Now that Toby Wells is city manager of Ceres, he's still serving as the city engineer.

Not for long.

Last week the city began recruiting for a new city engineer to prevent Wells from achieving an early state of job burnout.

Wells was hired by Ceres as the city engineer in July 2011. The Ceres City Council appointed him as city manager in April to succeed Art deWerk, who was doubling as Public Safety Director and acting city manager. At the time the council discussed its arrangement with Wells, he made it known that he could not perform optimally as city manager and city engineer. In April Wells told the council that: "Doing all three jobs, it's not likely that I'm going to do any one of those three perfectly as well as I'd like to."

At its meeting of July 28 the council approved an action to re-establish the classification for the position of Director of Engineering Services/City Engineer and eliminated Wells' former position of deputy city manager/city engineer.

The new position pay range is $8,897 to $10,814 monthly.