While music from the nearby sound stage entertained Tracy residents during the annual Day in the Park, Scouts tended four fires and saluted flags that were unfurled and placed into the flames. The Boy Scouts and the U.S. military are the only groups with Congressional approval to dispose of American flags.

Boy Scout Troop 515’s Douglas Palmer salutes as the Scouts retire American flags Wednesday at the rose garden in Lincoln Park. Tracy residents were invited to bring their faded and tattered U.S. flags to the retiring ceremony where they could be discarded of honorably.

Glenn Moore/Tracy Press

It was the second year the Scouts invited the Tracy community to take faded and tattered Stars and Stripes to be honorably retired. Assistant scoutmaster Alan Habberstad said the group hopes to make it a mainstay of Tracy’s Fourth of July lineup.

“Our plans are to continue this as long as the city has this going on, or as long as the city allows us to do this,” he said.

Habberstad said about 515 flags would be retired Wednesday, in addition to the 85 flags that were burned Tuesday night.