Manteca Unified wants to build a bus loading zone along Chardonnay Way to enhance student safety and ease congestion in the Joshua Cowell School parking lot along Pestana Avenue.

The City of Manteca sees it as an opportunity to get the school district to pay for repairs the city hasn’t done not just to Chardonnay Way but other Heritage Ranch neighborhood streets that school buses would need to use to go to and from the loading zone.

The city’s argument: The streets they required the developer to put in place in the late-1990s weren’t designed to handle the weight of school buses.

Nor, for that matter, were they designed to handle the comparable weight of garbage trucks that the city last year started running not just two but three times a week down neighborhood streets in December.

The bus loading zone is part of work being funded by the voter approved $260 million Measure A bond to specifically modernize, enhance safety, and extend the life of existing MUSD campuses.

And because of concerns about fiducial responsibility to taxpayers by being able to maximize the effectiveness of property tax dollars collected to retire school bonds, the city’s stance will mean the district will drop the school bus loading zone project.

That means the congestion — plus the associated student safety issues — along Pestana Avenue in the mornings and afternoons won’t be reduced.

For the most part, cities such as Manteca have no authority over approving school construction projects.

Such power rests with the State Architect’s Office in Sacramento.

The “requirement” that the road work had to be done was made when the school district made a courtesy call to the municipal engineering department regarding the plans for the bus loading zone on the southern edge of the campus.

It was an outgrowth of a suggestion by the state that the second bus loading zone be added to reduce congestion and improve safety.

The existing bus loading zone is intertwined with traffic movements in the parking lot of the school built in 1995.

The engineering department stressed the standards to which the street was built wasn’t with repeat school bus traffic in mind.

As such, instead of simply repaving the streets per se — a requirement the district contends isn’t justified — the city wants the school district to further enhance the load carrying capabilities of the streets in question.

Demanding street work to strengthen or repair pavement on streets that a new bus loading would require on residential streets apparently is a new requirement.

It wasn’t an issue three years ago, when school modernization work at Manteca High added a bus drop off zone on Mikesell Street.

While buses did load and unload on Garfield Avenue before that was partially closed to accommodate the expansion of the high school campus, busses did not go down either Mikesell Street or a block of South Sheridan Avenue.

Neither street was constructed, per se, to handle bus traffic.

The city did not request MUSD improve neighborhood streets when the new Manteca High bus loading zone was added. 

That said, the new garbage rates that went into effect a year ago have a 50 cent charge built into monthly household solid waste bills to help defray the costs the city incurs from the wear and tear garbage trucks have on residential streets.

Work planned for Cowell School includes a new multipurpose room, building upgrades throughout the campus, a solar panel system with battery storage, a revamped front parking lot, asphalt work, remodeling the administration offices, and such.

The bus loading zone work won’t be done if the city insists on requiring it.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com