Qualla: The Base That Became a Business Park

The Base That Became a Business Park: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Howard, CC BY 2.5. Major Hezekiah McClellan was born in 1894 and spent his career pushing the boundaries of what aircraft could endure. He pioneered arctic aeronautical testing, flying in conditions that killed engines and froze instruments, proving that military aviation could operate in the world's coldest latitudes. On May 25, 1936, his Consolidated P-30 crashed during a flight test near Centerville, Ohio, and the man who had survived the Arctic did not survive a routine evaluation flight. Three years later, the Sacramento Air Depot was renamed in his honor. The irony would have been lost on no one: McClellan Field was a logistics and maintenance base, the place where other people's aircraft were repaired, overhauled, and sent back into service. It fixed what the flying broke.

Image: Ian Howard | CC BY 2.5

The Base That Became a Business Park: The Machine Behind the Machine

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J.smith, CC BY-SA 3.0. McClellan was never a glamorous assignment. Established in 1935 as the Pacific Air Depot, it existed to keep the Air Force's equipment running -- a sprawling industrial campus of maintenance hangars, supply warehouses, and repair shops northeast of Sacramento. While fighter bases...

Image: J.smith | CC BY-SA 3.0

The Base That Became a Business Park: Coast Guard and Cold War

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J.smith, CC BY-SA 3.0. McClellan's maintenance mission attracted tenants. The United States Coast Guard operated Coast Guard Air Station Sacramento on the base, flying and maintaining several HC-130 Hercules search-and-rescue aircraft. The Coast Guard presence outlasted the Air Force itself -- CGAS Sac...

Image: J.smith | CC BY-SA 3.0

The Base That Became a Business Park: Politics and the Closure List

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BenFranske, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1993, the Pentagon selected McClellan for closure. The decision was not clean. McClellan was initially scratched from the base closure list, but that reprieve drew allegations that the Clinton administration was playing politics with California's military infrastructure. The b...

Image: BenFranske | CC BY-SA 3.0

The Base That Became a Business Park: Reinvention at Eight Million Square Feet

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J.smith, CC BY-SA 3.0. What replaced the base was McClellan Business Park, which now hosts hundreds of private companies alongside state, federal, and local government agencies across more than eight million square feet of commercial space. The conversion was deliberate and aggressive: rather than let ...

Image: J.smith | CC BY-SA 3.0

The Base That Became a Business Park: What the Water Remembers

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Ronbo76, CC BY-SA 3.0. Beneath the business park, a less hopeful story persists. In 2015, the Sacramento Bee reported that McClellan Airfield had been designated a Superfund site after the Environmental Protection Agency identified 326 waste areas on the former base. Sixty-six years of industrial milit...

Image: User:Ronbo76 | CC BY-SA 3.0