By allowing ads to appear on this site, you support the local businesses who, in turn, support great journalism.
Turlock lacks skilled workers, says economic taskforce
warehouse pic2
The Mayor's Economic Taskforce focused on one area of weakness at Tuesday's meeting, Turlocks heavy population of the unskilled and unemployed. - photo by Journal file photo
Cara Hallam
Updated: Feb 5, 2014, 2:03 AM
Published: Feb 5, 2014, 2:07 AM

The Mayor’s Economic Taskforce, whose focus is finding ways to bolster Turlock’s local economy, says that there is a high prevalence of unskilled workers in the area, and is set on trying to fix that.

Tuesday, the 25-member committee met at City Hall to continue their progress in developing a full Economic Development Plan to be presented to the City Council later this year. While reviewing the previous economic plan of 2003, the committee zeroed in on the strengths and weaknesses currently facing Turlock in the City’s attempts to attract new businesses. Of the weaknesses identified, one in particular gained considerable attention – Turlock’s heavy population of the unskilled and unemployed.

“In this area there is a lack of skills and basic employability,” said Mike Brem, vice-chair of the taskforce. “As a business owner who hires employees, I know I can speak for myself and say that this is still an issue.”

Noting the need for a better trained workforce, Brem called for suggestions from committee members on how to ensure that the City is well-equipped for new businesses seeking skilled workers. While some highlighted the public library and local university as possible resources to provide such education, a majority of the taskforce agreed that both Pitman and Turlock high schools should become better-equipped to supply vocational training programs for students who are not college bound.

“We need to find what we can do within the local high school system that will bridge the gap between high school and the workforce,” said Turlock attorney Richard Mowery. “Doing so would allow us to prepare a qualified workforce….It’s something that should start in high school before graduating, so that students can know where they’re going and where to get the resources they need. People go to college and have that guidance, but there are many who don’t go, and they have no direction.”

A 2009 survey found that within Stanislaus County, only 14.1 percent of residents age 25 and older held a bachelor’s degree or higher, leaving a majority of the local workforce ineligible for many high-skilled jobs. As Turlock continues to attract several new businesses to the shovel-ready Turlock Regional Industrial Park, City Manager Roy Wasden says that many of the new high-tech facilities will not help reduce the city’s unemployment rate of unskilled workers.

“It seems to be degree required, high-skilled jobs that we’re attracting,” said Wasden, “which is not solving our unemployment problem for unskilled individuals. It is, however, going to help keep our high-skilled residents who were previously commuting elsewhere for work, and keep their tax dollars here in Turlock, as we gain more high-skilled jobs….We’re going to evolve into the Silicon Valley of food processing, and it is becoming a very high-tech industry.”

But as the industrial side of Turlock continues to grow, several members of the task force believe there is also an immediate need for skilled workers who are not degree-holding individuals, but rather trained in hands-on, vocational skills.

“We need employees with knowledge of mechanics,” said Brem. “We know that we have a lot of unemployed, unskilled workers, so we need to find ways to reduce the unemployment for those people that we have here.”

Partnering with the City of Turlock and the taskforce is the Stanislaus Economic Development and Workforce Alliance, an organization dedicated to providing workforce training activities and business development services within the county. According to the Alliance representative, the organization does work alongside several area high schools to provide skill-level assessments for graduating students who do not plan on attending college. The assessment – a national job skills assessment system called WorkKeys – identifies and measures key workplace skills and knowledge a student possesses. After completing the assessment, students are provided with a WorkKeys Certificate to present to a potential employer. According to the Alliance, employers across the nation are using the certificate as a means to determine whether or not an applicant is qualified for employment.

Although the WorkKeys assessment is offered to any interested person through the Alliance, members of the committee continued to emphasize the need for vocational training through the school district.

“We need to make sure we’re establishing partnerships and working relationships between our business owners and the school district,” said Turlock physician Jim Reape. “It will help students see what business is about, while making sure they are receiving training.”

Aside from high school opportunities, the committee has also been seeking partnerships with California State University, Stanislaus. According to Maryn Pitt, the assistant to the City Manager for Economic Development and Housing, the City has been in contact with the professor in charge of student internships, as they plan to establish internship opportunities between college students and local businesses.

“There’s a new level of partnership that came with Dr. Sheley as he took over as president of the university,” said Wasden. “He is committed to these kinds of programs and community involvement, and that is something we really appreciate.”

The next Mayor’s Economic Task Force meeting, where members will continue to review strengths and weaknesses of the Economic Development Plan, will be held at 4 p.m. on March 4 at City Hall.

 

 

 
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.
Published: Apr 2, 2025, 4:48 AM

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.