Home Care In Vacaville, CA

The Peña Adobe Historical Society will host their annual “Artists at the Adobe” at the Peña Adobe Park in Vacaville, on Saturday May 4, 2024 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The park is located in Vacaville at Peña Adobe Road off Interstate 80 to the left of Lagoon Valley Regional Park’s entrance.

Fairfield’s Sandy Imperatori and students from her art classes will be at Peña Adobe Park for our returning plein air event. Sandy studied BFA Graphic Design at Carnegie Mellon University and has conducted the Plein Air Workshop in Virginia City, Nevada for over 20 years. The former Gallery Director of the Fairfield Visual Arts Association, Sandy began drawing and painting as a young child, and has been painting watercolor for over 25 years.

Artist Ann King of Oakland will chat with park visitors about her watercolor painting "Nestora Peña and Apolonia Vaca Along the Old Spanish Trail". Her painting depicts the daughter of Juan Manuel Vaca, just 3 yrs. old and the only daughter of Juan Felipe Peña, 5 yrs. old, as they traveled in the saddle bags of a “gentle mule” on the Old Spanish Trail to California in 1841. Ann reflects she "fell in love with mules as I studied photographs to get a reasonable likeness for this illustration. They walk heel-toe over rocky terrain, are quite sensible and only go where it is safe. That's why they have the reputation of stubbornness."

Historical Society Native American docent, James Tunstall will be showing his handmade jewelry. James celebrates his heritage using leather and shells to make necklaces and earrings. Park visitors will have an opportunity to make their very own shell necklace using wooden pump drills. Docent Armando Perez’s Native American heritage can be found in his paintings, which will be on display. Volunteers James and Armando have been sharing their heritage with Peña Adobe park visitors for over seven years.

Joining the artists will be members of the Vacaville Art League and Gallery! Established in January of 1963, The Vacaville Art League is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development and promotion of the visual arts. Located in the 129-year-old Segura home on Monte Vista Avenue, the Gallery has provided a place for the public to participate directly in the visual arts since opening on March 16, 1968. Come meet the members of the Vacaville Art League and learn about their gallery, events and classes.

Bring your art supplies and join the fun or bring a picnic and enjoy the wildlife and listen to the music of the Vacaville Acoustic Jammers under the direction of Terry and Leslie Cloper! The Jammers sing and play a variety of instruments including the guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and harmonica. They meet the first and third Wednesday of the month at the McBride Senior Center at 91 Townsquare in downtown Vacaville.

This annual artists’ event has included over 100 participants in previous years. Docents will be on hand to answer questions and conduct tours of the Peña Adobe, built in 1842 by the Peña family, who with the Vaca family settled in the Lagoon Valley. Visit the adjacent Mowers-Goheen Museum and see our collection of artifacts and a woolly mammoth bone found locally near Putah Creek. This event is free! For questions in advance, call (707) 447-0518 or visit our website www.penaadobe.org.

In June 2023, Roche disclosed its plans to sell or close the legacy Genentech Vacaville facility and cited its personalized pipeline as a driver for this. Now, Swiss contract development manufacturing organization (CDMO) Lonza is set to buy the facility and said the acquisition will enhance the firm’s large-scale biologics manufacturing capacity for mammalian therapies.

In addition to the $1.2 billion cash payment, the CDMO also expects to invest around $561 million to renew the facility and increase capabilities at the site to support mammalian biologics therapies. The Roche products currently produced at the site will be supplied by Lonza and this will be phased out as the site transforms to serve different customers and clients.

Over several years, the site has manufactured various monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) for Genentech and its parent company Roche. This includes some best sellers such as Herceptin (trastuzumab), Avastin (bevacizumab), Rituxan (rituximab), and Actermra (tocilizumab) – the latter in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The Vacaville site is a highly valuable strategic acquisition that will make capacity immediately available for our customers and unlock future growth for our Biologics division. It will support us in providing a commercialization path to existing customers and incremental large-scale commercial capacity to our partners,” said Jean-Christophe Hyvert, president of Biologics at Lonza.

“We have deep and long-standing industrial expertise in delivering commercial scale manufacturing services for our customers’ therapies. In combining this with the strong legacy of the Vacaville facility, its highly skilled colleague community, and its proven track record on quality, we are excited to take our leading large-scale mammalian offering to its next chapter of growth.”

The Vacaville facility has a total bioreactor capacity of approximately 330,000 L, which makes it one of the biggest biologics manufacturing sites globally by volume. According to BioPlan Associates’ Top 1000 Biopharmaceutical Facilities Index, the plant is only second to CDMO Samsung Biologic’s Songdo, Korea biocampus in relation to global bioreactor capacity.

Lonza said through the acquisition the CDMO will also generate West Coast commercial production presence and provide its customers with access to additional capacity in the US. Furthermore, 750 Genentech employees at the Vacaville site will be offered employment by Lonza.

Subject to specific closing conditions, the transaction is anticipated to be completed in the second half of this year.

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Amazon next year plans to nearly double the size of its already sizable Vacaville hub of warehouses, inking a lease for the North Bay’s largest commercial building built to date.

The Seattle-based e-commerce giant confirmed it has signed a lease for the newly completed 1.23 million-square-foot Building C at 920 Eubanks Drive. With floor area equivalent to 21 football fields, 209 truck docks and an inventory-stacking clear height of 42 feet, it’s the largest of three buildings approved for the 89.7-acre Midway Commerce Center project.

”Plans are in the very early stages and we’ll share more details in the future,” Amazon spokesperson Natalie Banke told the Business Journal in an email.

The Midway project team on Oct. 25 had announced that the first two warehouses were complete but didn’t disclose the name of the “national e-commerce tenant” that would be occupying the whole building in the second quarter of 2024.

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Amazon has committed to five North Bay facilities over the past six years, but only three have come to fruition.

The company first planted its North Bay flag with a 321,000-square-foot Vacaville sortation center at 300 Crocker Drive in 2017. In 2021, it opened a freshly constructed 202,000-square-foot delivery station at a site in American Canyon’s Napa Logistic Park that had been envisioned for a 1 million-square-foot building.

Also in 2021, the e-tailer opened in a new 617,000-square-foot sortation center at 4800 Midway Drive in NorthBay Logistics Center.

But two Sonoma County lease commitments in 2020 and 2021 fizzled, including the 250,000-square-foot Victory Station project south of the city of Sonoma and a 180,000-square-foot warehouse in Airport Business Center near Sonoma County airport. By in the first quarter of last year, Amazon backed out of the Victory Station and airport-area projects.

Also in early 2022, news reports started surfacing that Amazon across the country was delaying or canceling other warehouse projects as well as exiting leased facilities. This came as other retailers were noting a slowdown in e-commerce growth.

The other Midway Commerce Center warehouse just completed is Building A at 850 Eubanks Drive. The 198,490-square-foot rear-loading building a 36-foot clear height and mechanical dock levers at every other position.

Building A features LED lighting, 4,000 amps of power, mechanical levers and dock deals at every other dock position, metal roof deck supporting an insulated, 20-Year TPO roof, and 2,991 square feet of high-finish offices.

The remaining Midway building to be built, and said to be ready for building permits to be issued, is Building B at 870 Eubanks Drive. At 105,908 square feet, it would have a 32-foot clear height and what’s said to be California’s first use of cross-laminated timber building. That wood framing would be overlain by insulated metal panel in lieu of concrete, reducing carbon footprint by about 30% compared with conventional tilt-wall construction, which was used in Buildings C and A.

Ridgeline and Affinius Capital are the project developers.

Cushman and Wakefield and KBC Advisors were the real estate brokers in the Amazon lease deal.

Jeff Quackenbush covers wine, construction and real estate. Reach him at [email protected] or 707-521-4256.

VACAVILLE — Immigrating to Northern California 40 years ago, the Villasenor Family has shared a taste of Mexico through their restaurants.

Their children now run Villa Corona Restaurant locations in Vacaville, Napa and St. Helena. But now they are accused of discriminating.

"I was shocked," Carlos Villasenor said.

A vision-impaired customer named Jesus Torres filed a lawsuit in Contra Costa County court claiming the restaurant's website has "accessibility barriers for blind or visually impaired people." The lawsuit claims it kept him from ordering food online.

Villasenor says he has no idea who Torres is and thinks he is from out of town. He says the lawsuit was the first he heard of problems with his website, and that it doesn't work with special screen reading software.

Longtime consumer advocate Armand Bakalian who volunteers for the Call Kurtis program is blind and says it's frustrating when a website doesn't work with his screen reading technology. It reads out loud what's on a website and describes pictures.

He's struggled to get help from big corporations, but he says he normally does get help when he explains his concerns to locally-owned businesses.

"I would call the restaurant and say, you know, 'I'd love to order the food on your website, but I'm blind and your website is not providing me with enough information for me to order what I'd like. Can you help me?' " said Bakalian, who added that they normally do.

Villasenor insists Mr. Torres never called him or his staff about his restaurant's website and says he fixed the issue as soon as he heard about it. However, he told us Torres' attorney still demanded thousands of dollars to settle the lawsuit, which he says hits his family business hard — especially after barely surviving COVID-19.

"We were lucky to break even, so it's huge for us," he said. "We got to get a loan to pay this or I'm hoping we can settle at the lowest number possible, and I just don't think I need, you know, I deserve to pay them anything. I'm compliant."

I asked him if he felt like it was a shakedown.

"Total shakedown," he replied.

We searched the name Jesus Torres in Contra Costa County courts where the lawsuit against the Villa Corona Restaurant was filed and found dozens of civil rights lawsuits filed just since November of 2022.

Torres is represented in this case by Orange County attorney Joseph Manning, who has taken on corporations in accessibility cases.

We've learned that in 2019, the Riverside County district attorney went after Manning and several other attorneys, citing the number of disability suits filed, saying, "Attorneys who manipulate these laws do so for the purpose of illegitimate financial gain. These abuses not only hurt the specific small business owners, they also jeopardize the long-term legal protections of the disabled persons these laws were designed to help."

But we've learned this case, was quickly dismissed.

When we asked Manning about the Villa Corona case, he told us he doesn't comment on pending litigation, but said, "My firm is extremely proud of our efforts to bring the blind and visually impaired population into the 21st century....The surefire way to avoid such a lawsuit is to make your website accessible."

Carlos Villasenor says he supports accessibility for the blind. He just thinks this approach was wrong. After our initial interview, he told CBS13 he had limited money for an attorney and ended up settling the case. He can't discuss the amount.

"I've complied with the law, and I don't think he deserves any monetary compensation," he said.

Attorney Manning told me his firm takes into consideration how quickly a business resolves a matter when they resolve a case.

Advocates have come up with guidelines for websites so they are accessible to the blind. Attempts to make those guidelines law at the California State Capitol stalled this summer.

Kurtis Ming

Eleven-time Emmy Award-winner Kurtis Ming is CBS13's consumer investigative reporter and anchors the CBS13 News weekdays at 4 and 5:30pm.

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VACAVILLE — Immigrating to Northern California 40 years ago, the Villasenor Family has shared a taste of Mexico through their restaurants.

Their children now run Villa Corona Restaurant locations in Vacaville, Napa and St. Helena. But now they are accused of discriminating.

"I was shocked," Carlos Villasenor said.

A vision-impaired customer named Jesus Torres filed a lawsuit in Contra Costa County court claiming the restaurant's website has "accessibility barriers for blind or visually impaired people." The lawsuit claims it kept him from ordering food online.

Villasenor says he has no idea who Torres is and thinks he is from out of town. He says the lawsuit was the first he heard of problems with his website, and that it doesn't work with special screen reading software.

Longtime consumer advocate Armand Bakalian who volunteers for the Call Kurtis program is blind and says it's frustrating when a website doesn't work with his screen reading technology. It reads out loud what's on a website and describes pictures.

He's struggled to get help from big corporations, but he says he normally does get help when he explains his concerns to locally-owned businesses.

"I would call the restaurant and say, you know, 'I'd love to order the food on your website, but I'm blind and your website is not providing me with enough information for me to order what I'd like. Can you help me?' " said Bakalian, who added that they normally do.

Villasenor insists Mr. Torres never called him or his staff about his restaurant's website and says he fixed the issue as soon as he heard about it. However, he told us Torres' attorney still demanded thousands of dollars to settle the lawsuit, which he says hits his family business hard — especially after barely surviving COVID-19.

"We were lucky to break even, so it's huge for us," he said. "We got to get a loan to pay this or I'm hoping we can settle at the lowest number possible, and I just don't think I need, you know, I deserve to pay them anything. I'm compliant."

I asked him if he felt like it was a shakedown.

"Total shakedown," he replied.

We searched the name Jesus Torres in Contra Costa County courts where the lawsuit against the Villa Corona Restaurant was filed and found dozens of civil rights lawsuits filed just since November of 2022.

Torres is represented in this case by Orange County attorney Joseph Manning, who has taken on corporations in accessibility cases.

We've learned that in 2019, the Riverside County district attorney went after Manning and several other attorneys, citing the number of disability suits filed, saying, "Attorneys who manipulate these laws do so for the purpose of illegitimate financial gain. These abuses not only hurt the specific small business owners, they also jeopardize the long-term legal protections of the disabled persons these laws were designed to help."

But we've learned this case, was quickly dismissed.

When we asked Manning about the Villa Corona case, he told us he doesn't comment on pending litigation, but said, "My firm is extremely proud of our efforts to bring the blind and visually impaired population into the 21st century....The surefire way to avoid such a lawsuit is to make your website accessible."

Carlos Villasenor says he supports accessibility for the blind. He just thinks this approach was wrong. After our initial interview, he told CBS13 he had limited money for an attorney and ended up settling the case. He can't discuss the amount.

"I've complied with the law, and I don't think he deserves any monetary compensation," he said.

Attorney Manning told me his firm takes into consideration how quickly a business resolves a matter when they resolve a case.

Advocates have come up with guidelines for websites so they are accessible to the blind. Attempts to make those guidelines law at the California State Capitol stalled this summer.

Kurtis Ming

Eleven-time Emmy Award-winner Kurtis Ming is CBS13's consumer investigative reporter and anchors the CBS13 News weekdays at 4 and 5:30pm.

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