The Ceres City Council last week voted 4-1 to unfreeze the positions of a police sergeant and an officer to save in expensive overtime costs.
Ceres Police Chief Trenton Johnson noted that overtime increased after the March 2025 resignation of a sergeant to work for a neighboring agency. The absent position was frozen at that time, triggering a minimum of 861 hours of sergeant overtime. At approximately $100 per hour, that amount resulted in $86,100 in overtime.
“These costs were due to an extra hour per shift for two sergeants because there was no over-lapping sergeant coverage, plus 496 vacation hours that needed to be back-filled with overtime,” said the chief in his report. “These vacation hours would normally be covered by the swing-shift sergeant whose position was frozen.”
The overtime costs he cited did not include incentives or benefits.
Between the costs of filling the unfrozen sergeant position and eliminating overtime costs, the city is projected to save approximately $20,954 per year.
The city still has a captain and four officer positions frozen.
Chief Johnson said in 2025 his department was down to only 27 deployable officers at one point, “which is extremely tough to staff. I’m very happy to say that we have 39 deployable officers right now on each squad. We have 11 out of 12 officers working on patrol. That just leaves the sergeant the only ones that are left on 12-hour shifts. So we’ll still be able to maintain our minimum staffing on patrol with this switch.”
Ceres Police Department is authorized to have a staffing level of 47 sworn personnel.
Vice Mayor Daniel Martinez said that aside from the savings, unfreezing the sergeant position should “take away stress from those two sergeants who are having to be consistently on overtime, gives them a little bit better work-life balance, but one of the bigger things for me is it also creates a path for promotion. So something that one of our officers has an opportunity to improve and continue to climb.”
Reading from a prepared statement, Mayor Javier Lopez, said: “This proposal will straighten supervision with the police department, reduce costly over time, and provide greater operational stability.”
Councilman James Casey cast the lone vote.
AVA vehicle purchase
In other action, the council voted 4-1 to purchase a new vehicle for the city’s Abandoned Vehicle Abatement crew.
The 2013 Ford F-150 has needed a replacement for several
Years, the city said, and has approximately 100,000 miles.
The new vehicle will be equipped with an updated police radio and a laptop-based CAD computer. It will also be outfitted with a License Plate Reader (LPR) system specifically designed for parking enforcement. This LPR system will allow AVA officers to track and geo-locate vehicles and will automatically scan license plates to notify officers when a vehicle’s registration is expired.
Councilman James Casey cast the lone vote against the $38,240.71 truck purchase and $51,403 in upgrades and equipment.
