Manteca City Clerk Joann Tilton knows a thing or two about marathons.
Her best time in the 26.2 mile race is 4 hours and 39 minutes.
“I don’t run a fast marathon,” Tilton said.
But that was lightning fast compared to the longest Manteca City Council meeting — 8 hours and 5 minutes. It ended at 3:05 a.m.
That was back in the days of the epic fight over Big League Dreams sports complex that the city originally wanted to locate in Woodward Park.
Tilton spoke Thursday during the Manteca Rotary meeting at Ernie’s Rendezvous Room.
Tilton is retiring in March after 35 years working for the city.
She started on April Fool’s Day in 1981 in the planning department. Three years later the city manager asked if she wanted to fill in the vacant city clerk’s post. She thought why not since it couldn’t be much different than her job with the planning department that also required her to take commission meeting minutes.
After that they told her that in order to keep her job she had to run for election in a few months and that she would have to run the election as well.
Sixteen regular council elections, three special council selections, five city managers, six elected mayors and 10 different combinations of council members later she’s going to attend her last meeting as a city clerk.
That first election she conducted in 1984 cost the city $1,900. The last election in November 2014 cost $50,754.

Enlisting more help
for bypass safety
Manteca Mayor Steve DeBrum is tapping into the private sector as well to enlist muscle in his effort to see if adding an additional merge lane from eatsbo8udn 120 Bypass to southbound Highway 99 can occur sooner instead of later.
He’s meeting with Mountain Valley Express owner Scott Blevins.
Blevins was last year’s president of the California Trucking Association,
The MVE is a perennial winner of safety awards for the statewide organization.
As a trucking firm executive, he knows firsthand of the danger of trucks getting cut-off in heavy freeway traffic.