RANCHO CORDOVA, CA (MPG) “We’re getting closer to the finish line,” said Rancho Cordova Deputy City Manager, Micah Runner. “We’re really excited about what’s to come in the near future of creating place-making along Folsom Boulevard, and providing a real community heart for the area.”  In 2019, after two years of analysis, studies, feedback, and site selection, the City issued its Request for Proposal for the Mills Crossing Project. The City Council chose Griffin Swinerton/Related Housing to develop the 10-acre City-owned parcel across from the MACC.

At the virtual Rancho Cordova “luncheon” on March 19, Shelly Blanchard, Community Council executive director, said that since its inception in 2014, the Measure H half cent additional sales tax has helped fund many of the basic needs of the City, such as road repair and police protection, as well as “cool projects, long overdue projects, and an explosion of art.”  Beyond those uses, the City Council set aside money for some once in a lifetime legacy projects, and the Mills Crossing Project is one of those.

Runner introduced Korin Crawford, executive vice president of Griffin Swinerton, who presented a detailed summary of the Project. “Working with local governments to get authentic projects conceived, financed and built is more than a job for us,” Crawford said. “It’s more than a job for me, it’s really a calling.”

Crawford is from the Bay Area, born and raised in Palo Alto, educated in engineering. “I really got into the business out of grad school,” Crawford said. “. . . I didn’t really have development as part of my educational background, but I started volunteering for community-based organizations that were involved in redevelopment.”  Before taking the position with Griffin Swinerton, Crawford led public/private partnerships and infrastructure for the City of Los Angeles.

Crawford estimated the construction will start at the end of 2022 or beginning of 2023. As far as the completion, he said, “The project will probably go in phases, so it’s hard to break up the project into one singular start and one singular finish. But we generally estimate 30 months of construction or 2 ½ years.”  

The site has been vacant since 2019, bounded on the west by La Loma Drive. Residential will be to the north, and community facilities generally front along Folsom Boulevard. “We really want to open the doors of the Civic Center to Folsom Boulevard and draw in the public and visitors and both from Mills Station across the street and access from the road itself,” Crawford said. To the east the site borders Folsom Lake College, Rancho Cordova.

After all the research, input, and ideas from a large variety of sources, Griffin Swinerton came up with five programming themes that represent what they heard as the hopes and wants of the community and the City. Those were:  (1) the arts; (2) flexible meeting and community gathering spaces; (3) health and wellness; (4) education, craft and maker spaces; and (5) commercial spaces. “Ultimately,” Crawford said, “. . . the ideation and visioning process continues and we start to think about how all of these different uses are permeable and they bleed into one another.”

Those five themes coalesced into three preliminary development alternatives:  (1) an arts and culture-based center, organized around a central plaza; (2) a hub fostering innovation and learning, organized around a central street; and (3) a holistic wellness center, organized around a central park.

Next steps include 120 days for concepts and diagrams of the three alternatives after due diligence, site research and analysis, and initial findings for programming partners. Then an additional 180-210 days for the three developed site plans with illustrative drawings, precedent imagery, updated proposal for programming partners, and phasing/cost assessment. The final phase will take 300 days for the site plan of the selected alternative with 3D renderings, illustrative drawings/diagrams, imagery, programming partnership final proposal, phasing and cost proposal. The residential aspect will be addressed by Relative Housing. Whichever alternative is chosen, the final proposal will include parking, housing, arts and education, flexible space and commercial space.

“These three (alternatives) are not all mutually exclusive,” Crawford said. “You can do wellness in the context of a plaza and you can do the arts in a way that’s innovative. So all of these things are interrelated and can be hybridized and fused together.”