San Bernardino County’s second most populous and its 12th most populous municipalities appear headed in diametrically opposite directions in terms of their acceptance of warehouse projects large and small.
In both cities, a predominant contingent of the city’s residents appear adamantly opposed to the construction of further warehouses, which are cataloged by both cities as light industrial uses. In Fontana, elected officials and the planning/land use division employees who are answerable to the management echelon at City Hall who are in turn at the beck and call of those politicians feel that popular sentiment can be disregarded with relative impunity. In Redlands, where the city council for more than two decades has been far more aggressively in favor of growth than the majority of constituents who voted them into office, city officials are more sensitive than those in Fontana with regard to the type of development that is going on within their city limits. They sense that while, on average, citizens in their city would prefer that as little new construction take place as is possible, those residents are far less tolerant of factories, foundries and warehouses than they are of houses or commercial buildings.
Throughout San Bernardino County and the Inland Empire in general, the expansion of warehousing over the last two decades has been intensive.
There is more than 940 million square feet of warehousing in San Bernardino and Riverside counties at present, with more being built. That includes 3,052 warehouses in San Bernardino County. In Ontario alone, there are 290 warehouses larger than 100,000 square feet. Reportedly, there are 143 warehouses in Fontana larger than 100,000 square feet. In Chino there are 118 warehouses larger than 100,000 square feet, 109 larger than 100,000 square feet in Rancho Cucamonga and 75 larger than 100,000 square feet in San Bernardino. Since 2015, 27 warehouse project applications have been processed and approved by the City of San Bernardino, entailing acreage under roof of 9,600,000 square feet, or more than one-third of a square mile, translating into 220.38 acres. After Ontario, Fontana, Chino, Rancho Cucamonga and San Bernardino, the city in San Bernardino County with the next largest number of warehouses of more than 100,000 square feet is Redlands, with 57, followed by Rialto with 48. In addition to those 48 larger warehouses, Rialto has another 125 warehouses of under 100,000 square feet.
Increasingly, some elected officials, local residents and futurists are questioning whether warehouses constitute the highest and best use of the property available for development in the region. The glut of logistics facilities in the Inland Empire has some thinking their numbers are out of balance. In refuting the assertions of the proponents of warehouses that they constitute positive economic development, their detractors cite the relatively poor pay and benefits provided to those who work in distribution facilities, the large diesel-powered semi-trucks that are part of those operations with their unhealthy exhaust emissions, together with the bane of traffic gridlock they create.
In Fontana in particular, an increasingly vocal element of the community has decried the proliferation of warehouses in that city, maintaining that city officials there have been indiscriminate in where they have allowed them to be built, including in close proximity to schools and homes.
Acquanetta Warren was appointed to the Fontana City Council in 2002 and elected to that post in her own right in 2004 and reelected in 2008. She was elevated by the city’s voters to the position of mayor in 2010. Throughout her time as an elected official, Fontana has embraced warehouse development. Both her supporters and detractors alike refer to her as “Warehouse Warren.” Citing Fontana’s location, she says her city is a logical host for warehouses and distribution centers. She has argued that given the largely blue collar populace of Fontana and the consideration that approaching 30 percent of the parents of children attending Fontana schools either do not speak, or lack proficiency in, the English language, the best that can be done for a significant percentage of those who graduate from or drop out of Fontana’s high schools is to provide them with jobs such as those available in warehouses, which do not demand skilled laborers. Between 2016 and 2021, Fontana approved more than 30 warehouses totaling approximately 16 million square feet in southern Fontana alone.
A number of organizations, including the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, the South Fontana Concerned Citizens Coalition and the Robert Redford Conservancy have become animated in opposing Warren and her pro-warehouse agenda in Fontana. The State of California – in the form of the California Attorney General’s Office – in 2021 second guessed the decision of the city council decision to approve a warehouse next to Jurupa Hills High.
In the face of that opposition, Warren and her three allies on the city council – John Roberts, Pete Garcia and Phil Cothran, Jr – have remained convinced that building more warehouses in their city is a goal worth pursuing.
Earlier this year, on June 3, the Fontana Planning Commission, which serves at the pleasure of the city council, approved an environmental impact report which essentially gave go-ahead for a plan to consolidate six land parcels into one for the construction of a 397,000-square foot warehouse. By its action, the planning commission approved a final environmental impact report, the adoption of a mitigation monitoring and reporting program, a tentative parcel map and design review for the warehouse, which is to constructed on roughly 18.3 acres of land, situated between Sierra and Mango avenues, some 1,300 feet south of Summit Avenue.
On June 16, the Golden State Environmental Justice Alliance challenged that action, submitting an appeal of the approval. The alliance maintained in the appeal that the environmental impact report was inadequate and misleading, and did not provide an accurate or completed analysis of the environmental impacts of project or size up in its entirety what would come about as a consequence of the project’s construction and operation. According to the Golden State Environmental Justice Alliance, the environmental impact report did not provide an analysis of the health risk impacts associated with construction and the operation of the facility upon its completion.
According to the Golden State Environmental Justice Alliance, the city was permitting the developer to engage in a piecemeal approach in undertaking preparation for the project, had not provided an accurate site plan, floor plan or conceptual grading plans for the undertaking, and had not disclosed building elevations or given a project narrative during the scoping session for the public to review. Moreover, according to the Golden State Environmental Justice Alliance, the city and the developer did not openly address the closure of Windflower Avenue, which is to come about as a consequence of the project. The Planning Commission, Golden State maintains, should have requested a revised environmental report to make those details relating to the project available to the interested members of the public before the June 3 hearing, extending to information about the vacation of the road.
Fontana city officials maintain there is absolutely no substance or truth contained in the appeal of the project’s approval.
The council majority, consisting of Warren, Roberts, Garcia and Cothran, has instructed city staff to prepare a response to the challenge to “blow the Golden State Environmental Justice Alliance out of the water” by establishing that the project will “promote economic development by creating jobs, establishing a quick and consistent development process and showing those seeking to establish operations in Fontana that we are a business-friendly community.”
By contrast, when the generalized issue of further warehouse development came before the Redlands Planning Commission this week on Tuesday October 14, five of the six members present – Karah Shaw, Matt Endsley, Rosemarie Gonzales, Maryn Mineo-Wells and Emily Elliott – voted to recommend that their political masters, the members of the city council, amend the city’s zoning ordinance to ban discontinue the construction of warehouses within the city limits going forward. One member of the commission, Mark Stanson, opposed making the recommendation. A seventh commissioner, Rich Smith, was not in attendance at the meeting. on the redevelopment of existing warehouses.
According to Redlands Planning Division Manager Brian Foote, within the northwest quadrant of the city, primarily west of the 210 Freeway closest to the City of San Bernardino, where traditionally the development of warehouses and light industrial uses has been encouraged, there are 59 warehouses. He said three of those exceed 1 million square feet. Warehouses as defined in Wednesday’s discussion as building of 50,000 square feet or more with six or more truck docks or loading doors.
One of the primary development standards relating to warehouses the city has adhered to previously is a site location within one mile of a freeway ramp for new warehouses. Several of the city’s specific plans allow warehousing and distribution centers. The East Valley Corridor Specific Plan permits warehouses, limiting them to that specific plan area’s commercial industrial, regional commercial and special development districts. The East Valley Corridor Specific Plan requires a discretionary approval process by the planning commission and the city council for such entitlements. Either a “planned development” or “concept plan” entitlement is required and is processed as a quasi-legislative action.
According to a staff report, almost all of the larger warehouse/distribution facilities in Redlands have been developed over the past 20 years. Staff ascertained the year of construction for each property, and the results are displayed in a series of maps showing five-year increments of development (see Attachment C). Six large facilities were constructed in Redlands between 2002 to 2005, thirteen large facilities constructed between 2006 to 2008 and six large were facilities constructed between 2013 to 2015. Overall, the pace of development in the northwest area of Redlands shows six warehouses, all large, developed between 2001 and 2005; 25, not all large, built between 2006 and 2010; 19 warehouses of all types built in the northwest area between 2011 and 2015; three built between 2016 and 2020; and five built from 2020 to 2025.
According to the staff report, “In the southwest part of the city, there are another five properties that are believed to have warehousing and distribution uses for local businesses, for example, furniture distribution owned by a retailer, food/beverage distribution for a fast food chain, another food/beverage distributor for several restaurants, and mix of other small office or light industrial businesses in the other buildings. These five buildings range between approximately 52,000 to 96,000 square-feet each. The largest building with almost 96,000 square-feet has been subdivided for two tenants of about 48,000 square feet each and appears to be vacant presently. While these uses may involve storage and distribution activities serving Redlands and surrounding communities, the operating characteristics that serve local businesses and the local economy are different from the larger regional/national logistics distribution facilities in buildings that typically exceed 250,000 square-feet.”
The staff report noted that in 2026 a state law will go into effect that will apply to new warehouses of 250,000 square-feet or ones that expand to 250,000 square feet requiring a minimum of 500 feet of separation from a sensitive receptor to a dock door; that heavy-duty trucks cannot use drive aisles on sides of the building adjacent to sensitive receptors; that the site must have a separate entrance for heavy-duty trucks that directly access the major thoroughfare, arterial, or local commercial road abutting the project site; and buffer areas which are to have a specified width of 100 feet for screening and sound mitigation.
Previously, members of the planning commission had made statements suggesting that the city might adopt a total prohibition on warehouses and logistics distribution centers, while allowing those already permitted to continue to operate or that the city could impose more stringent requirements on warehouses to ensure they are located in areas that do not impact on non-industrial-related uses and are properly buffered or separated from other uses.
The planning commission took up such a discussion in earnest on October 14.
What was brought up during the commission’s discussion was that in the rush to accommodate warehouse development last year and this year, the planning commission went along with staff’s recommendations regarding allowing a 357,610-square-foot warehouse to replace the Splash Kingdom waterpark and another warehouse for Prologis to replace the La-Z-Boy manufacturing plant at 301 Tennessee Street. The vote on the Splash Kingdom replacement took place in July 2024 and the vote in favor of Prologis four months ago in June.
According to Brian Desatnik, the city’s development services director. there remain just three sites within the city where warehouse development could take place.
Desaltnik said the city can simply declare that there will be “basically… no new warehouses past a certain date.”
There is sentiment in the community and on the council that allowing warehouse development to override the potential for other types of development on those properties or that would supplant existing uses such as those at Splash Kingdom or the La-Z-Boy facility which are treasured by elements of the Redlands population would create needless hostility toward city government and its planning division, to say nothing of elected city officials.
Simultaneously, the city has been accommodating of residential developers and some commercial developers in recent years, which has rubbed some members of the community the wrong way. At the same time, Redlands, like other cities, is under pressure by the California Department of Housing and Community Development to accommodate more residential development. The State of California has specified that Redlands should be prepared to allow, during the October 2021 to October 2029 planning cycle 3,516 residential units to be built within its city limits, including 967 units for very-low income homebuyers, 615 units for low income buyers, 652 units for moderate income home purchasers and 1,282 units for those of above-moderate income.
There is some evidence to suggest that some concession to the anti-development sentiment among Redlands residents had to be made.
An idea floated was that the city will revamp its zoning such that the building of new warehouses would be banned and existing warehouses could not be torn down and replaced unless they were damaged or destroyed by some form of disaster such as a fire or seismic event. Those rebuilds would not be allowed to exceed the size of the original facility.
While Shaw, Endsley, Gonzales, Mineo-Wells and Elliott were amenable to asking the city council to declare Redlands off-limits to further warehouses, Stanson rejected the concept, saying a prohibition on warehouses or any type of construction or limitations on property rights were an unacceptable application of governmental authority.
“I can’t support taking away the rights of people to be able to do what they want with their property,” Stanson said. “That’s why they bought their property. I don’t understand the need to make it harder for people to do things in this town; it’s already hard enough to deal with the State of California and the City of Redlands as it is.”