Sacramento-area city ‘optimistic’ on landing tractor company’s regional headquarters
A Sacramento County city may soon be home to hundreds of new jobs and more manufacturing.
Kubota Tractor Corp. and the city of Elk Grove are in talks that could bring the equipment giant’s west region headquarters — a planned multimillion-dollar, 701,000 square-foot campus — to the south end of the city.
Talks continue and several key components — land and annexation issues high among them — are still months away. But economic development officials here are hopeful for a tent-pole project that could draw as many as 300 jobs and more manufacturers.
“It’s not a done deal, but we’re optimistic,” said Darrell Doan, city economic development director.
Landing Kubota, Doan said, would “plant a flag that Elk Grove is ready to do business” with national and multinational corporations, something Doan says the city has shown with the opening two years ago of a 150,000-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center on industrial Union Park Way.
“We’ve had a thriving but small manufacturing sector in Elk Grove for decades. What changed was two years ago when Amazon came calling,” Doan said. “We said, if we have well-conditioned industrial land, you can build an industrial center in Elk Grove.”
The proposed Kubota site, planned for Grant Line Road at the southern end of Waterman Road east of Highway 99, would be home to one of Kubota’s three national warehouse and distribution facilities, joining sites in Illinois and Georgia, and is expandable to 1 million square feet, Doan said. Kubota’s U.S. headquarters is in Grapevine, Texas, near Dallas.
The proposed campus would also be a final equipment assembly facility, house executive offices and become home to the conglomerate’s Kubota University, its U.S. employee training and education center.
The Elk Grove site would replace Kubota’s present West region location 22 miles to the south in Lodi, home to the manufacturer’s comparatively cramped 17-acre, 180,000-square-foot facility since 2005.
Elk Grove and Kubota have been in discussions for three years on a new site, Doan said.
Kubota in a statement said it “is underway with plans to expand its footprint in the Western United States. Kubota is currently assessing 50-acre properties in open discussions with the Economic Development team in Elk Grove,” adding that “the area will offer the company an opportunity to expand distribution capacity to an established dealer network.”
Kubota’s Western Division serves customers and dealers in 11 states.
The Grant Line land is familiar to Elk Grove residents. City officials in the middle of the last decade proposed it as a stadium site in Elk Grove’s longshot and ultimately aborted bid to bring professional soccer to the city. That morphed into a plan for a regional youth soccer complex with multiple fields spread across its acreage, before that, too, went by the boards.
Today, a series of steps must fall into place to bring Kubota aboard.
Elk Grove is in the process of annexing the 500-acre Grant Line parcel into the city ahead of a sale of the land to the global manufacturer. The annexation still must meet Sacramento County Local Area Formation Committee approval. City Council members must approve the land deal and Kubota still needs land use and permit approvals. The company will likely go before city planners for the OKs in July, about the same time council members will look at the parcel sale, Doan said.
“We want to market to industrial and manufacturing users. There’s a lot of interest in Elk Grove in these industries,” Doan said. “My team is spreading the message that we’re open for larger, more industrial projects like this.”
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