New Boys & Girls Club for Santa Rosa’s Roseland neighborhood rising amid largely neglected landscape

Just a few months ago, the construction site of a new Boys & Girls Club in Santa Rosa’s Roseland neighborhood was little more than a dirt lot with spray-painted orange lines outlining the club’s rooms and facilities.

Today, a massive wood-framed structure can be seen from the sidewalk on Sebastopol Road as the building rises with unmistakable, post-pandemic urgency. The bulk of wood framing for the second floor was completed in the past week.

The entire facility, which will bring underserved children in Roseland a full-size commercial kitchen, a teen center, a real dance studio and an art and science/technology lab, is expected to be open for business by January.

For the construction crews working the project, the nature of the project and its need in the Roseland community has fueled that urgency, said Austin Whited, project superintendent for Gallaher Construction, the facility’s designer and builder.

“It’s like there’s been wind in the sails when they found out what it is,” Whited said, adding that local residents are also excited when they learn that a Boys & Girls Club is being built.

“I am so shocked — every neighbor I’ve talked to, every person that comes on site, when they find out what we’re building, they’re like, ‘Oh, right on,’” Whited said.

While construction of the $17 million, 25,000-square-foot project is moving at a fast clip, its total funding is still being secured, said Jennifer Weiss, executive director of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Sonoma-Marin.

Weiss said Sonoma County recently turned down a request for $5 million of federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act. That funding would have been crucial toward meeting the capital project’s current $9 million funding goal.

On Thursday, county officials declined to say why they chose not to fund the project.

“If you’d like to request specific information as to why that program did not receive funding, you will need to submit a Public Records Act request,” said Kisten Font, a spokesperson for the Sonoma County Human Services Department.

Last week, Rep. Mike Thompson announced he had requested $4 million in funding for the project, including it in the fiscal year 2023 funding legislation released by the state’s House Appropriations subcommittees.

Thompson said Thursday he’s committed to the Boys & Girls Club project and hopes the 2023 funding bill will be approved by Sept. 30.

“This project has already cleared a very important hurdle of being included in the subcommittee markup and it still has many steps to go, including getting through the evenly divided Senate,” Thompson said in an email. “But I am hopeful that we will be able to pass this bill and secure this funding for the Boys and Girls Club this Congress.”

Weiss said it continues to be a challenge to raise the funds needed to pay off the construction loan, and doing so will depend on the local community, she said.

Developer Bill Gallaher and his wife, major donors to the Boys & Girls Club, had originally proposed to cover the full cost of the project, which was about $16 million at the time. In 2021, they scaled back their commitment.

But Weiss says the project would not have been possible without the $5 million the Gallahers had already contributed. She said the Gallahers have given $2 million in cash, and their company is donating all management, overhead and a lot of the engineering, architecture and design work.

The Boys & Girls Club is “paying cost” for materials and subcontracted labor, she said. Major subcontractors include Sheehan Construction for framing and North Bay Concrete for foundation work.

“The Gallahers are giving us $5 million. Nobody else is,” Weiss said. “They designed the building, they’re building the building, they’re doing all the interiors. I could absolutely not have done it without them.”

To raise the $9 million needed for construction, the club has five years — the period for the 1.5% interest loan the organization obtained through Santa Rosa-based Poppy Bank, where Bill Gallaher is founder and board chairman. The bank also contributed $100,000, she said.

The Boys & Girls Club of Sonoma-Marin, with annual revenues at about $15 million, receives 75% of its funding from federal and state grants supporting out-of-school services. The other quarter comes from charitable gifts and donations, Weiss said.

The organization’s current programs in Roseland serve 900 kids. Once completed, the new club will help serve 2,500 kids in the area.

The project represents one of the first major construction projects in years in the area that is not a school or a shopping center. It’s located less than 100 yards from a long-promised public revitalization project that’s been in the works for more than a decade.

That project, Tierra de Rosas, a mixed-use commercial and residential village, has yet to break ground, though the modest Mitote Food Park was recently completed at the site’s main parking lot.

From the generous second-floor windows of the new Boys & Girls Club, the picturesque hillsides that surround Santa Rosa offer a kind of antidote to the largely neglected urban landscape of the Roseland neighborhood.

“I’ve been watching Roseland on a daily basis for the last 14 years, and it’s been my absolute passion in life to bring the opportunities that I had as a young person to these kids as much as possible,” Weiss said.

The teen center on the second floor offers grand views of the full-size gym. The massive back walls of the gym have yet to go up and you can still see neighboring warehouse-type buildings.

Weiss said the rapid pace of construction has her dreaming big, and she hopes one day she can purchase adjacent property to build an athletic field.

“This is going to be the most significant thing that’s happened here, in addition to the local school district, they’ve built really nice, beautiful schools,” she said. “I think we really are focusing on kids and we also need to make sure businesses are successful.”

Whited said that by the end of summer, the structure would be “closed in” with major utility work completed. Drywall should start by August, with the finishing touches being completed through the fall.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @pressreno.