One of the biggest advantages downtown Manteca has to help shape its future has been routinely ignored in every visionary plan the city has ever commissioned in the last 60 years
It’s been hiding in plain sight, so to speak, since the 1960s even though it has been around for more than 106 years.
And when it comes to investing in downtown, it dwarfs the city’s $1.2 million purchase of the IOOF Hall or its $632,000 arch on South Main Street.
The advantage?
It’s the $66 million and counting modernization of the Manteca High campus.
Workers on Tuesday just three blocks east of the heart of downtown at Yosemite Avenue and Main Street were installing brick fence pillars as part of the expansion of the front parking lot from 60 spaces to 113 stalls complete with three solar arrays.
There will also be six chargers for electric vehicles.
It’s being done in conjunction with the construction of a 67,000 square-foot, two-story, 45-foot building with 32 classrooms and a media center along Sherman Avenue.
Back when Manteca Unified was cobbling together initial concepts on how to redo the 106 year-old campus, there were observations made on how the district’s modernization project and the city’s desire to strengthen downtown could feed off each other to create synergy to advance both Manteca High educational objectives and help elevate downtown’s economic well-being and culture offerings.
The biggest obviously is the drawing power of Manteca High.
On any given school day once the campus reaches its program enrollment capacity between students and staff, members of almost 2,700 Manteca households will be brought downtown.
And the majority of those are now south of the 120 Bypass that don’t have natural physical ties to downtown as do central Manteca neighborhoods.
The after school — and even lunch hour — business is obvious and fairly small.
The abstract thought was there was a built in daily “audience” that could be lured back on weekends and in evenings with out-of-the-box thinking.
And then there were weekend and evening use of facilities by the schools for organized sporting events.
They represent an opportunity that downtown could build on.
Previous district leadership had toyed with the idea of plugging a student culinary program into vacant store space to run a student restaurant with limited hours to serve the community.
While that is definitely out-of-the-box and more of a challenge, what is less so and easier to accomplish is harnessing high school facilities in a partnership that can strengthen the community that also happens to pay for schools by programming cultural and educational offerings into the 240-seat Dorothy Mulvihill Theatre accessed directly from Yosemite Avenue and four blocks from the center of downtown.
Up until the 1960s, the performing arts center was used extensively for community events such as concerts in addition to school programming.
Through the late 1990s, Manteca Recreation worked with a community-based group a year to stage two to three theatrical plays while coordinating the use of the facility with the Manteca Unified School District.
Manteca High’s reorientation toward Moffat Boulevard has changed the dynamics of traffic flow in the central district during certain times of the day.
It is also directly across from where the ACE commuter train stop and parking lot will be located, which is considered another potential game changer for downtown and the central district.
Community outreach on the new $960,000 effort to devise essentially a blueprint on ways to draw more people downtown gets underway this summer.
Ascend has been obtained to develop the plan working in conjunction with the community, the city, businesses, and property owners.
To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com
