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The City Council will give the Mayor’s Youth Support Network $1 million to help local kids, but some would rather see the money go to other groups.
Tracy will spend $1 million this year to try to help better the lives of kids by hiring extra police and recreation workers, a goal applauded even by some nonprofit workers who said the money could be better spent on groups that already work with troubled families.
To do that, the City Council on Tuesday night voted to spend $1 million to back the Mayor’s Community Youth Support Network, in part by hiring two more police officers, seven part-time recreation workers and two people to administer the effort, and a grant writer.
The organization hopes help kids in trouble through "prevention, intervention and suppression."
The network itself and its aspirations have few critics, but the way the city plans to spend the money came under fire Tuesday, mainly by people who already work with troubled kids.
Dora Contreras, the former principal for 15 years of South-West Park Elementary School, touted parenting classes at the school that she and other speakers said were battle-tested and proven to work.
They taught parents how to better deal with their kids’ antisocial behavior.
Regina Nordman is the executive director of the Vinewood Center, formerly the Tracy Mental Health Center, that runs some of the parenting classes at South-West Park. She said the center hands out hundreds of referrals to help kids who act out, and she and about a dozen of her colleagues attended the meeting.
Mayoral candidate Celeste Garamendi suggested the council put money into existing services, "not on an expanding bureaucracy."
Vinewood’s Martina Cabrera agreed.
"They’re putting money to hire people to do what we already do," she said. "That’s odd."
But City Manager Maria Hurtado said that in a network that consists of 25 agencies and people from nonprofits, city government and the school district, "We can only do one small piece."
In other matters, the council decided to tinker with its rules governing who gets to hang banners on city poles in downtown Tracy.
Military Moms asked to hang banners along 10th Street and Central Avenue with the names of Tracy servicemen and -women for 21 days before and after Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Veterans Day.
The head of the group, Marilyn Chorley, however, agreed to hang banners only on Central Avenue while city employees figure out a schedule to hang them and whether they can be displayed on 11th Street.
The Downtown Tracy Business Improvement Area worried that community associations could reserve the poles for long stretches at a time when it wants to promote downtown events. But those who run the business group were happy with the compromise of having Military Moms hang banners just on Central Avenue.
"It’ll bring people downtown just to look at the flags," said the business group’s Diana Koron.
And Chorley was happy, too.
"It’s a start," she said. "I’m not done."
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Not odd. Think about it. Gerrymander is "odd" to keep pointing out things she doesn't like. Mostly it is odd that she continues to fly under the radar with those boorish methods of badgering other politician's actions with mis-labeled intentions.
She is like a football fan who says your team won, but I don't like that the coach called that great play. So I will call it "odd" and keep dreaming that my team is not really just a losing proposition. On the sidelines. I remember kids like that when I was an adolescent.
They were odd too. And annoying. And they didn't win any popularity contests.