Written by Scott Hamilton, Project Manager
December 1, 2025

The project to restore Lodi’s first City Hall and Firehouse is being accomplished with 100% community-donated funding, volunteer labor and in-kind donations. Once restored, the first floor will be used by the Lodi Historical Society to house the Lodi Historical Museum and the second floor will be used by the Lodi Professional Firefighters Union for their Meeting Hall.

To-date, we have raised over $330,000 in cash donations from incredibly generous individuals and companies throughout the Lodi community. We have also received over $180,000 in in-kind services and pledges from local contractors and businesses. This includes Architectural and Engineering Services, Asbestos Assessment & Abatement, Demolition Waste Removal, Structural Framing, Concrete Work, Electrical, HVAC systems, Signage, and more.

Our original estimate to restore the building was approximately $1.2M but we have been successful in managing the scope and simplifying the plans as well as getting local contractors to donate their time & services. As we continue on this trend, our new fundraising goal is approximately $600,000 (an additional $270,000).

Before We got Started
The building was in a fairly dilapidated state. The roof was partially caved-in and had been leaking rain into the building for a couple of decades.

Accomplishments To-Date
Over the past couple of years, using a substantial amount of volunteer labor and in-kind donations, we’ve been able to steadily make progress on the restoration of this historic landmark.

The architectural services from NJA Architecture and the engineering by Mike Smith Engineering have been essential to getting this project underway. Both firms have provided extensive pro bono services to help get the renovation launched.

The first order of business was to clear out all of the junk and debris, remove the flooring, pull down lath & plaster ceilings and scrape out 20 years of biohazardous bird waste. Ostlund Environmental Services and RB Environmental donated their asbestos assessment and remediation services and Jeff Henderson and the Firefighters provided most of the sweat equity during the demo phase.

We then proceeded to demolish the interior walls and chip off all of the plaster from the interior walls to expose the brick. We had ET Abatement abate the asbestos roofing and Dave Vaccarezza donated the dumpster service of Cal-Waste for the entire demolition phase.

Once the demo was complete, with the expertise and assistance of retired carpenter Brad Davis, we installed new structural framing to place all of the rotted timbers including rebuilt roof trusses.

With the continued invaluable assistance of Brad Davis we then put down replacement roof sheathing to repair the rotten sections and Noble Brown Roofing installed a new TPO roof.

With the new roof in place Daniel Jimenez built and mounted custom steel window frames then we installed new window panels from the Glass Shop to make everything weather-tight.

Our friends from Lodi Utilities Services provided new connections to the water and sewer mains.

This allowed us to connect the mains to the building after the Firefighters and Mike Lear dug new trenches for the pipe to be laid.

Then the folks from GN Plumbing installed all of the water and waste plumbing in the building.

In the meantime, Grizzly Heating and Air installed the two HVAC units that they (very generously!) donated along with all of the installation labor and parts to this restoration project.

We then moved on to patch and repair the rotten, damaged and missing wood flooring on the second floor using salvaged wood decking from the roof.

We are currently working on installing structural steel posts donated by Valley Iron Works and 18-inch glulam beams that will allow us to remove walls and open up the first floor space.