings at the southwest corner of Mitchell and Roeding roads. Project was later abandoned.
• The Leer Building, a proposed building for the parcel at the northwest corner of Park and Sixth streets was approved in 2014 with promises of sparking revitalization in downtown Ceres. The project was abandoned.
• Family Pizza won approval in October 2022 to build an 11,900-square-foot pizza restaurant and bar on a 1.16-acre parcel at 3113 E. Whitmore Avenue, just east of the Del Taco and medical office properties. Again, nothing.
• There’s been no sign of any development of Dhillon Villas, a mixed-use application to build a 145-unit high-density apartment complex behind a commercial strip mall on Mitchell Road approved in March 2023. By the way, before that the land was approved on May 2, 2016 for a seven-building commercial center consisting of 102,500 square feet which never went anywhere.
• It remains to be seen if Surjit Singh develops a commercial shopping center of five buildings on 3.3 acres at the northeast corner of Mitchell Road and Roeding Road. The L-shaped project was approved in June 2022 and designed to partially wrap around behind an older strip mall that contains eight businesses including Liquor King, a floral shop, Indian store and hair stylist. Is this another project that got sucked into an economic black hole?
• Sam Khacho received approval in May 2021 to subdivide 12 acres into six parcels for development of a commercial center, dubbed SamBella Plaza, approximately 400 feet south of the Mitchell Road/Service Road intersection. No development plans have ever been submitted.
• Whitmore Towers, a 7,280-square-foot retail building focused on eating establishments on the triangle-shaped lot across the street from Ceres High School, excited lots of folks when it was approved in 2019. Poof, nothing.
• A proposed mixed-use two-story building consisting of 2928 Third Street opposite Whitmore Park was approved in March 2019. Why have Satwant Singh and Malkit Kaur Sanghera not built it?
• The 58-unit apartment project approved as part of the AM/PM project at the northwest corner of Service and Morgan roads has not developed. The store was built but not the 18 two-story apartment buildings north of it.
It’s discouraging to have reported on all these projects over the decades only to see them go puff in the wind. The next one that comes up I’ll tell myself, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
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Speaking of dirt bags committing crimes, it’s always disconcerting to see how many times folks in Ceres are victimized and post surveillance videos of porch pirates and other types of thieves at work.
On July 7 a woman in Ceres posted videos and stills on Facebook of two men stopping just short of the stop sign on Seventh Street at Whitmore Avenue, so they could get out and steal items from the back of a pickup parked in the driveway at the corner. The thieves (who appear to be Hispanic) could not steal the good tools from her husband’s work truck because they were locked up but did steal an old blower, a defective carburetor pump, an empty tool bag and a punctured hose truck.
Thieves are among the lowest form of human being. Guard yourself and your property. Don’t leave anything out for it will walk off.
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It was a matter of brain overload. I have so much crammed in my cranium that I slipped up big time when speaking to Congressman John Duarte in Whitmore Park last week. We were talking about the presidential race when I asked, “Are you running again? Who is running against you?” Adam Gray, he answered.
Oh duh, gosh. I’ve only been writing about it for months now.
His aide, Brenda Herbert nearly fell over backwards. “I knew that!” I reassured her.
Duarte said he understands being overloaded.
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Politicians want to pass more tax burdens onto California voters with two more ballot bond measures, Prop 2 and Prop 4.
Prop 2 is a school facilities bond issuance of $10 billion at a time when the state of California is already in the deficit spending mode.
They already issued $6.4 billion in bonds from the March primary on homelessness.
Now they want $10 billion for schools as student enrollment continues to drop. California had 6.2 million students in 2014 and now 5.8 million.
Why reward the state when there is an effort to ban charter schools which are actually producing results?
Keep in mind that none of that money will be used to hire non-union companies. It’s a labor union boondoggle. Eighty-five percent of construction companies are not allowed to bid which means less competitive bids and higher costs for school projects, an estimated 30 to 40 percent higher costs.
Prop 4, the $10 billion Safe Drinking Water, Wildfire Prevention, Drought Preparedness and Clean Air Bond Act of 2024. It’s a climate change scare measure.
It is opposed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.
Not one penny will go to building a reservoir or more water storage.
Legislative Democrats placed a bond issue on the ballot that includes $3.8 billion for drinking water and groundwater, $1.5 billion for wildfire and forest programs and $1.2 billion for sea level rise. Sea level rise? Really? If you go to the Santa Cruz Beach, it’s no higher today than it was 200 years ago. Get real.
In reality, Prop 4 is a craft way to offset some of their budget cuts they had to make because of massive overspending.
Democrats love to scare us about climate change. Don’t fall for it.
If this doesn’t pass, nothing changes for the worse but you will have less of a tax burden to pay this one off. What did we get from the $4.1 billion bond passed in 2018? Nothing to show for it.
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This has been one of the strangest years, not only weather wise but in politics. Something is off. Sinister things are happening.
President Biden was ousted from his nomination after millions voted for him. The Democrats have replaced him with an unpopular vice president who’s the butt of pundit’s jokes with her cackling and word salads – a person trying to act cool but coming off awkward.
Then we have a kid take a shot at Donald Trump and come within a fraction of blowing his head off because the Secret Service conveniently left a rooftop unprotected. While some declare the failure was just that – a security failure – there are folks like me who believe it was by design. Now comes a report that would-be assassin Thomas Crooks had communications with someone in Washington, D.C. close to the FBI.
Having the Secret Service and FBI stonewalling the investigation is par for the course. We still haven’t been given full access to the documents that would prove or disprove that JFK wasn’t a government ordered hit and that Oswald was conveniently offed to shut him up too. Remember that Jack Ruby was filmed saying “everything pertaining to what’s happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives … the people who had so much to gain and had such an ulterior motive to put me in the position I’m in will never let the true facts come above board to the world.” When a reporter asked, “Are these people in very high positions?,” Ruby replied, “yes.”
Don’t be surprised if somebody is allowed to succeed where Crooks failed.
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Being the strange year that it is, state Senator Marie Alvarado-Gil has abandoned the Democratic Party and is now a Republican.
In December I praised Alvarado-Gil for being the ONLY Democrat in the state Senate to vote against Senate Bill 2, a law that would have invalidated the rights of anyone with a concealed weapons permit to carry a gun into most places in California until a federal judge struck it down. In my column of Dec. 27 I wrote: “If we only had more Democrats like her. Thank you, senator, for recognizing a horrible bill when her party leader Newsom can’t.”
I recognized her conservative leanings and was not surprised that she left the radical left Democratic Party of today. Just as I saw the same thing happen when conservative Tulsi Gabbard left the Democrats and was maligned by them.
This column is the opinion of Jeff Benziger, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Ceres Courier or 209 Multimedia Corporation. How do you feel about this? Let Jeff know at jeffb@cerescourier.com
