Welcome to the People’s Republic of Tracy, where formerly conservative folks elected to the City Council continue their headfirst dive into competition with the private sector.

It was bad enough when city administrators, with the blessing of the council, made plans earlier this year to sell advertising in a magazine the city aims to publish three times a year.

Naturally, that put a frown on our faces here at the Tracy Press, where selling ads makes us our living and covers the cost of bringing you the hometown news. You’ve probably noticed it’s a rough time to sell ads for newspapers and others not named Google, dependent as we are on the health of a business to buy ads and the economy being less-than-healthy these days.

But reversing the ill health of Tracy’s retailers is what’s driving the City Council to spend its dwindling supply of tax money by the hundreds of thousands at a time when tax revenues have fallen into a manhole.

We all know about the $400,000 the city is giving away in $500 gift card increments to anyone who buys a new car in Tracy. In that case, Tracy is using tax money to give car dealers here a leg up on dealers elsewhere, making them more competitive against auto malls in other towns.

It’s called protecting one’s turf, and one could argue about whether it is an investment or a government handout. The move is expected to bring about $200,000 in sales tax revenue to the city. Certainly critics could say no business owner would spend $400,000 to earn $200,000, but at least it can be argued that it’s an investment in the future, which is why we supported it.

The city’s reasoning for pursuing the gift card program is simple and logical: It wants no more car dealerships to close their doors in Tracy. And it wants to protect its considerable infrastructure investment at the auto mall.

The auto sales tax purse used to yield more than 20 percent of all the sales tax in the city. Not only does the city want to avoid the vacancy problem, but it also wants to protect that revenue source.

So we can reason that the gift cards are a good step. Officials will claim victory years from now if no more car dealers fall victim to a downturn that more closely resembles the Great Depression than previous recessions.

But the city wants to do more. So it is also spending more than $200,000 now in the bank to promote other retailers. Some of that spending, about $48,000, has been invested in a new Web site business directory that will allow businesses free access to an online list funded by tax dollars.

Meanwhile, those of us who pay taxes and depend on online directories and advertising for our livelihood get to compete against a government program that doesn’t have to be accountable to the bottom line.

It’s one thing to ask those in the ad-sales business to compete against the city, as distasteful as that is.

But it’s another thing to ask us and others who sell ads to make a living to go toe-to-toe against a public entity that our tax dollars support so it can hand out for free what we have to charge for — so we can pay those taxes.

The city, by giving retailers free (for now, at least) space on the new city-paid-for Web site, ShopInsidetheTriangle.com, is doing just that.

Of course, it’s not free to everyone.

That Web site will cost you, the taxpayer, $48,000, and that of course will grow, as any government-run program rarely contains its costs. After all, there is the entire weight and cost of the city bureaucracy behind it, and all bureaucracies protect themselves at all costs.

Welcome to the People’s Republic.