With a full council and one councilmember flipping from a prior vote, the Ceres City Council voted 4-1 to pursue a grant of up to $4.5 million to upgrade Roeding Heights Park.

The vote comes in the nick of time as the grant application deadline is Dec. 17.

The lone “no” vote came from Councilwoman Cerina Ortero who struggled over spending $29,500 to pay for the city’s grant writing firm, Capitol Advocacy, given the city’s budget picture.

“I still feel like it’s a slight gamble because it’s an opportunity but it’s still not guaranteed,” said Otero.

On Oct. 12 she stated that she wanted the council to review the parks master plan before talk about funding parks.

With Vice Mayor Daniel Martinez absent at the Oct. 12 meeting, the council was deadlocked in a 2-2 vote about pursuing the grant. However on Monday, Councilman James Casey voted in favor of moving forward on the grant on Monday, siding with Mayor Javier Lopez, Vice Mayor Martinez Councilwoman Rosalinda Vierra to pursue the grant application.

Why did Casey change his vote? Interim City Manager Steve Williams explained that the grant writing cost could be funded from a pot of $195,000 in new money that came the city’s way from uncollected business license revenue from the third-party efforts of Hinderliter De Llamas & Associates (HDL) to recover those revenues. The remainder of the $166,000 of new business license revenue will remain in the General Fund.

Williams said since Ceres is a strong contender for the grant he stated the “opportunity is well worth the investment.”

“Staff believes that this is an opportunity to leverage a relatively modest expenditure towards a potentially multimillion dollar investment in one of our community parks,” Williams told the council.

A representative of Capital Advocacy suggested the city should pursue the grant.

“This particular park does stand in a very, very competitive position for this grant,” Vanessa Vergara of Capitol Advocacy told the council over Zoom on Oct. 12. “So Mayor Lopez, I’m very confident that with my team and with the city team as well we can absolutely put a very strong application forward.”

“Our parks, as we learned at the last council meeting, are in dire need,” said Councilwoman Rosalinda Vierra who also noted how youth sports groups are using the park for practice.