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Manteca keeps on trucking (aka building homes) while wearing rose-colored glasses
PERSPECTIVE
louise map
This aerial photo shows homes in the upper left corner whose buyers had to initial disclosure statements that a railroad passes by their neighborhood. Those buyers have been a part of efforts over the years to press the city to spend money to create quiet zones in a bid to get rid of train whistles.

Carol Nunes knows the truth.

And so likely do those that deal in the alternate reality of planning consultants.

Carol’s reality is Manteca, California, on planet earth.

The reality of planning consultants acting as “neutral” judges on the merits of proposed developments  is Seahaven Island.

That’s because their value system based in textbook planning with a heathy dose of Pollyanna denial of human nature at its heart emulates Seahaven Island — the idyllic  planned city enclosed in a massive Hollywood production set  depicted in Jim Carrey’s “The Truman Show.”

 Carol and her husband Al know a thing or two about human nature.

And its in the real world as opposed to Seahaven Island.

They have owned AC Trucking for 52 years.

They provide the type of jobs Manteca leaders always promise to secure with paychecks robust enough to support families.

They have 50 employees.

The truck yard they operate on Vasconcellos Avenue has 200 trucks.

Trucking is a 24/7 business. It creates noise. It creates smells. It creates dust.

A developer plans to build a number of homes next to the truck yard.

Strike that. They will face the truck yard.

Carol predicts future residents of those homes will be the death of AC Trucking.

It doesn’t matter if they sign disclosure statements acknowledging the obvious that the truck yard exists.

She can see the train coming.

More about real trains per se in a bit.

It doesn’t require buying an artificial intelligence program designed to line the pockets of Mark Zuckerburg et al to tell you what will happen.

Future residents will complain about the noise.

Future residents will complain about the smells.

Future residents will complain about the dust.

And they will complain.

They will complain to city leaders. They will complain to county departments. They will complain to stage agencies.

And they will keep complaining until they get their way.

No problem.

The planning consultants will tweak the script.

They will build a wall.

It will be a glorious and beautiful wall.

Not stacked truck container boxes as Arizona tried.

It will keep noise, sounds and dust from crossing the property border.

Maybe it will be 10 feet. Maybe it will be 14 feet.

A fellow script writer whose forte is sound will determine that.

It won’t just be a wall.

It will be landscaped.

There will be sidewalks.

A street will run along the beautiful wall.

And people will live in homes on the other side of the street with a commanding view of the wall from their front windows.

Everyone will live happily after.

But what if someone mars the beautiful wall with graffiti?

What if a hole is punched in the glorious wall?

Will it be part of a landscape maintenance district future homeowners will pay into?

Of course, no one is saying what they are thinking.

And “they” are the developer, the consultants, city staff, and elected leaders.

What are they thinking? It’s likely along the lines Al and Carol Nunes are going to eventually sell anyway.

That is the dark, dirty secret about growth done wrong.

It can put in motion events that force others to make decisions they may not want to make.

And it is being done, in this case, so an out-of-town developer can profit handsomely by using mechanisms put in place by the city for the “better good” of the community.

It’s more than a tad presumptuous.

The developer is assured of maxim return on their investment.

AC Trucking isn’t.

It has the added bonus of the developer being long gone when Al and Carol have to face the music — read that blistering attacks — about their operation.

The odds are city staff and elected leaders that vow to standfast against  such attacks will be gone as well.

Yes, Yosemite Square will provide needed housing.

But AC Trucking provides needed head of household jobs.

What is unfolding along Austin Road may be a morality play that no one wins

And the city, based on actions they put in place more than a decade ago coupled with housing mandates out of Sacramento, is powerless to stop it.

That said, the sugarcoating Truman Show style is an insult.

Yosemite Square 1.0 was approved prematurely as far as the city’s growth patterns are concerned because of the promise of office jobs that it now won’t deliver.

Yes, the traffic levels will likely end up being half of what was originally projected with the new project. But everyone fails to mention the several thousand jobs it was supposed to create are now never going to happen.

And as an ironic bonus it will create a situation that even with a wall it  will likely eventually force 50 good paying job out of existence down the road.

Yes, those people can find other jobs.

But to make such a cavalier statement you also have to concede those people who will occupy the homes to be built also could find other houses to live in.

It might be inevitable but to argue somehow that the developer by building a wall — even at 14 feet — will appease everyone reflects city leadership that has short term memory problem.

Every three years or so the city gets bombarded by angry residents whipped into a frenzy about train noise.

They go and hammer the council incessantly.

The council then agrees to fork over just under $10,000 to another script writer — a planning consultant specializing in quiet zones for railroad tracks.

The council promises to do something but then ends up deciding they can’t afford to do anything.

Of course, the charge is led by home buyers who bought homes with open eyes that were within a stone’s throw of railroad tracks.

The last train noise fight was especially ironic.

It involved residents of the neighborhood in the triangle bounded by Airport Way, Louise Avenue and the railroad tracks where up to 45 trains a day rumble by at high speeds.

It included the owners of a home that bought at the apex of the triangle on top of the Louise Avenue railroad crossing.

The city required soundwalls.

The city also required buyers initial a disclosure statement noting there was a — surprise, surprise — heavily used railroad track running by their neighborhood.

Carol is right.

AC Trucking will be repeatedly targeted by angry residents despite the sound wall and despite initializing the disclosure statement that they were buying a home across from a truck yard.

It is why at the very least the city should have required a 14-foot sound wall regardless and require landscaping aimed at baffling noise — such as California  pepper trees that grow tall and are evergreen — instead of looking aesthetically pleasing for homeowners.

But the council, didn’t do that.

Instead, they entrusted the script writers that are trained to plan in the word populated by Jim Carrey’s character Truman Burbank while everyone else lives in the real world.

 

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com

 

 

 

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