When the delegates from Gilroy’s sister city, Tecate, Mexico, go
home, it will be with sirens blaring.
When the delegates from Gilroy’s sister city, Tecate, Mexico, go home, it will be with sirens blaring.
The Gilroy, Gilroy Sunrise, Morgan Hill, Hollister, San Juan Bautista and Tecate rotaries, with a matching grant from the Rotary Foundation, raised $15,000 to purchase a 1983 fire truck and a 1987 fire engine for the city. The vehicles were presented to the city Thursday evening at a dinner.
“We’ve all contributed to making this happen,” said Peter Anderson, a member of Morgan Hill Rotary Club.
All the clubs raised money in different ways, said Anderson. They ran everything from golf tournaments to a flower sale at Goldsmiths Seeds, he said.
“If you bought flowers, you were contributing to buying these trucks,” he said.
The city of Tecate Mexico raised an additional $15,000 to buy eight police cars.
“Safety in Mexico is a big concern right now,” said Tecate Mayor Donaldo Eduardo Peñalosa Avila.
Tecate spent about $1.5 million of the city’s budget to improve safety, he said.
The cars and trucks, once part of the Gilroy fleet, are being replaced in Gilroy with newer models because emission level restrictions are higher in California than they are in Tecate or other U.S. states, Pinheiro said.
“The paint is not quite as bright as it was back in ’82 or ’83 but the engine still beats strong,” Gilroy Fire Chief Dale Foster said.
The project emerged a few years ago when Pinheiro and Councilman Russ Valiquette visited Tecate and learned the city needed updated police and fire equipment. This year, when Chief Foster approached Pinheiro with a list of surplus vehicles and the Gilroy Rotary Club started looking for an international service project to fund, Pinheiro put the three groups together.
“We wanted the sister cities to be more than sisters by name,” he said.
Several people at the ceremony were also thinking of new ways to bring sister cities together.
“We would like to pick another city and do the same thing,” said Kai Lai, president of the Sister Cities Association and a director on the Rotary’s board.
Meanwhile, the equipment will be helping Tecate – perhaps as early as this summer.
“Now is the time of the brush fires in Tecate, so these two trucks are going to help a lot over there,” said Felipe Villaobos, Tecate’s fire cheif, through a translator.
Tecate is small in people, but big in territory, Avila said. The city is home to 101,000 people and has six fire stations – two in the city and four in rural areas. The donated trucks will go to the main station. Before Thursday, Tecate had 12 fire trucks, four of which did not work.
Delegates from Gilroy’s sister cities in Japan and the Azores were also present for the celebration Thursday night.
South Valley Suzuki Strings, which has traveled to many of the sister cities, performed for the crowd. Dressed in red and green – the colors on Mexico’s flag – the group played several songs and ended with “Let There be Peace on Earth,” inviting the audience from cities around the world to join in the song.
But the crowd appeared most unified when Japan’s Garlic Lady – their equivalent of the Gilroy Garlic Festival Queen – went to perform a traditional Japanese dance only to have her music not play. The audience began to clap, at first uncertainly and then more steadily, keeping a solid beat while the dancer performed.
This exemplified the sister city spirit, Pinheiro said.
“The sister cities exist to exchange culture – to exchange the good things,” he said.
