No one is no longer born in Manteca.

And that bothers Jacob Naven.

The Family City has two hospitals and almost 100,000 residents and growing but no labor and delivery services.

Naven — who is running for mayor in the Nov. 3 elections — understands the challenges Doctors Hospital has in securing the services of an OB/GYN willing to be on call given he is a former hospital board member.

And while he understands it’s not in the city’s bailiwick per se, Naven believes a healthy growing community needs basic medical specialties when the need arrives.

He wants the city to sit down with Doctors Hospital, Sutter Health, and Kaiser to explore ways the city could aid in enticing specialists through various measures including possibly offering a home buying loan program for medical professionals.

To be clear, it’s not just about being able to give birth or medical services.

Naven believes the city needs to work at finding ways to making Manteca more livable across the board and do so by thinking out of the box to stretch dollars as far as possible.

Naven — who is in his first race for elective office in his challenge of incumbent Mayor Singh — likes the fact the city works with the school district to share facilities.

What he doesn’t like is that it is superficial at best when it comes to big ticket items that the public may want but is also crushing to taxpayers to build such as a new library and a performing arts venue.

At the top of the list is the possibility Manteca may bond for an aquatics center with Measure Q funds that could cost sell in excess of $20 million.

Naven would prefer the city piggyback on significant taxpayer investments in swimming pools at Manteca High and Sierra High through the $159 million Measure G bond.

It may mean the city invests in possibly adding support facilities for when the city uses the pools.

Naven noted the pool use by schools and the city essentially do not overlap in the same months. It also avoids the creation of a fourth swimming pool that needs to be maintained by taxpayers and isn’t used year round.

The small businessman that owns an insurance agency doesn’t disagree with all of the moves Manteca has made during Singh’s tenure as mayor.

That said, he believes there are better ways to spend limited city income.

The experts the city hires to keep Manteca safe — the fire command and professional consultants evaluating service levels — have indicated the Louise Avenue station is inadequate, preliminary work needs to start now on prepping for a seventh station east of Highway 99, and to work toward hiring another nine firefighters to keep the ladder company staffed once the sixth fire station opens.

Given the struggles Manteca has had in getting the sixth station financed, Naven said the city might be better off looking at bonding two fire stations — either a replacement for the Louise location or one in East Manteca — instead of possibly using Measure Q to bond for two recreational amenities instead of one.

“It’s a question that needs to be asked,” Naven said, pointing out the sixth fire station has been an identified need for 15 years yet still hasn’t broken ground.

Naven, noting Measure Q passed by just 409 votes, said the council needs to double down on efforts to make sure the spending of the sales tax assures the city has the facilities to deliver basic government services over the next 20 years before delving extensively into recreational amenities.

That’s why he believes it is irresponsible for the city to spend additional Measure Q funds without at least a roadmap being adopted that offers a clear strategy on how the city will 100 percent fund the nine firefighters positions they added earlier this year with the help of a federal grant.

He wants the same done for any police department positions being funded with Measure Q.

Naven said there is a need for more police officers and firefighters but the bigger issue is to make sure Manteca can afford to keep the positions it now has filled during economic downturns.

And while he understands cities need to take risks to keep growing the economy, he is skeptical the $1.2 million acquisition of the IOOF Hall and adjoining parking lot was a wise move.

Naven noted the city went into it with just a general concept to make downtown “better’ without vetting specific ideas such as a restaurant that are high risks.

“I respect Gary and what he has tried to do in the last four years,” Naven said.

But he believes Singh has made himself the target by his extensive presence on social media, prompting a number of people “to blame him for everything that is wrong with the city.”

As such Naven would like to see more department heads and other council members featured in the city’s social media.

And instead of trying to solve every problem as he believes Singh does “at all hours of the day” to inquiries from residents even if it is just to explain how things work, Naven believes they should instead be directed to the department heads that are paid to run city services.

About Naven

Naven makes it clear he is not risk averse.

But he tempers it with lessons he learned from his childhood and navigating a business through the Great Recession.

“We’d write 50 new policies a month and then we’d loss 54 from foreclosures,” he said of his insurance agency during the Great Recession.

That meant with two young sons at the time and stay-a-home mother — they did the math and determined by the time childcare costs were factored in the type of jobs and wages available would barely be worth it — he’d have to sometimes say no to a trip to the grocery store and rely on meals from what they had in the freezer.

Naven said he wasn’t trying to paint a picture about “how tough we had it” but to illustrate the perils economic swings pose to cities as well as families.

Naven, 45, was born in a small Iowa town.

His father bought a farm in 1980.

They ended up going broke four years later and we forced to sell the farm.

His dad ended up with $800 in his pocket allowing the family to make a fresh start in Arizona.

An opportunity as a farm fertilizer salesman prompted his father to eventually move to Northern California.

Naven was raised in Rocklin where he graduated from Rocklin High in 1999.

He plays tennis in high school and then played for a year at American River College in Sacramento.

Naven, as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, went on a mission to Panama from 2000 to 2002.

It was a perfect opportunity to build on his Spanish skills given his mother spoke Spanish as a second generation Mexican-American.

The stepped up fluency in Spanish is what convinced him to decline an offer to take over a much bigger agency in Yuba City in favor of one in Manteca in 2007.

Becoming an insurance agent helped Naven deal with pressure and hone his ability to make tough decisions.

He was accepted the third of the way into a multiple-month agent training program that meant he had to catch up with the rest of the class of he wanted to pass the final exams.

“If you don’t make a sale, if you don’t pass a test, then your family doesn’t eat,” Naven said.

Naven has been a Sierra High tennis coach since 2010 in addition to his involvement with community service clubs.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com