The Ceres City Council was updated last week in the city’s attempts to deal with homelessness and the blight caused by vagrants.
According to Ceres Police Captain Chris Perry, the city abated 216 homeless encampments between Sept. 1 and Nov. 26 “with about a 90 percent compliance rate from the people we are encountering.”
Captain Perry noted that the city has to post a notice at the encampments before abatement may take place. Typically the city will return within 24 hours to see if the camp is still present “and move the folks along.”
In the same time frame, the city picked up approximately 18,328 pounds of trash and debris and retrieved and returned 227 shopping carts to their respective stores.
The city is continuing to work with the county’s CARE team which provides one full-time staff member devoted solely to Ceres weekdays.
“This person also has access to our building now and access to our Code Enforcement office and they frequent our office quite often to work in conjunction to our Code Enforcement,” Perry told the council.
The city has also been reaching out to business owners seeking increased participation with signing “trespass letters” which help police run homeless persons out of parking lots and on business premises. He said cooperating businesses benefit since some customers shy away with areas populated by panhandlers and vagrants.
Ceres has also teamed up with the code enforcement units in Modesto and Turlock to brainstorm ideas and sharing what is working in their respective communities.
“And we’re also working on partnering to work in each other’s communities on combatting, say major problems that are going on where each community might need some additional personnel to help,” said Perry. “That’ll be great for us in that, you know, our Code Enforcement team is relatively small compared to maybe some other agencies such as Modesto, with some of the resources that they have so may be able to get some of their resources over for a special enforcement day or something in our city. That would be a great help and greatly appreciated.”
Members of the Code Enforcement unit, Perry reported, attended the annual code enforcement conference held in Monterey where they learned about new laws and tool that can be used to combat blight and homelessness. Also attending was Ceres Police Lt. Trenton Johnson who oversees the city’s Code Enforcement Unit.
Perry noted that it takes about four hours to clean up a homeless camp, sometimes requiring the use of heavy equipment like backhoes, bucket trucks and dump trucks.
Code Enforcement conducts what is termed “Wednesday projects” where team members concentrate on cleaning up different areas deemed as needing an “all hands on deck” effort.
“This could be maybe a large encampment or may just several people that need some attention. It could even be a leaf and limb issue, it could be a resident at a home that is in need of cleaning up their yard or something but they don’t have the means to do it themselves. Typically, though, it usually involves cleaning up homeless encampments.”
Perry shared the vision to create a Ceres version of Modesto Police’s CHAT (Community Health and Assistance Team) – only called HOT team for Homeless Outreach Team of four members. To fund it the city would apply for AB 109 funding through the Probation Department by January. Perry envisions the team to consist of a working supervisor, two advocate workers and a crime analyst to track data.
“Let’s face it, Ceres has our share of homelessness and …it certainly keeps us busy but certainly not to the magnitude of Modesto.”
Ceres staff members also benefitted from a briefing presentation made by the county’s Mobile Crisis Response Team (MCRT) which operates in the Stanislaus Recovery Center at the former Memorial Hospital facility. Beginning Dec. 31 the agency will have mental health clinicians and crisis specialists working around the clock to help the cities deal with those with mental orders and channeling folks into treatment centers.
“It’s just another resource that we’re going to have at our fingertips. The more help and the more work out there, I think, the better we will be in the long run.”
Ceres resident John Warren asked Captain Perry about slides shown during his presentation of the city cleaning up homeless camps along the railroad right-of-way. He commented that the railroad “should be taking care of their own problem” instead of using city resources.
Perry noted that the railroad, when first contacted, was “very apprehensive about us being on their property and not wanting us on their property.” He said it took several phone calls to convince the railroad they are allowing the creation of blight for Ceres and the city was doing them a favor and that the team doesn’t want to wait six months for them to act.
“We were actually able to force their hand a little bit and get them out there in conjunction with us to clean up these issues,” said Perry.
One woman in the audience related how a neighbor passed away and she urged the family to not place a For Sale sign on the house for fear of squatters. She pointblank asked Perry if Ceres has a problem with squatters and was told “not that I am aware of,” especially with houses selling quickly in today’s market.
“We don’t deal with them that much,” said Perry. “I could probably count on just a couple of fingers the times we’ve had squatters in the last handful of years.

