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New rec center could come to Turlocks westside
council preview pic
Members of the community and the Turlock City Council would like to see the Turlock armory building repurposed for recreational use. - photo by Journal file photo

A new recreation center could be in the future for the westside of Turlock as the Turlock City Council voted to move forward with an initial study on the feasibility of repurposing the National Guard Armory building on Flower Street.

In June, the City received notice from the State Military Department indicating their intent to end their 99-year lease of the National Guard Armory site, located adjacent to Soderquist Baseball Field, effective Dec. 31. According to the lease agreement, the State Military Department must remove all improvements upon ending the lease — which would include demolishing the existing building and 25,000 square feet of parking lot.  The City of Turlock is considering repurposing the facility, however, and an initial City staff walk through looks promising.

"We do think it's worthwhile to take a closer look at this facility," said Allison Van Guilder, director of Parks, Recreation and Public Facilities at Tuesday's City Council meeting.

The City Engineering and Building division staff members who inspected the property found the building to be generally in stable condition without any obvious deficiencies. Modernization is needed throughout the building that was constructed in the 1960s, however, including additions to conform to current accessibility requirements, and mechanical, electrical and plumbing facilities are due for upgrades.

The building currently houses offices, conference rooms, a gymnasium, locker room, kitchen and a former indoor shooting range that is now being used as storage.

The City Council approved spending $23,400 on a Phase I Environmental Site Assessment and a Phase II assessment, if needed. If those assessments don't show any major problems with the building or property, then the City could move forward with having an architect draw up plans for potential uses, said Van Guilder.

Turlock resident Bob Puffer is hoping the City will consider building a roller rink in the 12,000 square foot armory.

"We used to have a popular roller hockey league," said Puffer.

City Council District 2 candidate Gil Esquer voiced his approval of repurposing the facility.

"Especially in District 2, it's something we could use for the community. I just don't want to see it sold off. I think we could use it," he said.

According to Director Van Guilder, the timing of the State ending their lease couldn't be better, with the Sports and Recreation Facilities Prioritization and Feasibility Study just wrapping up.

"We'll be hearing what the community would like to see," she said of possible new recreation uses for the armory building."

"I think the possibilities are endless," said Council member Bill DeHart. "It's an opportunity for Turlock to have a potential jewel for the westside."

Also on Tuesday, the City Council approved forgoing the formal bid process to purchase 42 self-contained breathing apparatus and associated equipment from Cascade Fire Equipment in the amount of $392,361.

The Council found it was appropriate to purchase the equipment without a formal bid process due to the Turlock Fire Department's imminent need of the equipment — as all the current air tanks will be at the end of their 15-year lifespan come spring 2017 — and Cascade Fire Equipment has agreed to pass on special pricing to the Turlock Fire Department, which results in over $219,000 in savings.

Turlock Fire Captain Casey Cockrell has been working with other fire agencies in the county since 2012 to find the best option in replacing the outdated equipment, as a number of other departments were all facing the same situation with outdated breathing apparatus.

Cockrell said the Turlock Fire Department has put in over 200 hours of maintenance and testing on its older equipment. Even with the maintenance, he said, the equipment just wears out putting firefighters who rely on the apparatus to breathe in hazardous situations.

"They take a beating because that is the nature of the job," said Cockrell of the breathing apparatus.

Mayor Gary Soiseth encouraged the fire department and other city departments to not hesitate to bring issues of health and safety to the city manager and then the Council.

"This council places (health and safety) at a high priority," said Soiseth.

Costa, Gray propose congressional bill to address critical physician shortage in rural areas
Costa and Gray
San Joaquin Valley congressional members Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, left, and Rep. Adam Gray, D-Merced, are shown discussing their bill H.R. 2106 in a virtual press conference on Tuesday.

BY TIM SHEEHAN

CV Journalism Collaborative

Two San Joaquin Valley congressional representatives have introduced a bill that could help address the vast shortage of doctors in the region, particularly in underserved areas. 

Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, and Rep. Adam Gray, D-Merced, say the Medical Education Act would, if passed, establish a program of grants to support expanded medical education programs in underserved areas of the nation.

The Valley could be one of the key areas that would benefit from the legislation. California has about 90 primary care doctors per 100,000 residents statewide, the federal Health Resources & Services Administration reported in November 2024. 

That’s more than the ratio in some states, and less than some others. The nationwide ratio is about 84 doctors per 100,000 residents.

But in the San Joaquin Valley, home to about 4.3 million people, doctors are much more scarce – about 47 primary care physicians per 100,000 residents, according to Dr. Tom Utecht, chief medical officer at the Fresno-based Community Health System.

That number is “a little over half of what is necessary to take care of a population,” Utecht said Tuesday in a video press conference. “We have the lowest physicians-per-capita rate in all of California, in the San Joaquin Valley.”

Introduced last month, the Medical Education Act is something of a placeholder for the time being until the Congressional Research Service can weigh in with financial estimates of what is needed in different parts of the country, Costa said. 

A companion version was introduced in March in the U.S. Senate by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-West Virginia, and Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Los Angeles.

At this point, the legislation does not specify how much money will ultimately be sought or how grants would be structured.

Costa said the shortage of doctors in the region “is combined with language barriers, cultural barriers and distances … and that would really go for rural parts of our country regardless where folks live.”

“If you live in rural areas, it’s just more difficult to have access to good quality health care,” he added.

Costa said the legislation, if it can survive a Republican-controlled House and Senate and a Republican president, “would be transformative because it would invest expanded resources to minority-serving institutions and colleges located in rural and underserved areas to establish schools of medicine and osteopathic medicine.”

The bill would also create an avenue for more historically Black colleges and universities, as well as Hispanic-serving institutions, to establish medical education programs, Costa said.

Gray noted that when he was in the state Legislature, he and colleagues “worked to get hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to expand the UC Merced campus, to ultimately secure the funding to put the first medical education building up on campus.”

Gray added that the UC San Francisco’s medical education program in Fresno “is an important part of creating the (medical) workforce of the future for the valley, but more importantly, solving this access to care issue that plagues Valley communities.”

At UC Merced, director of medical education Dr. Margo Vener said there has been a surge of interest in the university’s program that funnels students through an undergraduate program for their bachelor of science degree through a medical school degree in collaboration with UC San Francisco.

“All the students that we are enrolling are from the Valley and for the Valley, because they want to really make a difference in promoting health in their communities,” Vener said. That, she added, is likely to eventually translate to those would-be doctors to stay in the Valley to practice medicine.

“The data suggests that two factors really strongly influence where physicians stay to practice,” Vener said. “One of them is where they’re from, which, of course, is why we’re recruiting students from the Valley for the Valley just to stay (and) be doctors for their community. And the other factor is where you went to residency. Those are the two biggest drivers.”

That’s something that was underscored by Dr. Kenny Banh, assistant dean of undergraduate education at UCSF Fresno. “Regional campuses such as UC Merced and UCSF Fresno not only grow doctors, but they take those doctors, physicians and medical students from their communities in the region, and train them in those regions to go back to be physicians in those areas,” he said.

While the costs of the Costa-Gray legislation are yet to be determined, Banh said there are also costs associated with doing nothing to expand medical education.

“There’s health care costs, regardless of how we work it, if we don’t invest in having an adequate supply of physicians,” Banh said. “There’s a cost on the human that can’t access care” and doesn’t get to a doctor until a condition is not treatable “or with significantly worse morbidity and mortality outcomes.”

“And that cost is borne by health systems taxpayers, one way or the other,” Banh added.

But even if the Costa-Gray bill were to pass in this congressional session, the payoff of home-grown medical schools producing a bumper crop of physicians in the Valley or other deprived parts of the country would be years down the road.

“I think it’s really important to understand why we need to invest now for our future, because it takes so darn long” for a student to go from being a college freshman to a practicing doctor, surgeon or specialist, UC Merced’s Vener said. 

After a four-year bachelor’s degree, a student must then complete four years of medical school, which in turn is followed by a residency of three to five years.

“Then often people will do a fellowship to become, for example, a cardiologist or a gastroenterologist or something like that,” she added.

“If you start investing in just one student now, it’s going to take such a long time before they really are there to take care of you at that moment when you need them to be your gastroenterologist, your cardiologist, your emergency physician, or, dare I say, your family doctor,” Vener said.

That, she said, is why it’s also necessary to expand residency programs that can attract would-be physicians into the region in hopes that they will remain once they complete their training. “We need those doctors now, and that’s why this effort is important,” Vener said, “because this is what will both inspire people to stay, but also inspire people to really come and embrace the communities and serve them.”

In a related development, state Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria, D-Fresno, recently introduced a bill for the University of California system to develop a comprehensive funding plan for expanding the current SJV Prime+ BS-to-MD partnership between UC San Francisco and UC Merced, with the goal of transitioning the program to a fully independent medical school operated by UC Merced.

“We have seen firsthand the impacts of medical workforce shortages throughout the Central Valley,” Soria said in a prepared statement. “AB 58 would help ensure the Legislature is equipped with the information needed to secure appropriate funding for the medical education provided for our community at UC Merced.”

— Tim Sheehan is the Health Care Reporting Fellow at the nonprofit Central Valley Journalism Collaborative. The fellowship is supported by a grant from the Fresno State Institute for Media and Public Trust. Contact Sheehan at tim@cvlocaljournalism.org.