Riverbank, California

R iverbank, a city of 25,000 in Stanislaus County, Califor- nia, lies on banks of the Stanislaus River, in the heart of the Central San Joaquin Valley-five miles north of Modesto, 75 miles east of the San Francisco BayArea, and 75 miles south of Sacramento. It was originally founded as a ferry crossing in the mid-1800s and was established as a town with the coming of the Santa Fe Railroad. Riverbank incorporated as a city in 1922, and its official slogan is “The City of Action.” “Riverbank has a long history of being pretty aggressive with regard to new projects,” says CityManager, Sean Scully,“trying our best to take advantage of as many opportunities as pos- sible and being open to lots of different ideas and concepts. And we’ve always been a place that’s been unafraid of large- scale projects that may be difficult for a small community to manage.” One such large-scale project that Scully says the City has been working on for a while is the Riverbank Industrial Complex (RIC), formerly known as the RiverbankArmyAm- munition Plant (RAAP), located at the southeastern edge of the City.The facility began operation in 1943 as an aluminum reduction plant for military supplies. It closed in 1944, and was used for storage until 1952,when the Norris Thermador Corporation was contracted by the U.S.Army to manage the property and produce ammunition supplies for the military.At the height of production, as many as 3,500 individuals were employed on the site. In the 1990s, as production waned, the Army leased excess space on the site to private tenants through the U.S.Army’s Armament Retooling and Manufactur- ing Support (ARMS) program.This allowed a variety of private business tenants involved in manufacturing and light indus- try to operate on the site and take advantage of its amenities. The RIC is actually composed of two non-contiguous sites, totaling 173 acres.The Main Site, located at the southeast portion of the Riverbank city limits, comprises 146 acres and