WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE: The Manteca City Council has given the Manteca Unified School District permission to connect its new headquarters at Louise Avenue and Airport Way, shown above, to city water lines before annexing into the city, but only if the board agrees to annex the adjacent school farm, too.

The City of Manteca will allow the local school district to connect its new three-story office building to city water pipes, even though the district has not yet annexed the property into city limits — but there's a catch.

Acting unanimously, the Manteca City Council on Monday told Superintendent Cathy Nichols-Washer that if the district wants city water, it must first change its pending annexation papers to include the district's entire property at Louise Avenue and Airport Way.

So far, the school board has sought to annex only the southernmost 18 acres of the parcel, upon which the new district headquarters is swiftly taking shape, leaving its adjacent 45-acre farm on county land.

Trustees have resisted annexing the farm out of fears that it would fall victim to encroaching development, and that students’ cows and pigs would offend city-dwellers' dainty noses.

But with industry springing up west of Airport Way, councilmen have argued that the whole parcel, farm and all, must be annexed to keep Manteca growing in an orderly fashion.

“We’re talking about a major industrial development and we don’t want to lose that to the county,” councilman Jack Snyder said Monday. “We need that, and you happen to be a part of that building block.”

The district is in a bind. Building a well could cost up to $2 million, according to Dan Eavenson of MCR Engineering, and it might be impossible to find potable drinking water at all, because of a site nearby that was once a magnesium plant.

Workers in the portable office buildings have been drinking bottled water for some 30 years.

Plus, the district faces a time crunch. Water must be hooked up before desks and workers can be moved into the building, and the move must take place when classrooms are empty over a few days in late June, so the shutdown of district computer systems won’t disrupt schools.

Several city leaders on Monday openly acknowledged the district’s predicament, and further noted that access to city water is the one “bargaining chip” the city has to coax the district to comply with its annexation request.

”A well is not a realistic option for you. I don’t know if your board has considered that,” Mayor Willie

Weatherford said Monday, addressing Nichols-Washer. ”I do not see us losing our bargaining chip, especially with the school board, (for) the annexation of that property and the orderly growth of the City of Manteca.”

In the same vote, the council did try to alleviate some of the school board’s fears, reiterating a prior commitment to let the district farm its property for as long as it wished.

The school board must now decide whether to give in to the city’s demands and change its annexation request, or — an unlikely choice — spend millions of dollars to become self-sufficient on county land.

The issue may be discussed at the next school board meeting on May 20, but an agenda had not been finalized as of press time.

The council did not grant access to city sewer pipes. Building the necessary leach fields and tanks would cost the district around $600,000, Eavenson estimated.