A memorial honoring those in Manteca who have served America may be built on the site of the downtown tennis courts at Center and Poplar streets.
Mayor Willie Weatherford is asking his colleagues during Tuesday’s 7 p.m. City Council meeting to conceptually approve the site for a veteran’s memorial. Once that is done, the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars will work on designs for a memorial and identify potential funding sources.
Meanwhile, staff at the direction of the Manteca Recreation and Parks Commission is looking into whether there is sufficient enough interest to consider converting the tennis courts into pickleball courts. That analysis will continue regardless of the council’s decision. Both uses could conceivably take place on the site that includes two tennis courts, a lawn area along Poplar and the former Scout Hut.
The mayor met with representatives of the two groups that have been discussing putting in place a veterans’ memorial similar to those built recently in Ripon and Lathrop.
The group had considered other locations including Library Park, on the Big League Dreams site at Daniels Street and Milo Candini Drive and directly across the street from the BLD sports complex.
The veterans concluded a downtown site was more appropriate and that the Center and Poplar location was the best alternative.
The most ambitious non-downtown proposal was on the city-owned site across from the BLD complex where San Joaquin County has committed to build a South County government center in the coming years. That design included shallow tidal basins lined with the flags of the various services.
In the coming years, a fallen serviceman - Marine Cpl. Charles Palmer who was killed in Iraq - will be honored with a neighborhood park named in his honor as part of the Raymus Homes’ 538-home Oleander Estates planned in Manteca along Woodward Avenue, west of Union Road.
Existing memorials in Manteca include:
• The memorial to the fallen in World War II, World War II, and the Korean War at the entrance plaza of the Manteca Library directly across the street from the proposed veterans memorial site.
• Seventeen individual plaques on 17 rocks representing each of the 17 men who lost their lives in Vietnam that are placed in front of Brock Elliott School. The school was named after Brock Elliott who was the first from Manteca to fall in that war.
• A plaque inset on a rock near the flag poles at the entrance to the BLD sports complex that honors Charles Palmer.
Those are in addition to a portable wall of honor listing the nearly 1,000 Manteca area residents that served in World War II plus the Traveling Tribute to the fallen in the Global War on Terror.
The City council meets at the Civic Center, 1001 W. Center St.
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