Editor, Manteca Bulletin,

‘Tis the season for illegal fireworks once again.  

It’s already started, and will continue until well after Independence Day has come and gone. The people that perpetrate the use of illegal explosives could care less about what damage they cause to people’s property, as well as their own.  They have a total disregard for people’s safety.  They also have a total disregard for animals that freak out hearing that garbage explode.  Not to mention disrupting their neighbors continually day and night. 

Time makes no difference to them. They start early in the day, and continue well into the night, sometimes as late as 2 o’clock the next morning.  I read with amusement the articles in the Manteca Bulletin about illegal fireworks, but nothing is ever said about what enforcement procedures are in place to curtail the use of explosives. People call the police for fear of their houses being stuck by airborne explosives that are being used at any given moment, such as bottle rockets, or worse, mortars, but in most cases the police don’t respond because they claim lack of resources, so they say. 

This has been going on for years in Manteca, and nothing has ever been done to punish the people that abuse the so called laws in place dealing with this issue.  If the City Council took action, such as mandating automatic fines of $500 to $1,000 for the first offense, and mandatory 30 days jail time for every offense thereafter, the use of illegal fireworks would drop by 80 to 90%, but they act like they don’t care about what goes on in this town most of the time. It’s time they start enforcing laws to protect this town, and it’s citizens.  Illegal fireworks are illegal, so what seems to be the problem in dealing with the people that do that sort of thing?

Fred Neeleman

Manteca