You can say the Manteca is wasting $3.8 million on building an interactive water play feature.

You can say the city shouldn’t spend $500,000 on an outdoor fitness court at Woodward Park.

That’s an opinion.

You can demand the city spend the money on streets or hire more police with it instead.

That’s an opinion too, but there is a rather big asterisk that follows.

The asterisk?

You’d be demanding the city blatantly commit a criminal act and basically defraud people who are taxpayers.

The money the city is using for both Woodward Park projects is from growth fees collected on new construction for parks as authorized by the California Legislature when they adopted the Mitigation Act Fee in 1987.

While they are fees per se and not outright taxes, they are seen by many as pass through taxes although that is technically not correct.

The 1987 act was put in place by the legislature as a way for cities to fund municipal facility needs that growth creates in the aftermath of the passage of Proposition 13.

Call it a work around of Proposition 13 if you want.

Before Prop. 13 passed, many cities raised property taxes on owners of existing homes to help pay for additional infrastructure to accommodate growth.

Growth fees are assessed only on new development and can only be spent on what they are collected for, which is addressing the impact of new growth and not existing city infrastructure and amenity deficits.

Knowing that, there are critics of the city who will still say they don’t care, the city should spend the money anyway on something else like police or streets.

To be blunt, continuing to assert the city should try to do something illegal that would fill a hotel or two with lawyers hell-bent on suing Manteca to Kingdom Come is just as arrogant as bicyclists driving down the 120 Bypass in a pack and popping wheelies.

It would also be telling the city to defraud a select group of taxpayers — the buyers of all those $700,000 new homes paying $7,000 in property taxes who proportionally pay a lot for more general fund services than those yapping for the park fees to be diverted to street work.

The fraud part?

All of the growth fees developers pay are collapsed into the price of a new home.

Manteca’s new taxpayers are therefore paying the fees that some contend are indirect taxes but technically aren’t.

The fees were charged and collected on the legal premise they can only be used for specific purposes.

To do otherwise, is fraud.

Those new homes buyers are also taxpayers.

City critics claiming the water play feature and outdoor sports court are a waste of taxpayers’ dollars and should be spent for other city recreational amenities is one thing.

Demanding the city take illegal action by diverting the park fees that would essentially defraud taxpayers that paid the fees which are not technically taxes is as wrong as one can be.

The wording of the state law is neither vague, nor does it have loopholes.

It was straight forward wording demanded by taxpayer advocates to protect taxpayers.

In short, the rage expressed supposedly on behalf of taxpayers on the Internet — the bottomless pit of indignation, justified and otherwise — is demanding the city to defraud a select group of taxpayers.

Connect the dots.

It’s not only a logical conclusion but it is actually what it is — an incessant rattling to hijack funds that California taxpayer advocacy groups fought for years in the legislature and courts to assure would not happen.

You may not like what they are spending the money on, but the law and the implied contract made with new homebuyers say the water play feature and fitness court — or other recreational amenities — are the only things it can be legally spent on.

It’s also a safe bet that those that have paid the fees — and continue to do so as it is in the mix of the cost of the home that they needed a mortgage to buy — are not among those demanding Manteca spend the money collected from them for parks to go toward repairing streets in existing sections of Manteca.

They are expecting recreational amenities.

Amenities, by the way, the whole community can access.

If you are a critic of city hall, you can’t have it both ways.

You can’t demand they follow the law and then demand they don’t follow the law when it comes to your own personal agenda or beliefs.

That doesn’t mean critics shouldn’t be vocal.

If they indeed believe it is a waste to spend the park fees on the two amenities in question because they have a better suggestion on how the money can be spent on recreational facilities in Manteca, they need to make that known.

It is clearly way past being too late for the water play feature that is almost done.

The barn door has opened on the fitness court, but if it is such a vile and atrocious waste of money as some are claiming, then by all means rally the forces and launch a full-blown drive to reverse the decision.

But here’s the rub.

What do you want the city to legally spend the money on?

The original plan for Woodward Park envisioned horseshoe pits where the outdoor fitness center is going.

Perhaps the community needs a lighted horseshoe pit complex in that location like a massive pickleball court complex the city’s consultant suggested Manteca due with the lighted baseball field at Marion Elliott Park across from the Powers Avenue Fire station.

After all, the existing city horseshoe pits at Library Park have hundreds of people lined up each week waiting to us them.

You don’t like the city, you don’t like fact Manteca doesn’t have pristine street pavement everywhere you drive, or you don’t like Manteca —with 20 less police officers and basically the same population as Tracy — has roughly the same crime rate as Tank Town.

However, to morph that into a non-stop demand that elected leaders violate their oath of office to uphold California’s laws by the wantonly illegal act of diverting restrict funds is plain wrong.

It is an opinion.

But it has no legal, moral, or ethical basis that it is factually right to demand and/or assert that they do.

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