The former Stanislaus County Court building at 2744 Second Street in Ceres has sat dormant for many years and the city of Ceres is actively exploring purchasing and renovating it for city use.

At a closed session on Oct. 29, the Ceres City Council was given an update on the city’s talks with the Judicial Council of California to buy the building. Interim City Manager Steve Williams said the state has priced the building in the $400’s.

Located directly behind the Third Street fire station and just south of City Hall, the building could be used to house one of the city’s departments.

“We are interested in purchasing it so we’re just going through the process of what it would take, where the money would come from and so we’re just discussing options,” said Williams.

Because the council will be meeting once in November and once in December with a light agenda due to a new council coming aboard, Williams said any agreement wouldn’t be crafted and made public until January or February.

While the city would have its choice of uses, Williams said he is leaning toward using it to house the Public Works Department administration. That would place all city administration on the same block.

“Right now we have kind of a centralized operation,” Williams noted. “They (the public) can go to Finance in this building, they can go to Planning in this building, they can go to Engineering in this building, but if they have something for Public Works, they have to drive – it’s not far – over the bridge and on the other side of the freeway. So instead of sending them across the freeway, we’d just send them to the building next door to us if they want Public Works related administrative things.”

Williams reported that he walked through the building about a month or two ago to take a look at the inside of the building and found it “completely abandoned.”

“There’s nothing in there. It still looks like a 1970s courthouse.”

The 3,000-square-foot Ceres court building was completed in 1969 at a cost of $65,000. The building saw its last court use in 2007. In 2008 Stanislaus County turned the building over to the state Judicial Council as part of a mandate of the Trial Court Facilities Act of 2002. Although the city was interested in obtaining the building at the time, the act expressly prohibited the county from transferring it to another agency like the city of Ceres.