By James Chiao, Osgood Project Lead, FCSN Co-Chair

For the past 4-5 years, FCSN has been looking for opportunities to expand its facility in Fremont due to the long waiting lists, office overcrowding for our dedicated staff, and the lack of physical space for programs. Currently FCSN must rent spaces to run two of our existing programs. In 2020, FCSN board felt the urgency and formed a site search committee with the goal of acquiring a 10,000+ square feet (sf) commercial property. Previously, our goal was a smaller office of around 3000 sf. Therefore, it was a major decision to seek a much larger facility so we can consolidate our programs and have enough room for future expansion.

Our timing for site search was perfect, the commercial property market was in a slump because of the pandemic. However, there was a scarcity of commercial properties that met our stringent zoning requirements. Then my daughter Tracy, a commercial realtor, brought to our attention this 18,000-sf industrial property on Osgood Rd, Fremont, which we all overlooked for one reason or another. It turned out that this property was an educational facility for an after-school program, with zoning that matched our intended use. After a long and tenuous negotiation, we acquired it in May 2021.

In August 2021, the board formed a design team and picked T Square as our architect. The design team consisted of James Chiao, Albert Wang, Anna Wang, Sylvia Yeh, Lilian Lin, CK Lee, and volunteers Stanley Woo, Jeff Woo who provide construction expertise. We have some experience at running this type of project as we had all gone through our South Bay Bascom Center renovation before. For the next twelve months, we worked and completed the initial design and submitted to Fremont’s planning department in summer 2022. At the same time, we started looking for contractors to bid on the construction part of the project. We were surprised when the initial bids were much higher than expected – partly due to the rising cost since the start of the pandemic. We made the difficult decision to go back to the drawing board and worked on a value engineering (VE) plan. Instead of a total renovation of the two buildings, we decided to reduce the scope of the 2-story building.

By Dec 2022, we received the approval of our original plan from the city’s planning department. We then chose to work with Pacific General Construction (PGC) to refine the scope and identify additional cost-saving measures. We submitted our VE plan as a revision in March 2023, and PGC started demolition at around the same time.

The following photos show the tremendous progress we have made so far, thanks to PGC’s dedication, careful planning, and management. From our experience, a project of this size could easily take eighteen months to complete. However, we were pleasantly surprised when PGC advised us that the target completion date of the construction is Q4 of this year. With PGC as a partner, we are hopeful that the project will be completed before the end of this year.

With strong support of FCSN leadership, dedication of our design team and architect, and our experienced contractor, PGC, we hope to move into our new space next year and expand our highly sought after programs to serve more families with children with special needs.

If you feel our project is worthwhile, please support us with a donation. Please contact me at jim_chiao@yahoo.com or Albert at aybwang@comcast.net should you have any questions.