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Maynor wants to keep Lathrop safe & united as one community
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LATHROP – Brent Maynor pays attention when he’s at City Hall.

With commitments to three Mayor’s committees and a seat on Lathrop’s Parks and Recreation Commission, the local father – who is again seeking a seat on the City Council – makes sure that he takes in as much information as he possibly can whenever he’s at a city function.

Part of it is just the desire to be informed. But part of it also the need to know that the place where he’s raising his family will retain the same low-crime, community-oriented feel that made the city desirable in the first place.

And he’s hoping that by landing a seat on the City Council – one of nearly a dozen people running for two vacant seats – he’ll have a hand in making sure that he’ll be able to secure that future for both his family and thousands of others as Lathrop enters a vital period of growth.

“I love where I live,” Maynor said. “It’s a great city and I want to do what I can to see it become one of the best and most prosperous cities in the area.

“People would really be surprised with (how) much support we see from volunteers at events and people willing to help one another. These are things that I want to make sure continue.”

But that’s not to say that there isn’t a little bit of room for improvement.

Maynor’s chief concern – public safety – is rooted in the concern that rising crime rates in neighboring communities would spill over onto Lathrop’s streets. With Stockton’s financial problems and a murder rate that’s out of control, Maynor says that he wants to make sure that people can walk down the street and feel safe and not have to worry that somebody will walk up to them in broad daylight with a gun and demand their jewelry – a crime on the rise in Lathrop’s northerly neighbor.

He’s a supporter of the one-cent sales-tax increase on the November ballot – Measure C – which will provide additional funding to both the City of Lathrop (which administers funding to Lathrop Police Services) and the Lathrop-Manteca Fire District. He hopes that its passing will restore the peace of mind that residents deserve.

“I think that the Sherriff’s Department is doing a great job here in our community – there are some issues but I don’t think there’s a city out there that doesn’t have its share of issues,” he said. “People have the right to feel safe. We don’t want or need crime to take off here like it has in other cities.

“Our firefighters are also underfunded, and hopefully that tax initiative will properly address that if the residents approve it.”

A former construction worker that was injured on the job, Maynor has seen growth on the front lines – from Modesto to San Jose – and knows the bedroom-community stigma that is commonly applied to places like Lathrop and other Central Valley hamlets.

A single project like River Islands, Maynor says, will add thousands of homes to the community – not counting other developments that are on the horizon – and help attract businesses that are looking for a certain population before locating.

With attracting head-of-household jobs as one of his priorities, making sure that Lathrop can be a self-sustaining community is an idea, he says, that isn’t too far off on the horizon.

And it’s when he gets out and talks to people that he truly gets an understanding of what Lathrop’s residents want to see – whether it’s something as major as getting regional businesses to locate or as minor as what people call sections of town.

“One of the things that I’m hearing is that people don’t like the idea of an East and West Lathrop,” he said. “We’re one city that just happens to be separated by a freeway, and that’s something that could bring the community closer together.”