The City Council has effectively divided the citizens of Tracy into “Them vs. Us.” Never before has there been such a void in the true information being fed to the residents.

The well-meaning “sports enthusiasts” are buying hook, line and sinker the rhetoric from developers and pressuring the council to move into development agreements, which are the wrong way to go any way you look at them.

TRAQC is not a dirty word. This is a group of sincere citizens who have nothing financially to gain in opposing the city’s actions, while everyone who disagrees with Tracy Region Alliance for a Quality Community is in it, at some level, for his or her benefit.

Have you read TRAQC’s candidates’ “Contract with Tracy” They want a sports center built even sooner than Ellis/Tracy Hills developers are proposing. The city has the funds and several properties to start an aquatics center/sports field today if the city really wanted to do it. The city wants to use the aquatics center as an excuse to go forward with the developer contracts with Mike Sousa and Les Serpa. Why

After reading the Tracy Press on Tuesday, I am more optimistic about our city than I have in a long time. The straightforward promise of mayoral candidate Celeste Garamendi and council candidates Carole Dominguez and Roger Adhikari to make long-overdue changes in the city was refreshing. Every one of the points in their Contract with Tracy is important, and I am certain it will be just the beginning of the progress they will make.

I look forward to a new day where our elected officials have a better vision for our town — where our goal is to make Tracy a great place for all of us to live, and where our city will put the needs of the ordinary citizens first.

I am in favor of their Contract with Tracy, not a contract with developers. We should not be divided in what we want to accomplish.

• Janet Greenhow, a local paralegal and legal document assistant, is from a six-generation Tracy family and is a member of the Tracy Region Alliance for a Quality Community.