Those who set off illegal fireworks – which can and do lead to grass and structure fires – will likely be emboldened to do so next Fourth of July after the less-than-stellar citation of only six violators in Ceres this year at $2,500 a pop.
In 2019 the Ceres Police Department issued 53 citations, 39 in 2020, 34 in 2021 and 15 in 2022.Eighteen citations were given in 2023.
The number of citations to drop as illegal fireworks increase.
Ceres Police Chief Chris Perry explained that the council’s recent order to hold down overtime costs limited his department in only putting one two-officer unit on the streets four days solely devoted to catching those igniting illegal fireworks.
When the Ceres City Council heard his report, none of the members uttered a comment.
But in Manteca, a city of 93,409 in San Joaquin County where police issued 37 citations, Mayor Gary Singh expressed disappointment since that his city doubled the number of drones used to record footage of locations from where illegal fireworks were being launched.
Manteca Police Sgt. Ian Osborn also wasn’t satisfied with 37. He said that while drones have a time stamp and proper global positioning system data records the location, officers still made in-person visits to make perpetrators aware that they had been caught breaking the law and to gather additional information to issue a citation on the spot.
Osborn wants his officers to drop the in-person visits in the future since it can tie up police officers for 20 to 30 minutes on each violation and less ground can be covered.
Apparently if a drone collects the video and meta data, police can follow up several days later with sending out citations.
Maybe it’s time Ceres officials rethink how they want to handle the problem in 2025. Or will it take a councilmembers’ house burning down to get some increased police enforcement that week?
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It’s great to sit down and talk about the lack of affordability in the Central Valley and California in an election year but the town hall of July 9 seemed like wasted time.
Much of what ails California boils down to one party getting its way on everything – higher taxes, climate change carbon offset costs, regulations that make life more expensive, etc. Until you remove the stranglehold that Democrats have on California then it will continue to remain unaffordable.
As one example, Assemblyman Juan Alanis (R-Modesto) noted that the solar panel mandate on all new houses, including granny flats, either drives up the prices of homes or stops people from building an accessory dwelling unit on their lot. He said the legislation is a “done deal,” meaning there aren’t enough Republicans to reverse the expensive policy.
Ask yourself why California residents pay approximately $61,337 per year in housing expenses – the second most expensive in the U.S. We can all understand why Hawaii is the most expensive (lack of enough space and the desirability of living in “paradise.”) But California has plenty of space yet homeowners pay 95% more for housing expenses than the national average. You can only explain it by the lawmakers who pass laws that make living here unaffordable.
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Now that the Ceres City Council has agreed to no longer block public comments at meetings via Zoom, it should prepare for if it happens again. If Zoom bombing does occur again, cut the person off immediately and have the mayor apologize for his/her ignorance. But don’t cut off the public’s right to engage in the discourse around public policy. What they did last year by shutting down all public comments was just wrong. Risking another incidence of Zoom bombing is part of living in a free society.
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The city’s Public Works monthly report for June contains a statistic I found shocking. The city calculated that in June the average gallons of water used per resident per person per day was nearly 79 gallons – a far cry from the 160.47 gallons per person per day in 2011 and 152.23 gallons of water in 2013.
The city began metering water in July 2011.
I went back into our archives and from my August 5, 2015 report, “City misses state water goal” was this: “Ceres had an average use of 118 gallons per person per day in June and 114 in May. The state average is 96.98 gallons per person per day.”
In my article, “City still advancing water conservation,” published Oct. 31, 2018, Public Works Director Jeremy Damas stated that in September 2018 Ceres residents used 106.98 gallons per person per day. The 2018 year average as of September was 91.57 gallons per person per day.
Either the city’s calculations are way off or residents have really caught on with water conservation.
All of this came as a surprise to me as since Damas retired in December 2021 regular in-person updates on water consumption at council meetings ended with the new Public Works director.
Also slowing down quite a bit is the city issuing water wasting warnings – 312 given in June 2015, and only 16 last month.
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It’s hard to believe that the Ceres City Council fast-tracked the approval and design to replace the Whitmore Park gazebo – which came out of nowhere last year from Vice Mayor Bret Silveira – while the community’s interest in restoring the iconic water tower still falls on deaf council ears.
A group met in 2017 to express desire to have the 1934 tower repainted. The city back then said it didn’t have the money. When ARPA funds came along, the excuse was gone but the council found other ways to spend it, including a gazebo that doesn’t really need to be replaced. Oh, and they used ARPA funds to give COVID bonuses to city employees who showed up for work like they were hired to do. Most of us in the private sector received no such bonuses for doing our jobs.
In January Councilwoman Rosalinda Vierra asked for the tower to be placed on the council agenda and still nothing yet headed into August.
The water tower continues to look like blighted crap and is seen daily by hundreds of thousands of travelers up and down Highway 99. If the first impression that outsiders get of Ceres is that tower then no wonder Ceres continues to have a bad rap of a city of blight – murals or not.
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I’ve been saying it for months now about an impending assassination attempt and I was spot on.
In my June 18 column, I talked about how the Democrats were itching to use the use the term “felon” on Donald Trump after a New York judge handicapped his defense team in a grossly unfair trial and gave jury instructions that they didn’t all have to agree on a verdict.
I wrote this in my column: “It’s quite disturbing and underscores just how desperate they are to destroy Trump. But now that his supporters have dug in their heels, what will they do next? Pull a Sirhan Sirhan?”
In case you’re too young to remember, Sirhan Sirhan was the guy who killed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.
For the last several years they’ve been working overtime to stop Trump to the point that I feared an assassination would be the next step.
Am I saying the hit job on Trump was ordered by forces within the so-called Deep State? Not necessarily but it’s rather strange that a rooftop was convenitently left open by the Secret Service and it dragged its feet about reports that a suspicious man was walking around with a rangefinder.
I was in Santa Cruz that weekend and watched the first five minutes of Trump’s rally live before turning it off to go swimming in the motel pool. About a half-hour later a guy came out of his room to tell his friend “Someone just shot Trump!”
I was shaking at poolside as I fumbled with my phone to watch the rally on Fox’s YouTube page. I saw Trump go down and had no idea if he had been hit during the minute of the Secret Service dogpile. When I saw him come up, defiant and blood on his face, I became emotional. I felt the anger stir inside me because deep down we know they let it happen by design.
All this year I expressed my fears to others before the Butler rally – that somebody within Homeland Security which oversees the Secret Service was going to leave a hole open for somebody – perhaps a young recruit who wanted to be a martyr – to take the shot. And what did we see in Butler? An obviously overlooked shooting perch that Secret Service failed to cover until some in the crowd spotted Crooks and alerted a local police officer. The fact that it took so long to take out Crooks is all you need to know.
The head of the Secret Service gave a cockamamie excuse that her sharp shooters weren’t posted on that roof due to its slope. The pitch on that roof was less steep than the average 4/12 pitched roof on an American house so spare us the BS.
According to U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, requests to beef up Trump’s security team had been rebuffed leading up to July 13. Also lending to the failure was diverting agents away from Trump to cover First Lady Jill Biden’s event the same day.
Cruz went so far as to say: “I have a very strong suspicion that politics played a real role in this … because politics plays a role in everything in this damned administration does.”
Indeed, it appears the Secret Service treated Trump like a low-key former aged president (such as Clinton or Carter) and not an active leading candidate for president who the media stirs up angst against each and every day.
Some vile Democrats didn’t care if Trump got killed. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) – that rat I bumped into in 2019 along with Jerry Nadler while visiting the Memphis site where MLK was shot – wanted to yank Secret Service protection from Trump after his kangaroo court conviction. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Ms.) on the House Homeland Security Committee introduced a bill to strip Trump of his protection. Even after Trump was shot, Thompson didn’t have the decency to admit he was wrong nor say he would pull his bill.
If the Trump hit wasn’t an actual government conspiracy, it’s obvious to many that the Biden White House has been less enthusiastic about adequately protecting his opponents. Let’s not forget how Biden refused to extend Secret Service protection to RFK Jr. This coming from an administration that has done everything in its power to take Trump out with law-fare suits.
By the way, I was there at Graceada Park when independent candidate John Anderson came to Modesto during the 1980 presidential campaign, and the Modesto Airport and saw his Secret Service guards first hand.
Another concern about the Secret Service is DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) – essentially hiring less qualified people in the interest of hiring minorities and women. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle is apparently obsesses with hiring more diverse recruits, such as 30 percent female requests by 2030.
We want the best agents, not having to fill racial and gender quotas. As Greg Gutfeld cleverly said on Fox, with DEI you DIE.
Don’t look for the Secret Service to be transparent about their abject failure.
The government keeps us in the dark about a lot of things – UFOs and the JFK assassination for starters. We’ll never know the truth about Epstein’s death either, nor see VIPs like Bill Clinton or Prince Andrew answer for their sexual predation of underage girls during visits to Epstein Island. And likely, the cover will never be ripped off of what could be a massive conspiracy to permanently take out Trump.
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It’s a disservice of the media to blur out photos of slain assassin Crooks. I saved a copy of the unedited photo on my iPhoto. It shows the kid’s head plastered in blood. Everyone should see it as an example: if you want to kill others – especially a president or a presidential candidate – this is what you get.
No sympathy for the bad guy.
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Is the end coming for the Woke progressives in our government? It looks like the pendulum may be swinging back to the right.
People are beginning to “see” what’s happening as a result of their policies.
Take crime for example, which has flourished since the Gavin Newsom backed Prop. 47 came into play, making major thefts mere misdemeanors, creating an open season on our retailers. We will have a chance this November in fixing Newsom’s Prop. 47 mess.
On July 10 the San Francisco Chronicle reported that despite what city officials and Newsom have said, Oakland’s crime rates are not down 33 percent.
If crime is not down 33 percent, how can the governor claim that? In a nutshell, incomplete data comparisons and unreported crime, misleading the public on just how poorly the city is handling its crime crisis.
Sacramento took a different strategy to lower its “reported” crime rates. In 2023, the Sacramento city attorney nearly issued a public nuisance citation to the Riverside Boulevard Target store for reporting retail theft “too often” to police.
Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher was quick to slam the city’s threat, saying “Newsom keeps insisting that reports of theft are dropping – well, now we know why. Not only are thieves let off without even a slap on the wrist, but now the victims are being threatened for even reporting crimes.
“Whether it’s cooking the books or intimidating victims, Democrat-led cities are doing everything to bring down their crime numbers except actually holding criminals accountable.”
Public nuisance citations are usually linked to bars, nightclubs or restaurants open late that do not have adequate security or rules in place to disperse customers who may gather.
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California suffers more economic harm because of its dangerous governor.
It’s old news by now that Elon Musk is relocating his headquarters of SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) from California to Austin, Texas, where his Tesla electric car operations are headquartered. Musk said he’s doing so because Narcissist Newsom has signed the perverse law that bans public schools from notifying parents of pronoun changes by students (their own children.) You might as well call this the “Ensuring Schools to Keep Parents in the Dark” bill. Musk says Newsom is “attacking both families and companies.”
Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher put it succinctly when he said: “Gavin Newsom’s anti-parent agenda isn’t just bad for families - now it’s doing serious damage to California’s economy. With the highest unemployment rate in the nation, you’d think our governor would be doing everything possible to protect jobs. Instead, he’s pandering to extremists in his party by cutting parents out of their kids’ education and driving even more businesses to pack up for other states.”
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The political views coming from Dan Gottlieb, a spokesman from the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee (fundraising arm) is hilarious.
Last week he sent an email saying Jewish Americans are concerned about Trump’s alleged Project 2025 when it’s been the Democratic Party which has largely been pro-Palestinian.
Project 2025 calls for the dramatic dismantling of the Department of Education. Gottlieb said this raises “serious questions about the future of the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which is responsible for investigating discrimination, including antisemitism, in schools and on campuses.”
I was around when Jimmy Carter formed the federal Department of Education and I remember the opposition to his plan. It was and is unnecessary to have a U.S. Department of Education since the states are in charge of their own school systems. The budget for the federal department is around $80 billion and has 4,400 federal workers.
Republicans have been outspoken critics of the universities which have been petri dishes for the cultivation of anti-Semitism and the ousting of college presidents who allow students to take over campuses.
There isn’t one program the Democrats ever want to see cut or eliminated to save taxpayers money – well, except for Secret Service protection for their most hated politician.
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
