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- Bradford Lange was misidentified in a photo caption on Page 5 of Tuesday's Lodi News-Sentinel. Lange is the vineyard general manager for LangeTwins Winery and was inducted into the San Joaquin County Agricultural Hall of Fame this month.
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A Delta College campus in Lodi: Idea not dead yet
About a year ago, ideas of San Joaquin Delta College buying land in Lodi and opening a satellite campus were nudged to the back burner.
Instead, the college's board of trustees decided to focus its efforts on the Mountain House satellite campus in Tracy, which opened in August, forgo purchasing land off Victor Road in which it had already invested $4 million, and set aside $2.8 million to purchase land in Lodi at a later date.
With the current economic crisis and the severe slashing of Delta's budget by the state, a possible Lodi campus seems to now be even further out of reach.
The college has cut more than 470 classes this semester and more than 80 teaching positions in its effort to trim $8.3 million from the budget — despite having one of its highest enrollments ever with 22,000 students. Delta placed thousands of students on waiting lists and has even had to turn some away.
"We are still considering opening a Lodi campus. The state budget does have an impact, though," said Raul Rodriguez, Delta's superintendent/president. "Without state support, it is difficult to pull off any further expansion at this point."
In September, Matt Wetstein, Delta's dean of planning, research and regional education, reported that 2,650 students attending classes at its main campus in Stockton, or 12 percent of the entire student population, reside in the Lodi, Woodbridge, Acampo and Galt areas. The number is the school's second-highest percentage outside of Stockton's 61 percent.
Steve Castellanos, the board of trustees president, said he is still optimistic about a Lodi center, but financial constraints make it hard to say when it could start developing.
Delta encountered problems with producing the Mountain House campus, which ran millions over budget and still resulted in the board scrapping a permanent building in favor of portable modules. The college is trying to be proactive in preventing problems like that with future expansion.
Wetstein and his staff are currently developing an educational plan that will take into account input from constituent groups and the community. The plan is scheduled to be presented to the board of trustees sometime in the first quarter of 2010. Once the trustees have that information, then they can better determine if and where to expand.
Taj Khan, Lodi's representative trustee, hopes the effort will help Delta map out a better plan.
"Our old system of building campuses was upside-down. In the old days, we found a real estate and then decided what to build and teach. This was wrong," said Khan, who is one of five new trustees elected to the board at the beginning of the year. "In the new board's opinion, first we need to define what are the educational needs of the community and where are those needs and then we can figure out where and what to build or buy."
Khan also said the college is in the process of hiring an architectural firm to help in the process of space planning. Until the results from the evaluation can be analyzed and debated, however, Delta isn't even looking at possibilities of where to buy land in Lodi.
Another factor that is delaying any development with a Lodi campus is Delta's commitment to projects like the Goleman Library renovation, and for the construction of the new science and mathematics complex at it's main campus. The state promised $40 million in matching funds for the projects, but Rodriguez said he doesn't know when Delta might be reimbursed for them.
"That is $40 million less that we have to use on other projects such as the Lodi expansion," Rodriguez said. "I still think a Lodi campus is a realistic possibility, although I have no idea exactly where it might be located. We will consider all options. The exact timing is hard to gauge until we have a better idea of when we are going to get that reimbursement from the state."
Contact reporter Joelle Milholm at joellem@lodinews.com.
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deltaconfidential wrote on Nov 5, 2009 10:04 AM:
siser wrote on Nov 2, 2009 4:04 PM:
ud wrote on Oct 30, 2009 6:41 PM:
educator wrote on Oct 30, 2009 10:51 AM:
Obviously, you have fallen into the trap that the Administrators have set. Open your eyes and your mind and see the real world. We are all suffering and only the Administrator have not taken cuts. They pretend they have. They took furlow days and then bought the reduction in pay back through vacation time. They took a pay cut and the Raul recended the decision. "
educator wrote on Oct 30, 2009 10:47 AM:
siser wrote on Oct 29, 2009 8:40 PM:
educator wrote on Oct 29, 2009 5:56 PM:
WOWerzz wrote on Oct 29, 2009 2:17 PM:
Comments on this story are now closed.