Rancho Santiago Gets Federal Grant to Aid Start-Ups

The Rancho Santiago Community College District has received a $1.5-million federal grant to help build a high-tech business development center in Santa Ana.

The city is expected to sell the district an acre at Bristol Street just north of Edinger Avenue for $1. The site will house the 20,000-square-foot Digital Media Business Accelerator.

“The city is extremely excited about this project, and it’s going to promote our economic development efforts to further entice high-tech businesses to locate in Santa Ana,” said city spokeswoman Jill Arthur.

The project will be an incubator, a place where business start-ups can be nurtured until they grow successful enough to move out on their own.

Construction is expected to start next summer, said Jill Dominguez of the WRJ Group in Fountain Valley, a consultant for the project. The building will house 10 to 15 businesses, which will receive such technical support as broad-band and fiber-optic communication systems and computers. The walls will be movable so office spaces can adjust to new businesses.

Companies moving into the accelerator will find their rent increased as they become successful. By their second year, Dominguez said, rent will cost as much as other commercial spaces.

“Go out into the big world and get some other space,” Dominguez said. “It’s like parents. You turn 18, here’s the door.”

The Economic Development Agency grant originally was headed for the South Orange County Community College District, which would have turned a helicopter hangar at the former Tustin Marine base into a digital learning center.

But district trustees were philosophically opposed to the incubator and said they couldn’t take the money for the digital learning center because they didn’t know when the land would become available. The division of the base has been tied up in the Legislature and by lawsuits.

The goal of the Economic Development Agency grant is to create jobs, and that is part of the state’s mission for community colleges. Dominguez said the goal of the accelerator is 150 jobs in six years. Each year, records of companies in the accelerator will be inspected to ensure they are hiring people from the community, Dominguez said.

In addition to office space, companies that participate in the business development center will get help from Venture Point, the Orange County Business Council’s small-business development program, including professional information on how to run a business.

Another partner in the project is CORE Economic Development, a nonprofit business connected to Christ Our Redeemer AME Church in Irvine. Pastor Mark Whitlock was executive director of a similar incubator that the First AME Church in Los Angeles recently established with a federal grant in the south-central section of the city.

“I felt we could certainly transfer some of the same skills we were able to acquire in Los Angeles to Orange County,” Whitlock said. “There is a need for business opportunities for minorities in Orange County.”