Water got cut off Wednesday to 12 apartments at a complex in the 1300 block of East North Street.
The problem had to do with the bill payment. But it wasn’t because the owner didn’t pay the City of Manteca bill. They did. It got cut off because someone at the city’s Finance Department inadvertently entered the wrong bank routing numbers setting in  motion a series of events that first incorrectly declared the complex was two months late in paying its water bill that lead to the water being turned off.
It took most of Wednesday to clear up the snafu but water service was restored by 4:30 p.m.
Several hundred accounts a year get turned off by the city for failure to pay water bills.

Reducing food source
for some homeless
There may be an added bonus to the City of Manteca’s food waste recycling program.
The city is employing locked collection bins to minimize mess and potential problems with rodents and insects. In doing so, it means restaurants for the most part will no longer have to worry about the homeless and others shifting through their trash bins in search of edible food.
A number of businesses have complained to the city over the past year about having the contents of their trash bins dumped on the ground by people shifting through them for food. The problem was particularly acute for dining places that have buffets where they toss the leftover contents each night.
Large grocery stores such as Food-4-Less have already been securing food waste inside of their back rooms and waiting until collection time to place bins outside.

Mealworms love
eating Styrofoam
There is one joint green effort by the Manteca Unified School District and City of Manteca that has been derailed — the recycling of Styrofoam lunch plates.
For a while, the plates that are place in a device that stacks them and then crushed into a cube were being used by a firm that used recycled Styrofoam to make other products. However, the demand for recycled Styrofoam isn’t big enough.
So the city tried mealworms.
It seems mealworms can survive by eating nothing but Styrofoam. That’s the good news. The bad news is it would take millions upon millions of mealworms to consume what one school generates in a day. Stanford University research shows that 100 mealworms consume 34 to 39 milligrams of Styrofoam a day — roughly the weight of a pill. The mealworms on an all-Styrofoam diet were as healthy as those mealworms on a normal diet of bran.
The biodegradable waste they reduced was deemed safe enough to use in soil for plants and crops.
The school district continues to stack and crush Styrofoam to reduce space taken up in trash bins. which in  turns keep their garbage bills lower.