The numbers are staggering.
With 500 rooms initially, the Manteca Great Wolf Resort would be the largest hotel by far in the Central Valley dwarfing the 359-room Holiday Inn Sacramento Capitol Plaza and the 260-room Doubletree Hotel in Modesto. Another 200 rooms could be added in future years should McWhinney Development ultimately build on a 30-acre city-owned site west of Costco.
The six-story hotel tower would be the tallest building between Modesto and Stockton.
And with 290,000 square feet, the hotel portion would have as much square footage as Target, Costco and Staples combined.
The conference/meeting/exhibition facility’s initial 20,000 square feet is equal in size to the Modesto Convention Center. Plans call for that possibly doubling in size in the future.
There would be 37,500 square feet of sit-down and casual food and beverage operations plus game rooms, general retail and party rooms. That’s the equivalent of nine buildings the size of Panera Breads whose 4,200-square-foot structure in the final stages of construction on East Yosemite Avenue.
The 75,000-square-foot indoor water park could in a future phase be expanded to 151,000 square feet making it the biggest water park of any kind in Northern California. Envision the Manteca Costco next door to the Great Wolf site and increase the square footage by almost 8 percent and you can grasp the indoor waterpark’s ultimate footprint. It — like the hotel tower — will be six stories.
Initially it will have 1,100 parking spaces, exactly double of the nearby Big League Dreams sports complex. A future expansion may add 330 more parking stalls.
Costing an initial $200 million to build when the resort and supporting infrastructure are taken into account, the first phase will have a construction value exceeding the record year for overall construction in Manteca that was set in 1999 when permits valued at $196 million were issued.
It would create 414 permanent jobs and 156 part-time jobs making it the city’s largest private sector employer.
The annual payroll of $9.4 million would make it the third largest among the private sector behind Doctors Hospital of Manteca and Kaiser Permanente.
The annual number of guests is expected to average 400,000 a year for the first 500 hotel rooms. That’s slightly more than the combined populations of Stockton, Manteca, and Lathrop.
Details about the Great Wolf project the city has been in talks with McWhinney Development to build for 54 months are included in 1,231 pages of environmental documents concerning the resort and the overall 189-acre family entertainment zone that it would be a part of bounded by McKinley Avenue, the 120 Bypass, Big League Dreams/Costco, and the municipal wastewater treatment plant.
Work on the environmental studies that were just completed started originally in November 2013.
The project is expected to go before the City Council sometime in August or September. The environmental documents are currently in the public review period.
It would take two years to build the initial phase of the resort which means it could be completed by early 2018. The year 2018 also would mark the 100th anniversary of Manteca’s incorporation as a city.
Complete build out of both phases would take place over 15 years.
