Is the future of downtown Manteca — or any part of the existing city for that matter — worth the resources, time, and money that has been invested chasing the family entertainment zone?
Let’s hope the city’s effort over the past seven years to land the linchpin that would make the endeavor work — an indoor waterpark resort with at least a 500-room hotel and conference center — succeeds. If not over $10 million on infrastructure and initial work on the McKinley Avenue interchange is going to look questionable at best.
What makes this irksome isn’t the calculated risk but the promise made starting in 1999 and parroted by subsequent city councils that the next “big thing” will produce the bonanza to finance investment in existing Manteca and the economic Mother Lode that will help pay for needed boosts in city services and uplift private sector job offerings.
That’s what Spreckels Park was supposed to do. It ended up leveraging the infrastructure for the Stadium Retail Center and paying to build Big League Dreams which was supposed to do what Spreckels Park was supposed to do. The same was true of the deals that landed Bass Pro Shops and Costco. Seven years ago the implied promise was made again — Great Wolf along with the Austin Road Business Park would power Manteca across the Rubicon and into the promised land of prosperity several notches beyond where we are now.
Austin Road Business Park, for all practical purposes, was strangled by city bureaucracy that can be about as nimble at times as a giant tortoise with three broken legs and 300 pounds of weights strapped to its shell.
Great Wolf was the big fish that got away because someone in the public sector — Manteca’s bureaucracy and hired guns known as consultants — thought they could get something much better by attaching the family entertainment zone to it. This isn’t what the private sector thought. At any rate, it lengthened the environmental approval process just long enough for Great Wolf to have second thoughts.
Now the city is in intense negotiations with another resort operator with even bigger plans than Great Wolf. Manteca could still end up landing on its feet and do so in a better position than if Great Wolf had started construction two years ago.
This little recap of Manteca’s economic strategy that has produced a lot of positives — Spreckels Park, Bass Pro Shops, Orchard Valley, Stadium Retail Center, Costco, and Big League Dreams — is designed to set up a question that the City Council needs to answer. Why can’t the city spend as much time performing critical municipal duties aimed at combatting blight in existing commercial areas and neighborhoods?
Prevention is a lot less expensive than blight. Code enforcements needs more teeth and resources.
I’ll rest my case on two words: Sycamore Arms.
It’s the burned out boarding house that has graced the corner of Sycamore and Yosmeite avenues in that condition for 19 months. Before that it was shuttered after it became the Club Med destination of the homeless, druggies and gang members. The fire tarnished the appeal somewhat making it more in the Motel 6 genre on the scale of abandoned buildings. But that said it is a magnet for criminal activity.
The criminal activity combined with the colossal eyesore virtually at the heart of downtown plus another choice property that’s being ill-kept close by is a huge drag on that segment of downtown. No one is going to invest serious money in that block with two massive cancerous sores on top of them.
In case no one at City Hall hasn’t noticed, Sycamore Arms is a cancer on downtown and the community is not going away. The owner did not have fire insurance and lacks the resources to do much of anything with the structure including tearing it down.
Then there is a real fear that come winter when the homeless are inside the building they will start another fire to stay warm. Such fires wiped out three structures on Moffat Boulevard, destroyed the old Sunnyvalley Meats building east of Cabral Motors, and have damaged empty houses and even a shuttered used car lot office in downtown. Should a fire get going and be undetected long enough in the Sycamore Arms it would likely wipe out the entire block.
Manteca’s leaders don’t have do the Nero act. They can take steps. It may require pumping up the property nuisance ordinance similar to what Los Angeles did to go after abandoned buildings and those left standing and vacant after fire damage. The reason LA undertook such an initiative is painfully obvious. Such buildings are crime magnets and pull down neighborhoods and commercial districts.
Ultimately is may mean the city will need to go through a legal process to declare buildings such as Sycamore Arms a public health and safety hazard, raze the building, and place a lien against the property to eventually retrieve the costs. They may well end up taking the remaining land over after five years.
It may cost the city some of its precious Economic Revitalization Reserves to pay for the legal process and contract to demolish the building. They may get some of it back in a land sale. But they will also avoid ongoing costs — check the police logs — plus remove an albatross from around the proverbial neck of a high profile portion of downtown.
The City Council needs to start work on making that happen now.
If not it could cripple downtown permanently.

 



This column is the opinion of executive editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Bulletin or Morris Newspaper Corp. of CA.  He can be contacted at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com or 209.249.3519.