The city canceled its contract with BrightView Landscaping Services at budget time but the Ceres City Council last week hiring a new company to provide landscaping maintenance along public rights of way and parks.
The one-year contract with Elite Maintenance & Tree Service is $129,720 covers landscaping maintenance on approximately 1.3 million square feet of public rights-of-way, in addition to approximately 160 acres of public parks and landscaped areas.
In 2022 the city’s contract with BrightView Landscape Services expired on June 30, 2026 in part to save money and because the city wasn’t pleased with the performance.
Interim City Manager Steve Williams developed a new agreement that utilizes existing funding generated through the applicable Community Facilities Districts (CFDs) and Landscape and Lighting Districts (LLDs), which is already designated for contracted landscape maintenance services. This approach will ensure that the rights-of-way and landscaped areas within those assessment districts continue to be properly maintained for the benefit and enjoyment of the public while remaining consistent with the City’s adopted budget.
“I’m happy to see that we found a way to bring back some of these services,” commented Ceres City Councilwoman Cerina Otero, “and I do want to thank our Parks and Facilities and street teams, everyone who’s been helping with getting some of the landscape cleaned up at the parks down the right of ways.”
She also asked the city to monitor the sprinklers along the city rights-of-ways and downtown.
“I know the contractor will look for broken sprinklers and they’ll report those things back, but I think it’s important that we actually see that water is running from them, that they’re actually working because we can see the dry shrubs all over the city, the tree roots breaking up the sidewalks and everything and I don’t want that to run into a liability for the city or in the future costs more because now we’re replacing all of the nice plants. So if that’s something we can just put on our radar for the future and figure out a way of how to maintain the water in those areas, it would be helpful.”
Williams said the city is also pursuing an agreement under $25,000 to provide interim assistance during the “heavy growth months of landscaping that a company can come in and assist our parks department and our streets department with landscaping and other services at two specific locations at River Bluff and at Smyrna Park.” He said it would be an approximately nine-week engagement.
