Manteca Unified is forgoing $1,070,856 it is legally due when the former Qualex building at 555 Industrial Park Drive is formally sold to the City of Manteca in the next few months for remodeling into a permanent homeless navigation center.

It is a gesture that a number of other agencies are doing as well based on the $2,140,000 selling fair market price of the 55,000 square-foot building.

When all is said and done, the city will end up paying $316,700 for the building. And that will be covered from a $16 million state grant Mayor Gary Singh was able to secure for the city’s homeless navigation project with the help of former State Senate Susan Eggman.

Manteca Unified Assistant Superintendent Victoria Brunn noted the district has a huge stake in addressing the homeless situation in Manteca given roughly 800 of the district’s 26,000 students experience homelessness whether it is couch surfing, staying in a shelter, living with their family temporarily in someone else’s garage, or being on the streets.

But the district’s gesture is more than that.

It assures roughly 6,000 of its property taxpayers that are still on the hook for retiring bonds issued by the now defunct Manteca Redevelopment Agency won’t be paying twice to buy the same building.

The somewhat convoluted scenario is the result of how RDAs operated in California and how they were terminated in 2010 in a bid to divert revenue to Sacramento to avoid laying off bureaucrats during the Great Recession.

RDAs were allowed to be establish by cities to fight blight, fund affordable housing and boost economic development in 1952 by capturing tax increments after the base year they were formed. That meant instead of new tax increments being divided between schools, cities, counties and such it all went to the RDA.

RDAs were governed by council appointed boards. In the case of Manteca and many other cities, that simply meant council members wearing a different hat as an RDA commissioner.

In 2006, the City Council acting as the City Council, was trying to find an inexpensive way to replace inadequate and security riddled police department.

Staff convinced the council to buy the Qualex building where Kodak employed 171 workers processing film until it closed in April 2004.

The City Council sitting as RDA commissions agreed to buy the Qualex building for $3.6 million. That money came from bonds that were issued against future property taxes of those 6,000 parcels that is still being paid off.

The same council a year later soured on remodeling Qualex as a new police station when the state require any new police facility — remodeled or built from scratch — with holding cells to have on-staff correctional officers.

The city leaders at the time had no appetite for the additional ongoing annual cost despite the severe inadequacy of the police station designed for a city of 50,000.

The decision to disband RDAs led to the formation of successor agencies in 2012 to monitor the repayment of bonds. The successor agencies were directed to dispose of all surplus property and divide the proceeds between the taxing agencies that forfeited incremental tax increases when the RDA was formed.

Eight years ago, as the successor agency was preparing to solicit bids, a suggestion surfaced for the city to retain the Qualex building for what, at the time, would have been a traditional homeless shelter.

Among those wanting to bid on the Qualex building was Manteca Unified that wanted to use it for centralized warehousing for nutritional services.

Fast forward to today.

The sale to the city is finally almost completed but instead of being a police station as intended in 2006 it will now be a homeless navigation center.

The market value is now $2,140,000 or $1,460,000 less than what the RDA paid for it 20 years ago.

And while all city taxpaying property owners would have been on the hook for the lower price, there still would have been 6,000 parcel owners that would have been paying twice for the same building.

The double jeopardy, so to speak, went out the window with the $16 million state grant Singh secured for acquisition, remodeling and operating the homeless navigation center.

The decision by most of the other taxing agencies to forgo their share of the sale proceeds means the city not only won’t have to dip into more of the $16 million to buy the property and can use it to remodel and address soft costs of furnishing the navigation center but also frees up money to cover ongoing operating costs for a while.

San Joaquin County and the county library system also contributed a combined $440,000 by passing on the sales proceeds. The city’s share of the sale, which is going toward the purchase, is $316,720.

City Manager Toni Lundgren said some of the other agencies involved indicated they might forgo their share of proceeds once the sale is completed.

The purchase of the Qualex building is before the Manteca City Council when they meet tonight at 6 p.m.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com