In his Saturday commentary regarding the city’s plans for recreational facilities, Wyatt Weisel from the Keenan Land Co. raises many questions that cannot be answered until city staff has concluded its negotiations with The Surland Cos. and AKT Development/Souza Realty. At that time, a recommended agreement will be sent on to the Tracy City Council, where council members will have an opportunity to review and the community will have an opportunity to comment.

As the chief executive of Keenan Land Co., Weisel hopefully knows that negotiations are conducted in private and that negotiated agreements are made public only when an agreement is reached.

In his commentary, Weisel showcases his plan for building sports and aquatics facilities and presents this as an alternative to the development agreements the city is negotiating. This alternate plan proposes that the city build these facilities on land purchased from Keenan Land, using taxpayer funds scraped from the city’s reserve fund. I fail to see how this proposal is an improvement over the city’s plans. The city’s reserve fund balances are insufficient to pay for these facilities, and it would be financially irresponsible for the city to dip into these rainy-day funds to pay for these or any other project.

The city’s plan for an aquatics center is the best possible alternative, providing the highest net benefit to the community. The city is negotiating a development agreement with Surland which is proposing to design and build a full-featured, family-oriented, $20 million aquatics center on land it will donate to the city. Most importantly 100 percent of the cost of this facility will be funded by Surland and requires no use of city tax funds. In exchange, their key requirement is to receive priority rights to 200 building permits per year when they become available in the year 2012.

The alternate plan proposed by Weisel is a vague and unfunded plan that raises even more questions than the ones he posed in his commentary.

• Michel Bazinet, a Tracy resident, was a member of a city of Tracy task force that recommended possible sites for an aquatics center to the Tracy City Council.