Lodi News-Sentinel published this article Monday, November 30, 1998

Cleanup Efforts
By Ross Farrow
News-Sentinel staff writer

Mathew Thurlow/News-Sentinel

Don Litchfield and his business partners have moved their business, Copper Enterprises,
to the old Lockeford Winery. The business is operated out of the former scale house.
Plans to renovate the other buildings on the property are under way.

LOCKEFORD - The old Lockeford Winery, opened in 1946, housed the first commercially produced champagne in the Lodi area.
During the past 12 years, however, the abandoned winery site on East Locke Road sustained considerable damage due to parties and vandalism. Now the new owners have some fresh ideas.
"I can just see some giant reptiles hanging from the ceiling," said Don Litchfield, one of the property owners. "Imagine what a giant dinosaur center in Lockeford would do for Lockeford."
Litchfield, who has an active imagination and a variety of interests, has some other ideas for the land, such as beer manufacturing, a bottled water production plant and fish.
Litchfield and his partner, Bruce Viel, have spent $150,000 to $200,000 to renovate the 48-acre parcel, where several cases of vandalism and fires have taken place.
Purchased by Viel and Litchfield for $215,000 in March after 11 years of neglect and vandalism, some of the property has been spruced up since the partners occupied the complex July 1.
Teen-agers, many of them gang members, were known to consume drugs and alcohol, party, burn roofs and spray graffiti on the walls of the 52-year-old buildings, San Joaquin County officials say.
"They left this place in quite a shambles," Litchfield said. "It still looks like Sarajevo in a lot of areas.
Most of the graffiti has been removed, although the words "vandalism" (spelled incorrectly by the vandal). "KKK" and "skinhead" remain on the buildings.
Several fires took place before Litchfield and Viel bought the property, including one in July 1997 that required the services of 60 firefighters from 11 fire districts.
A small brick building, which Litchfield calls a "scale house," has been converted into an office occupied by Litchfield, his wife, Karyn, and two other employees.
Several companies are involved in the old Lockeford Winery property. One is called Copperford, consisting of Viel, Litchfield and their wives, which owns the land. The name stems from Copperopolis, where the Litchfields live, and Lockeford, where the Viels call home.
Litchfield's business, however, is known as Copper Enterprises. Viel is not involved with the business.
An Alaska firm called Clearwater Environmental, which involves Litchfield as well, has its Northern California office at the old winery site. Litchfield and Clearwater Environmental own a quarry in the San Andreas area and work together on environmental cleanup projects and levee repair work from Manteca to Yuba City.
Clearwater Environmental, from its Lockeford office, is under contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for $30 million worth of projects over the next two years.
The firm employs about 50 workers and had 70 during the peak work period in the summer, Litchfield said.
Litchfield said he became interested in acquiring the Lockeford Winery property because of his background in environmental cleanup efforts.
With the work we do anyway, we can incorporate renovations on a daily basis," he said.

Asbestos was removed this year and permits are being acquired from the county to get a gas tank removed, Viel said.
New to the old Lockeford Winery property is a 45-foot-high palm tree transported by truck from Sherman Island in the Delta, Litchfield said. The tree would have been destroyed due to the environmental work had it not been moved, he said.
Aside from the office building, buildings are plagued with broken windows, dirty interiors and graffiti, but Litchfield has some ambitious ideas for the property, such as manufacturing bottled water and beer. Some of his ideas make his wife, Karyn, burst into laughter.
"Can you imagine how much 220,000 gallows of beer is worth?" he asked.
A provocative question to be sure, but Litchfield has his eyes on a storage tank that could be filled with beer if the right beer company decides to open shop in Lockeford.
The bottled water would come, he said, from the three deep wells filled with what he describes as perfectly good drinking water.
Litchfield also dreams of finding someone to convert 10 acres of old evaporation ponds to the rear of the property into fish farm, where carp, black bass, sturgeon and other fish could be raised for sale.
The only problem facing Litchfield is the need to rezone from industrial to commercial if his dream for a fish farm becomes a reality.
"We can manufacture explosives (under the present zoning), but we can't raise fish," Litchfield sighed.
What seems to excite Litchfield the most is the 20,000-square-foot warehouse on the property, which he dreams of converting into a dinosaur museum and gift shop.
In addition to his other activities, Litchfield said he collects and sells 75 million-year-old fossils.
His collection is housed for safe keeping at the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in South Dakota, but he'd like to move it to - you guessed it - Lockeford.
"We happen to have the friends to help make it happen," Litchfield said.
Jurassic Park aficionados may be disappointed, however, because Litchfield said he specializes in the slightly younger Cretaceous period from 120 to 60 million years B.C.

This article is reprinted with the permission from the Lodi News-Sentinel.

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