The Record Article
Ground broken for offices

STOCKTON -- Groundwork has begun in preparation for the first office-construction project in University Park , part of a long-term renovation of much of the 103-acre campus taken over eight years ago by California State University , Turlock .

A two-story, 63,000-square-foot office building is being built for the Valley Mountain Regional Center , a nonprofit private corporation that provides and coordinates services for children and adults with developmental disabilities such as mental retardation, autism, cerebral palsy and epilepsy.

VMRC, which serves the five counties of San Joaquin , Calaveras, Amador, Tuolumne and Stanislaus counties, also has offices in Modesto and San Andreas.

The building will be built on about 4.6 acres on the southeast corner of the campus and is expected to be occupied a year from now. It will allow Valley Mountain to consolidate and expand its operation now spread out over three adjacent north Stockton buildings totaling 37,000 square feet.

It's a 10-year lease deal, with two consecutive five-year renewal options, said Valley Mountain executive director Richard Jacobs.

"As you can imagine, being in three separate buildings, even only yards from each other, creates some problems," he said. "And we're out of space in the three buildings anyway."

Valley Mountain has been growing for the past 20 years, he said, and needs more space for public meetings as well as more room for meetings and classroom training for families and service providers. VMRC provides direct diagnostic services, he said, but otherwise contracts with group-care homes and speech, physical and occupational therapists.

About 180 of Valley Mountain 's 285 employees work in Stockton . The regional center serves about 8,500 children and adults.

CSU Turlock, also known as Stanislaus State , is utilizing for academic purposes about one-third of the total central Stockton campus, which for decades served as a state hospital for those with developmental disabilities.

But CSU signed up Stockton developer Fritz Grupe and company almost four years ago to transform the rest of the site, which included dozens of aging structures, into a revenue-producing environment for office, retail, apartments and so on.

"We are excited about completing our first deal and seeing construction commence," said Dan Keyser, senior vice president of Grupe Commercial.

Much of the work has involved ridding the campus of massive, thick-wall concrete structures unsuitable for retrofitting for modern uses.

Since Grupe took over the campus redevelopment project, more than 35 buildings have been demolished or relocated, totaling more than 380,000 square feet.

In addition to existing tenants, University Park will have more than 500,000 square feet of office space, 60,000 square feet of retail, and more than 200 apartment units, according to Grupe plans.

Shelly Cannon-Keely, the CB Richard Ellis office specialist who handled the VMRC deal, said she has received a lot of interest from private office and medical users interested in leasing space within University Park .

Jacobs said that not only is the campus setting nice, but its central Stockton location will also be more convenient. San Joaquin County mental-health services are nearby, as are the county courthouse and offices connected with child- and adult-protective services and Social Security.

Plus, it's historical, he said: The University Park development used to be home to the Stockton State Hospital , which closed in the mid-1990s after 150 years of serving the same type of people that Valley Mountain Region Center serves.

To reach Bruce Spence, phone (209) 943-8581 or e-mail bspence@recordnet.com