San Joaquin Delta College now looking for 'anything' to establish a Lodi presence
By Andrew Adams
News-Sentinel Staff Writer
Updated: Saturday, August 23, 2008 7:22 AM PDT
The new San Joaquin Delta College satellite campus could be a storefront in Downtown Lodi.
It could be the new tenant in the Blue Shield building on Guild Avenue.
Or, possibly, a new building in the industrial area of east Lodi.
At this point, Delta College is willing to consider any option for a Lodi campus.
"We're just looking at anything," Delta's president and superintendent Raul Rodriguez said this week. "Highway 12 is not dead, and we're pursuing everything else."
The Highway 12 site is a group of properties off Victor Road that at one time seemed like it would be the future home of a Delta campus. Several years and several million dollars later, the college is no closer to building the campus and is looking at other options.
Rodriguez said the college has looked at the Blue Shield buildings on Guild Avenue as well as other properties throughout Lodi. He concedes that with much of the $250 million Measure L bond already spent or committed to other projects — especially Mountain House — it would be a challenge for the school to construct a new building.
Instead, Rodriguez said the school may have to move forward with something that could work in the short term and hope to expand on that in the future.
This could be a storefront campus that Delta could lease for a few years while it organizes funding and drafts a plan to build a permanent home in Lodi.
Delta has an $18,000 contract with the consulting firm Project Management Applications based in Stockton and Sacramento. That firm is working with the Lodi company Sandhill Development Company LLC to search for a site on Lodi.
Sandhill owner Wayne Craig said he had signed a confidentiality agreement and couldn't disclose any details about his search.
PMA worked on Delta's Mountain House site as well. According to the firm's Web site, the company helped plan the 460-acre project, manage other consultants and work on "cash flow and budgeting."
Rodriguez said the leaders of the school's bond team are putting together a list of potential locations in Lodi and that list may come to the college's board of trustees in early September.
"This is not a time to out of hand dismiss anything," Rodriguez said. "That is why it's taking a little longer; they're being comprehensive."
Such a campus may not be what folks in Lodi envisioned, but Rodriguez said it's the long-term vision of building a Lodi site.
Tad Platt, one of the partners of DGP Real Estate, helped broker the initial deal with Delta and the property owners at the Victor Road site.
Platt said he looked "for months and provided a number of different locations," and the Victor Road site was the best fit.
He said he couldn't think of another property in the Lodi area that could match with what Delta said it needed.
Another commercial broker, Jim Verseput, said he couldn't think of many options for Delta. He said land to the east of Lodi could be a good fit, as any property south of Lodi is close to Stockton, and properties to the west are pretty expensive.
City Councilman Bob Johnson is an ardent supporter of the Delta satellite campus as well as the Victor Road site. Johnson said if the school decided on a storefront campus, he "would not be jumping up and down about it."
The beauty of the Victor Road site, Johnson said, is that it had the space for all of Delta's plans, and it was close enough to the city limits to make annexation and extending infrastructure relatively easy. The partnership between the college and developers also would have paid for that infrastructure work.
Johnson, Platt and others trying to predict Delta's next move admit that the college is now in a situation where it may be difficult for the school to decide what it wants to do, but it's rather a decision on what it's able to do.
(Marc Lutz/News-Sentinel)
Possible campus sites
1. Blue Shield's Guild Avenue building
Often touted as a good fit for Delta, the building will be vacant once Blue Shield's new center is constructed south of Harney Lane. The 73,954-square-foot building could accommodate a satellite campus, but it would require a major refit, and parking likely would be an issue. The college could also find itself locked in a building with little options for expansion. Cost: The building is for sale for $9,244,250, or $1.25 a square foot to lease, according to a real estate listing site online.
2. Eastside industrial Lodi
The industrial area east of Highway 99 has open parcels, easy access to highways 12 and 99 and connections to the city of Lodi's infrastructure. Land averages $200,00 to $250,000 an acre, and that doesn't include the cost of building a campus. Lodi Unified School District built its Arieda Education Support Center on East Vine Street for $4.5 million in the early '90s but a comparable building in today's dollars would probably be triple that. Estimated cost: $15 to $20 million.
3. South Lodi
Large parcels here are for sale, but neighboring development is driving up property values. The area is served by Harney Lane and Highway 99, but the southern edge of Lodi is close to growing Stockton, which almost defeats the idea of a "satellite" campus for a college based in Stockton. Cost: $12 to $15 million, based on land values estimated to be $200,000 to $400,000 an acre.
4. Downtown
It could be a boon for Lodi's commercial and cultural hub, but a college campus would be a tight fit. There is a 9,000-square-foot building for sale at 9 N. Sacramento St. that is close to the parking garage and the coming World of Wonder science museum. Delta officials have expressed an interest in a small, Lodi "presence" that could eventually become a campus. Cost: $1 million and up.
5. North of Lodi
Early in Delta's search, the old Victor Meat plant came up as a possible site. The cost of cleaning up the property as well as extending infrastructure across the river seems to have knocked that site off the list early on in the process. Mokelumne Christian School also has plans to use the old plant to expand its high school. Farther north, the cost of building a campus on Delta's property in Galt and connecting it with roads, sewer and power could prove prohibitive, yet, the school does own 140 acres there. Cost: $10 to $15 million.
(Costs are an approximation based on current land values and estimated construction costs.)
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