Manteca Police — responding to concerns that Woodard Avenue by Woodward Park has turned into a Northern San Joaquin Valley version of the Bonneville Salt Flats — conducted a speed survey on Thursday, March 3, in the 700 block of East Woodward Avenue.
Of the 1,391 vehicles radar recorded speeds on that day, the 85 percentile speed of all traffic was 46 mph. That measurement is critical since it dictates— within a 5 mph variance — the speed that cities can set speed limits on streets where police employ radar. The actual posted speed on Woodward Avenue is 45 mph. Enough vehicles were traveling under 45 mph — 132 to be exact — to drop the average speed to 40 mph.
Not all drivers were angels as one driver was clocked going 61 mph past the park.

Manteca recycles
477M gallons
of wastewater
There was 2,550,714 gallons of tertiary disinfected recycled wastewater used for constriction dust control in Manteca last year.
That means water trucks traveling to the purple fire hydrant at the treatment plant avoided using enough potable water needs to meet the year round needs of 39 Manteca households since the water would have come from potable drinking water supplies had construction crews tapped into regular fire hydrants as they have in past years.
At the same time 474 million gallons of secondary treated wastewater were used to irrigate 260 acres of alfalfa and Sudan grass fields to provide feed grown on city land at the treatment plant leased by an area farmer. That’s the equivalent if the water needs of 7,214 Manteca households for a year. The big difference is much of the water used flows to the treatment plant in a dedicated pipeline that is used to irrigate crops from the cleaning of bell peppers at Eckert’s on Moffat Boulevard.
The Eckert pipeline avoids eating up expensive treatment plant capacity for agricultural waste water that — once treated — would have been dumped into the San Joaquin River.
The water used for dust control also would have been sent to the river.