The city is set to expand its borders by about 300 acres, following a 3-2 vote by the Patterson City Council at its April 21 meeting.

Most of the expansion is set to occur on the east side of Highway 33, close to Poppy Avenue. The plan is to build a 52-acre industrial park.

The city owns most of the land in the area and intends to use it to expand water services. Private investors own the remainder.

There are also patches of city-owned, noncontiguous land included in the annexation, most of which are east of the city. The largest patch is adjacent to the city’s sewer treatment plant on Elfers Road.

The Stanislaus County Local Agency Formation Commission will have to approve the annexation before the project can move forward.

Council members Dominic Farinha and Annette Smith cast the “no” votes. They wanted preservation measures for agricultural land included in the proposal.

Those measures, which were recommended by city staff, were removed when the Patterson Planning Commission reviewed the matter March 26.

“Development is a privilege, not a right,” Smith said.

The guideline would have required developers to purchase agricultural land and set it aside for perpetuity to replace the ag land they intend to develop. Almost all the land near Poppy Avenue is now designated for agricultural use except for a small pocket of housing.

The removal of the ag mitigation measures came at the request of Max Garcia, who’s engineering the project. Garcia said because two other large annexations did not have agriculture mitigation imposed, neither should his project.

The projects he was referring to were the West Patterson Business Park — a massive industrial park that now houses two distribution centers and several businesses — and the Villages of Patterson — a 3,100-home project in northeast Patterson that’s been hibernating since early 2007.

The council did not require ag mitigation from those projects because of their public benefits — jobs from the business park and price-fixed homes and an apartment complex from the Villages.

In Tuesday’s approval, the idea of a public benefit did not enter the argument — just that a precedent of removing the requirement had been set. That triggered Smith’s opposition.

“I haven’t heard the overriding public benefit,” Smith said.

Others wanted a more hands-off approach to regulations.

“I believe in an owner’s right to do whatever they want with their land, as long as they follow guidelines,” Mayor Becky Campo said.

Contact John Saiz at 892-6187 or john@pattersonirrigator.com.