Tesoro Park is the Manteca neighborhood park of the future.

It will look like most other parks complete with playground, trees, and grass. The big difference is in who pays to maintain the park that will cost $117,000 a year. Instead of taxpayers doing so through the general fund that is currently in deficit mode, it will be the 485 eventual homeowners in the neighborhood through assessments via a landscape maintenance district.

The City Council when they meet Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Civic Center, 1001 W. Center St., are being asked to place a $221.37 assessment per parcel to pay for the cost of the LMD work. The Tesoro subdivision consists of 485 residential lots bounded by Atherton Drive Van Ryn Avenue and Woodward Avenue. Last year’s assessment of $440.42 per lot was suspended for the current fiscal year because much of the sound wall landscaping hasn’t been completed. Adding the park, though, created a need to put an assessment in place.

The 9.6-acre park in southeast Manteca was annexed to the existing Tesoro Landscape Maintenance District (LMD) after the developers – Standard Pacific Homes and Woodside Homes – agreed to do so in exchange for an extension of their sewer allocation time limits.

The move to annex the park to the landscape maintenance district will save the general fund $117,000 a year.

It will be the third park maintained in this manner in Manteca. The others are Rodoni Estates and Valley Park.

Municipal policy is now to include all future neighborhood parks as part of landscape maintenance districts when new subdivisions are built.

It is designed to take pressure off the general fund that helps cover the upkeep for almost all of Manteca’s 50 city parks. The budget crisis has forced Manteca to reduce its park staff by half.