Editor, Manteca Bulletin,
It seems as though the people of Manteca are being taken for a ride, by the mayor and council. This city issues permits for a vast amount of homes this city doesn’t need. Then they want to convey costs to new homeowners, by imposing a Landscape Maintenance District on them. They want them to pay for parks that subdivisions can do without. We currently have an overkill of parks. We need to phase many of the parks out, to save this city money. Many of the parks are seldom used. How can the city make the claim they want affordable housing, while they constantly impose costs on new home buyers?

Here is another confusing example of charges to residents. The city imposes water restrictions on residents to conserve water. Then they ink hundreds of homes to be built and share the limited water. They set the amount we can use monthly and penalize us for exceeding that amount. I don’t see the council conserving to protect our limited water, they are conserving to allow for hundreds of new homes.

They raised our water rates threefold before a low bid came in that saved them a lot of money. Then they used the excessive money generated by the low bid for a spending account. They transferred three employees to this account and took thousands from the account to build a maintenance facility. It seems the restricted funding isn’t restricted after all.

The excess should have been rebated to the residents. This is a backdoor tax on the public. The city violates restricted funding, so why didn’t they save three employees that were laid off, by transferring them to the solid waste account. Instead the city bought a $282,000 hybrid garbage truck, using the solid waste account. People are expendable in lieu of purchasing by this council. We do need change.