One of the largest industrial buildings in Lathrop that is in the planning pipeline will take the work of more than the city’s staff to get through to the other end.
Last month the Lathrop City Council approved a task order to an existing contract with Loewke Planning Associates to complete the initial study and mitigated negative declaration and the associated documents required of the California Environmental Quality Act for an 870,000-square-foot warehouse building being constructed just south of the Highway 120 Bypass on Murphy Parkway.
The commercial building, which does not yet have a major tenant, is being constructed by the Sacramento-based Buzz Oates Company and will have a larger operating footprint than the 723,000 square-feet that Kraft Heinz will be leasing at the old Pilkington float glass manufacturing plan on Lathrop Road – a building with roughly 1 million square feet of space.
The document preparation for the project will be fully paid for by the developer – totaling $215,533 plus the city’s administrative fee of $15,000 for a total not to exceed $230,533. As part of the agreement, that money will be paid back to the city as part of the development process. Because the existing contract with Loewke was in place for planning services – helping to alleviate the workload of the city’s small planning department with the amount of projects currently working their way through the system – the change and the agreement needed to be approved by the council.
That building will be one of the anchors of a development segment being referred to as the South Lathrop Specific Plan – land that nears the city’s border with Manteca that offers prime access to both I-5 and the Highway 120 Bypass for quick access to the I-205 corridor for access to the Bay Area or the Highway 99 corridor to reach the eastern half of Sacramento or points further south like Fresno or Bakersfield.
While the land directly north of the Highway 120 bypass adjacent to I-5 has been prime land for spec developers looking to attract industrial tenants for warehouse space for years, this will be the first cluster of major projects to occur on the opposite side of the Bypass.
According to Lathrop Mayor Sonny Dhaliwal, the makeup of the building – whether it will be segmented or leased in full – isn’t yet known, and no word has come on any prospective tenants.

To contact reporter Jason Campbell email jcampbell@mantecabulletin.com or call 209.249.3544.