Nearly a year after beefing up the Code Enforcement Unit with additional personnel, the city of Ceres is noticeably cleaner, Ceres Police Captain Chris Perry reported to the Ceres City Council Monday evening.

Seven days a week, the expanded team works on cleaning up illegal dump sites, graffiti, trash in vacant lots and addressing zoning violations, public nuisances, business violations, unlicensed street vending and abandoned shopping carts.

The one-man team in place before the city hired additional staff wasn’t working keeping up, said Perry.

“It was really hard for him to handle the show all by himself,” said Perry of Senior Code Enforcement Officer Jeff Varni. Most of that time Varni was behind on getting to reports of blight or violations by 100 cases.

Now, Perry said, the city is “caught up and we actually handle calls on our GOGov app as they come in, one by one, each day.”

“If anybody reports anything to our Code Enforcement Division via the GOGov app, those calls are handled that day,” Perry told the council.

In March the city added Code Enforcement Officers Jeff Hopkins and Jack Taylor, a full-time secretary in Lauren Medina and two part-time officers, including David Garcia. The city is recruiting for the second part-time code enforcement officer.

Lt. Trenton Johnson is now overseeing Code Enforcement as the supervisor.

Read the full story at The Ceres Courier:

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