Critics Pan Grand Plan for Gold Rush City

By MARK ARAX

May 18, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

LATHROP, Calif. — Before developer Norman Jarrett turns off the lights and fires up the projector, he wants to make one thing clear about the creation he calls Gold Rush City.

No slide show on earth could possibly do his $4-billion project justice--its four theme parks, its Barbary Coast, its 1849 mining town, its Boot Hill, Fisherman’s Wharf, Safari Zoo, Hungarian horse show, Chinese circus, 120,000-seat auto speedway, sports arena, performing arts center, three golf courses, four world-class hotels and 8,500 houses done in Italian, German, English, French and Chinese motifs on a boggy island in this tiny San Joaquin Valley farm town.

“Other than Disney World,” says the 51-year-old architect from South Africa, “this is probably the biggest project of its kind in the United States.”

Like Los Angeles of the 1950s, the farmlands of the booming Central Valley tempt all tribes of dreamers and the small towns and counties willing to entertain those dreams, no matter how fanciful. In recent years, dozens of new towns with names like Camelot and New Jerusalem have been proposed on cotton fields and oak-studded grazing land far from urban centers.

Each one has vowed to cure the ills of suburban sprawl with the same antidote: village-style houses and well-paying commercial and industrial jobs all rolled up into one Shangri-La. Most have died before a single shovel ever broke ground, victims of their own grandiosity and lack of financing for sewer, water, roads and schools.

Gold Rush City, a 30-year project on 5,800 acres of sugar beet and grain fields in the flood plains of the San Joaquin River near Stockton, certainly ups the ante. Its Disney-like scale would seem to spell doom for Jarrett, an idea man who has no fortune of his own to pour into his brainchild.

Among the groups mounting a legal challenge against the project’s massive size, costs and impacts to the environment are the California Farm Bureau and the Sierra Club.

And yet seven years after Jarrett went from city to county in search of a taker and found the newly incorporated, can-do town of Lathrop, Gold Rush City is very much alive--even if the developer, the landowner and city officials still don’t know how they will finance $100 million in immediate infrastructure costs.

Not even the January floods, which buried the entire island site under water for three months, have cooled their optimism.

“That day Norman Jarrett first walked through my door and laid out his vision, I laughed at him,” said Henry Kuechler, the longtime farmer who owns 4,000 acres of the Stewart Tract island at the eastern edge of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. “ ‘You’ll never get it done,’ I told him.

“Six years later, he’s got all the development rights, he’s got all the zoning and the city of Lathrop has annexed the land. He’s done something a lot of people said couldn’t be done. He’s put a lot of glue on his vision.”

‘Gold Mush’ City

San Joaquin County Supervisor Dario Marenco, a vocal opponent, sees only water and madness. “Since the floods, it’s ‘Gold Mush’ City. The entire island was under 11 feet of river. I can’t think of a worse place to build a theme park.

“We don’t have the infrastructure to support anywhere near that kind of development. And he doesn’t have the money. It’s amazing that it’s gotten this far on smoke and mirrors.”

Jarrett would agree that selling a project as audacious as his is at least one part seduction. That the actual Gold Rush never made it anywhere close to these delta farm fields seems a forgivable license once you step inside his office at the Stockton airport. Jarrett and his wife, Jean, have done a meticulous job re-creating the era of the forty-niner--from the gold-plated spittoon in the corner to the prospector’s picks and pans that line the perimeter to the Tiffany-style lamp overhead.

Their entire world has been reduced to a single theme of California’s El Dorado (“The Gilded”), devoted to a single ambition: to woo the big-money backer. There’s the phone number ending in 1-8-4-9 and the fax number ending in 1-8-4-8, the year the first nugget was found at Sutter’s sawmill along the American River. There is the no-expense-barred promotional packet covered in luminescent gold; the company car, a Cadillac El Dorado, and the license plate, “Gldrsh2,” presumably because someone else already had taken “Gldrush” and “Gldrsh1.”

Jarrett traces his fever and the idea for Gold Rush City to his native Johannesburg, where he helped design Gold Reef City, a theme park and museum built in the mid-1980s around an old mine shaft.

Not long after he landed in California in 1986, he began approaching cities in the Bay Area and Central Valley about a well-planned community and amusement park bigger than Disneyland that would celebrate the Gold Rush.

Stockton was one of the cities that heard Jarrett’s pitch, and showed him the door. The plan seemed long on swagger and short on ways to raise the necessary capital without passing on debt to the city and reducing services to existing residents. “It never got to first base,” said former Stockton Mayor Joan Darrah. “Quite soon after that, he went to Lathrop.”

Jarrett says Lathrop was a perfect fit, a small town of 8,859 residents untouched by cynicism and surrounded by cheap open land, three major freeways and the sprawling tail of the San Joaquin River, a direct waterway link to San Francisco and Sacramento.

The same Lathrop officials who had barely tackled two budgets (the town was incorporated in 1989) eagerly set about adopting a new master plan to accommodate the massive project, whose sewer costs alone dwarfed the city’s general fund.

When it came time to lay out a detailed financial plan, the city was satisfied with the developer’s assurance that he did have backers to get him through the long planning stages, including a well-heeled international firm involved in a large housing project in nearby Contra Costa County. As for bonds and other funding sources that would be needed for sewer, water, levee improvements and highways, those decisions could wait.

“They’re a small city and they were extra careful to negotiate a development agreement that didn’t put their general fund at risk,” Jarrett said. “Because they’re a small city, we’ve been held to a higher standard.”

But county and state officials say Jarrett could not have found an easier mark, a town desperate to bury its past as the place where the pesticide DBCP was manufactured and illegally dumped in the 1970s and, according to federal government findings, caused sterility in workers at the town’s main plant.

“You’ve got this small wannabe town searching for a way to put itself on the map and here comes this swashbuckler dangling the next Knott’s Berry Farm,” said state Sen. Patrick Johnston (D-Stockton), who describes himself as a skeptic regarding the project.

“It’s quite a stretch, but if you’re a dreamer and believe in a field of dreams, then I guess you’ll build it and they’ll come.”

In the gung-ho, pro-business town, where city hall, the police and fire departments, animal control, Farmer’s Insurance and the Cornerstone Church office are all housed in the same rented building on the grounds of the chemical plant, there are no apologies for embracing Norman Jarrett.

Mayor Steve McKee said he makes no bones about his passionate support for the project, even though he had to sit out the key votes because his 120 acres of alfalfa were part of the 7,000 acres of farmland annexed by Lathrop for Gold Rush City and an adjacent housing development.

“Our critics like to say this is a bait-and-switch game,” McKee said. “Norman is baiting us with the theme park and regional shopping center and in the end the only thing we’ll get is a bunch of houses. I take offense at that. We’re not a bunch of hayseeds here.”

It is the cheerleading of City Manager John Bingham that has generated the most concern among critics.

“We’re talking about another Disney World and the Mall of America,” Bingham said in an interview. “We’re talking about a massive jobs program. It will bring in $100 million a year in new dollars to the area. The income to Lathrop alone will be $64 million a year.”

When asked where his numbers came from, Bingham replied: “All of these numbers came from the developer. Why? Does that make them invalid? We work off the same page, the developer and us. We’re partners.”

Pam Carder, the city’s development director, said in one instance Bingham had exaggerated the projected net revenue tenfold. “I don’t know where he’s getting that $64 million a year in revenues. Our consultant figured the revenues would be about $6 million a year.”

January’s floods could not have come at a more inopportune time for Jarrett and his backers. Now, much of his energy is spent searching for $16 million in funding to shore up the levees on the San Joaquin River.

He is aware that support is building among lawmakers in Sacramento for loosening the shackles on the river and expanding its flood plain. Indeed, experts have called flooding of the Stewart Tract island site a major relief valve that saved downstream Stockton from even more damage.

“This project is the ultimate head-in-the-sand approach,” said Jeffrey Mount, chairman of the geology department at UC Davis and author of the book “California Rivers and Streams.”

“The notion that you can shore up the levees and prevent future flooding is naive at best and delusional at worst. It will flood again,” he said.

Walter Yep, chief of planning for the Army Corps of Engineers, said the federal government is no longer in the business of constructing levees to subsidize developers like Jarrett. “The best solution to floods is good land planning.”

Is building four theme parks and a huge master-planned community on a delta island good planning? “I wouldn’t do it,” Yep said. “I wouldn’t do it.”

Lawsuit Dismissed

Lathrop officials are confident that Jarrett will finance the levee work so that Gold Rush City is protected from floods and city taxpayers aren’t left holding the bag on construction and maintenance costs. Already, Jarrett is talking to the local irrigation district about issuing bonds backed by the value of the farmland.

Recently, the project got a big break when a local judge dismissed a lawsuit by the Farm Bureau and the Sierra Club that accused Lathrop officials of glossing over the project’s negative impacts on farming, water supply, traffic and air.

But while the judge’s decision is being appealed, a legal cloud remains over Gold Rush City that prevents Jarrett from selling his development rights and complicates his search for a major amusement park operator as partner.

“There’s just a few things that need mopping up on the lawsuit and then we’re ready to break ground,” he said.

He turns off the lights and flicks on the projector. On the far white wall of his office, the dream assumes color.

“Water is the reason we came here. You’ll be able to get to the site from Old Sacramento and Pier 39 in San Francisco by smaller craft. We’re going to have a marina, a fisherman’s wharf, a water bus. . . . There’ll be high noon gun battles in the streets. We would like to re-create the mountains, the rivers, the lakes and pan for gold. Whatever gold you find, you get to keep. You might hit it big, as they say.”

He turned aside any talk that Lathrop, saddled with some of the worst tule fog in winter and oppressive 105-degree heat waves in summer, would be anything less than an optimum spot for year-round vacationing.

“We’ll have lions, leopards and tigers. . . . A giant bear statue will announce the site. We don’t think it would be as large as the Statue of Liberty or the statue of Christ in Rio, but certainly big enough to see from all points.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

A Developer’s Big Dream?

Norman Jarrett’s $4-billion Gold Rush City development envisions a gigantic theme park and entertainment complex on a boggy island near the tiny San Joaquin Valley farm town of Lathrop. Some of the proposed project’s features:

1) Four theme parks

2) Three 18-hole golf courses

3) Hotels and motels

4) 8,500 houses done in Italian, German, English, French and Chinese motifs

5) A farmer’s market

6) Shopping, entertainment, parking, educational and commercial sites scattered throughout the facility