The University of California, Riverside, is teaming up with the owner of 39 acres of land near Hunter Park and the city and county of Riverside to bring UCR's dream of a research park closer to reality.
The partners hope the University Research Park, and much more high-tech development, will spring from the corner of Columbia Avenue and the Gage Canal. There, on a four-acre parcel donated to the university by Gordon Harris, a Loomis, Calif., dentist, UCR will work with a private developer to build a 20,000-square-foot building to house research labs and working space for the development of high-tech products.
UCR sees the building as a way to help recruit faculty who have ideas for commercial products and as a source of job opportunities for students, said university spokesman Jack Chappell. The building can also be used to attract out-of-area companies with high-tech projects which might need faculty or students with special skills. UCR will make available $1 million in lease guarantees to help land private financing for the building, which the university hopes will be under construction by fall 1999.
Jon Hutchison, the university's director of real estate development, said he is in contact with a San Diego developer with experience in such buildings. That builder has told him there are a number of companies with products which are coming out of San Diego laboratories. Those companies will be looking for space to work on prototypes and early production models but feel San Diego is too expensive.
Harris has also given Riverside County an option to purchase an adjacent 35 acres for about $700,000. The county would make that land available to developers and high-tech employers, some of whom might be outgrowing their spaces in the university's building as they near the production stage.
The city of Riverside will be investing about $1.4 million in sewers, water pipes, storm drains, roads and other infrastructure for the area, much of which is in orange groves served by dirt roads.
Private land owners in the area surrounding the University Research Park hope the necessary infrastructure and the spark of the university building will stimulate employers to move to the area.
High-tech development at the area should also be stimulated by the expansion of UCR's College of Engineering, Center for Environmental Research and Technology. The center will be moving from a Bourns Inc. building on Columbia Avenue to a 20,000-square-foot building on an adjacent lot.
In addition, the Pacific Optical Division of Recon Optical, a Bourns subsidiary, will be moving its research and development labs from Torrance to the Bourns complex early next year. Within 5 years, that facility could employ as many as 170, said Michael Beck, director of new initiatves and economic development for UCR.
The city and county envision the research park as the core of the Riverside Regional Technology Park, an area of 856 acres, 532 of them undeveloped, extending east of Iowa Avenue, mostly along Palmyrita and Columbia avenues on the north edge of Box Springs Mountain. The county will be extending the existing Highgrove Redevelopment Area to include about 60 percent of this acreage, said Robin Zimpfer, assistant director of the county's Economic Development Agency.
The area of the Regional Technology Park includes existing industrial buildings, mostly along Iowa Avenue, as well as undeveloped parcels of various sizes and slopes. Hutchison said the combination of ready-to-lease buildings, open lots and ready developers would give companies a variety of options.
Chappell provided formulas that indicated the Regional Technology Park could supply up to 14,000 high-tech jobs, with an average salary of about $40,000.
Published 9/23/1998