The first property needed to build the McKinley Avenue interchange on the 120 Bypass will cost $365,000.
The Manteca City Council tonight is expected to authorize spending that amount  to buy 1.29 acres with a single family residence at 19480 McKinley Avenue from the Lick 2000 Trust. The price was based on its highest appraised value which is its zoning as a vacant commercial property.
The purchase is being paid for with set aside money from Manteca’s final redevelopment agency bond sale.
The interchange — which would be the fourth within three miles on the 120 Bypass through Manteca and the second for Lathrop on the freeway when coupled with Yosemite Avenue to the west — is considered key to attracting thousands of jobs to the two cities.
It is why when Sacramento indicated it couldn’t fund projects it committed to years ago on the State Transportation Improvement Plan that other jurisdictions in the county stepped up to plead Manteca’s case. Ripon and Lodi have offered to forgo their STIP projects to help the effort to try and get the state to honor its $12 million commitment for the interchange. Tracy is writing a letter of support.
City Manager Karen McLaughlin said the League of California Cities plans to use McKinley Avenue interchange as an example that it’s not simply roads that California is forgoing by not funding funding for freeway and highway projects but jobs.
Caltrans has determined there is adequate capacity at the Airport Way interchange to serve the city’s envisioned 500-room resort hotel. Any future expansion and development on the rest of the 210-acre  family entertainment zone on city owned property that includes more than 344,000 square feet of retail and dining space would require the McKinley Avenue interchange.
Manteca, which has identified other funding sources for the balance of the $30 million project that includes federal funds and RDA bond proceeds, would like to start work on the interchange by 2018 with completion by 2020.
If the state doesn’t come through it would push that start date back further.
The interchange is critical for head of household jobs. Most of those jobs, though, won’t be coming from the much touted, high-profile family entertainment zone with a 500-room destination resort hotel site with an indoor waterpark and conference center west of Costco that may ultimately generate over 1,500 jobs including 570 jobs at the envisioned resort hotel.
Instead they will be provided by over 5 million square feet of building space in the Lathrop Gateway Business Park that will straddle McKinley Avenue on 384 acres west of the resort hotel
The majority of the 165 acres of limited industrial uses and most of the 83 acres of service commercial space will depend on the creation of an interchange at McKinley Avenue. The project’s 57 acres of commercial office and accompanying freeway commercial is clustered around the Yosemite Avenue interchange north of the 120 Bypass.
“Development of places like Tesla Motors, CenterPoint, and Lathrop Gateway are all regional,” Manteca City Manager Karen McLaughlin has noted in the past.
That’s because the jobs that are created at such locations aren’t simply held by the people living with that city’s particular city limits. The top hometown of employees working at larger industrial  and distribution concerns in Lathrop, as an example, is Manteca, based on a survey conducted a number of years ago by the San Joaquin Partnership.
The McKinley interchange is critical for the Lathrop Gateway Business Park.
It is bordered on the south by the Union Pacific tracks that carries Altamont Corridor Express trains and serves as the city limit line between Lathrop and Manteca. The northern border is Yosemite Avenue/Vierra Road with the Union Pacific tracks that swing by Simplot serving as the western boundary.
The McKinley Avenue interchange is also part of the long-range circulation plan for Manteca south of the 120 Bypass where more than 60 percent of the city’s population is expected to be by 2040.
McKinley Avenue is envisioned to head further south and then swing to the west to connect with a proposed interchange on Highway 99 midway between Austin and Jack Tone roads ad part of the Raymus Expressway corridor.
The  council meets at 7 p.m. at the Civic Center, 1001 W. Center St.