Valley Children’s Museum takes leap forward

DUBLIN » With an agreement in hand for a parcel in a Dublin park, leaders of the Valley Children’s Museum are hoping to ratchet up fund-raising for a permanent museum building that could open in 2022.

“This puts into place that we have the ( building) site dedicated, and that our board is going ahead with its capital funding campaign,” said Harry Sachs, a San Ramon City Council member and board member for the Valley Children’s Museum. The agreement with Dublin, he said, “legitimizes what we’re doing.”

Current plans call for two buildings — one of as large as 28,000 square feet, the second one smaller — on the southeast edge of the future Dublin Crossing Park along Dublin Boulevard east of the Iron Horse Trail, near the Dublin-Pleasanton BART station.

Although the Dublin City Council’s November 2016 approval of the Dublin Crossing Community Park Master Plan included a few acres set aside for a future museum site, that approval didn’t constitute a solid assurance that land would be there for the museum. That assurance came, after several months of negotiations between city and museum leaders, with an agreement approved by the city coun- cil on Aug. 15.

Dublin Mayor David Haubert said he expects the buildings, as now planned, would cost $30 million to $35 million. “But that could change depending on how much money is raised for the project,” he said.

Unlike the look- butdon’t-touch nature of most historical museums, children’s museums are all about interactivity, encouraging learn through touching and playing with things. The United States is home to more than 250 such museums, and there are another 100 or so worldwide. The Bay Area hosts several, including the Habitot Children’s Museum in Berkeley, the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, the Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco and the Children’s Natural History Museum in Fremont.

There are none, however, east of the Caldecott Tunnel or the Dublin Grade. Contra Costa and eastern Alameda counties provide a fertile market, given all the young families in the Tri-Valley, eastern Contra Costa and elsewhere.

“It’s something that is long overdue,” said longtime museum board member Donna Kerger of San Ramon. “For me, it isn’t a San Ramon project or a Dublin project — it’s a regional project. Livermore, Pleasanton, Danville, all these cities have expressed support.”