In Her Final
Legislative
Go-Round In The Assembly, Gómez Reyes
Gets Warehouse Regulation

In her last major legislative accomplishment before she transitions from the Assembly to the State Senate next year, Assemblywoman Eloise Gómez Reyes was able to use the waning days of this year’s legislative session to revisit an issue of substantial importance to her and her constituents and forge a compromise version of a bill she had been shut out on last year.
In March 2021, Gómez Reyes sponsored Assembly Bill 1547, which called for a requirement that a 1,000-yard or .58 mile buffer zone be maintained between the outer boundary of the warehouse site and what are deemed to be sensitive land uses, which include schools, parks, daycare centers, churches or residences.
Under the bill, prior to a warehouse use being considered by the agency with land use authority over it, wider notice than is required with other developments must be given to the community in which it is located, and that agency is to require, at the project proponents expense, an analysis of air quality impacts of the warehouse development, taking into account the truck traffic increase caused by the project. Assembly Bill 1547 would have further mandated the project applicant hold a series of community meetings with affected residents to develop a community benefits agreement. This agreement is to include a plan to incorporate zero emission trucks, the use of zero emission last- mile delivery and local employee recruitment. Assembly Bill 1547 failed to garner passage.
In March 2022, Gómez Reyes, who was then the Assembly majority leader, introduced AB 2840. If it had passed in its original form, it would have required local governments, when approving new logistics projects of 100,000 square feet or more, to impose a 1,000-foot buffer between those projects and homes, schools, health care centers, playgrounds and other places especially at risk from air pollution blamed on warehouse-bound diesel trucks.
Assembly Bill 2840 would also have required a “skilled and trained workforce,” as defined by the state Public Contract Code, to build warehouses. The bill also called for “local residents” to be entitled to a set percentage of jobs once such a warehouse opened.
The California Chamber of Commerce and the Fontana Chamber of Commerce opposed the bill.
Assembly Bill 2840 failed to make it to a vote of the full Assembly.
In 2023, Assemblyman James Ramos introduced Assembly Bill 1748 and Gómez Reyes brought forth Assembly Bill 1000. Both were were ostensibly aimed at the same goal, though they were different in tenor and in much of their substance. While each was represented as imposing heretofore nonexistent regulations on warehouse development, reform advocates considered Gómez Reyes’s version to be earnestly aimed at creating a meaningful buffer between warehouses and residents, while Ramos’s bill was characterized as one intended to enable developers in continuing to construct warehouses.
Gómez Reyes’ Assembly Bill 1000 would have required 1,000 feet be maintained between new warehouses of 100,000 square feet or more and homes, apartments and other places where people spend a lot of time, such as day care centers and schools. It would have been applicable statewide.
Ramos’s AB 1748 dealt with the same topic as AB 1000, that being the proximity of warehouses to living quarters, educational facilities and the like. Ramos’s version would have imposed a substantially less exacting limitation, however, specifically a 300-foot buffer between dwelling units or quarters or sites where large numbers of people spend hours on a daily or semi-daily basis and warehouses of 400,000 square feet or more in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
San Bernardino County is at the epicenter of warehouse development. Its location adjacent to Los Angeles County, home to the massive port facilities in San Pedro and Long Beach, where between 400 million tons and 700 million tons of cargo brought in by ship from Asia have been offloaded annually over each of the last five years, an endless parade of merchandise travels through San Bernardino County, making it America’s major logistics hub.
There is at least 930 million square feet of warehousing in San Bernardino and Riverside counties at present, with more being built.
There are 3,031 warehouses in San Bernardino County. In Ontario alone, there are 289 warehouses larger than 100,000 square feet. Reportedly, there are 142 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, 26 warehouse project applications have been processed and approved by the City of San Bernardino, entailing acreage under roof of 9,598,255 square feet, or more than one-third of a square mile, translating into 220.34 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 56, followed by Rialto with 47.
Ramos’s version was friendlier to corporations, developers, landowners, real estate speculators, investors and businesses than was Gómez Reyes’s attempt at legislation. Members of the Assembly Natural Resources Committee, noting that AB 1000 put a higher priority on protecting the interest of common citizens than did AB 1748, endorsed Gómez Reyes’s bill over Ramos’s. Nevertheless, Ramos was able to outmaneuver Gómez Reyes in the competition to have his bill considered by the Assembly when in April 2023 the Assembly Local Government Committee, chaired by Assemblywoman Cecilia M. Aguiar-Curry and which counts Ramos as a member, took up dual consideration of AB 1000 and AB 1748. The committee could have sent both ahead in the lower house’s deliberative process. Ultimately, the committee allowed AB 1748 to progress to consideration by the full Assembly and 86ed AB 1000.
It thus seemed that Ramos was set to prevail in the contest of competing warehouse regulation codification but the entire California Legislature missed the June 2, 2023 deadline for the first passage of a bill within the legislative house it originates in for it to be sent to the other house – in this case the California State Senate – for consideration. Assembly bill 1748 was lost in the logjam of other bills being considered that year.
Gómez Reyes, who is far more passionate about the issue of warehouse proximity to living quarters than is Ramos and who, as a Democrat, is involved at present in a race against Upland City Councilman Carlos Garcia, a Republican, for the open State Senate District 29 seat being contested in the November 5 election, followed through with Assembly Bill 98, her last all-in effort before she leaves California’s lower legislative house to get the warehouse-proximity-to-housing regulation she has long sought passed into law. She introduced Assembly Bill 98, coauthored by Assemblyman Juan Carrillo, D-Palmdale, this year and shepherded it through the legislative analytic process, ultimately inducing her Assembly colleagues to pass it on Saturday August 31 by a margin of 47-to-16 and then saw it prevail in the State Senate on a 22-to16 vote. Assembly Bill requires that any warehouses to be built from here on out be well removed from homes, schools or any other existing facilities, buildings, structures or land uses where people tend to congregate.
Assembly Bill 98 hits the same notes with regard to air pollution, truck traffic, noise and other problems associated with locating warehouses that Assembly Bill 1000, Assembly Bill 2840 and Assembly Bill 1547, although, it has been observed, with somewhat less force.
While the larger the warehouse the more onerous it is in terms of its impacts, even smaller warehouses of less than 100,000 square feet can represent a threat to the health and wellbeing of those living in proximity to them, to say nothing of the interruption such uses will have on the tranquility of a residential neighborhood.
In pressing for restrictions on warehouse with Assembly bills 1000, 2840 and 1547 experienced opposition from the logistics and building industries, real estate interests and even the construction trade unions, which accused her of fighting progress and working at cross purposes to those seeking economic development. She garnered at the same time, however, the support and admiration of those seeking, to use a catchword, environmental justice. It is somewhat ironic that now, having compromised in order to be able to Assembly Bill 98 past the gauntlet of committees, through the Assembly and then the State Senate and onto the governor’s desk, she is now being hit with criticism from many of those environmental justice crusaders for having “watered down” the previous versions of Assembly Bills 1000, 2840 and 1547 to arrive at Assembly Bill 98.
Assembly Bill in a very practical sense means that warehouses can no longer be built in what are essentially residential areas. It restricts new warehouses or distribution centers from being built on anything other than arterial roads, collector roads, major thoroughfares or local roads primarily used by commercial traffic.
It also would require new warehouses to have 300-foot setbacks between sensitive uses and the nearest loading dock if the warehouse is built in an industrial area, with that setback increased to 500 feet if the warehouse goes into a non-industrial area or land that was rezoned to industrial. In addition, Assembly Bill 98 has landscaping and screening requirements, consisting of walls plants or landscape berms, intended to screen and/or shield warehouses from surrounding properties and uses. That buffering landscaping varies from 50 to 100 feet.
Warehouses, sprawling across vast tracts of natural land essential for environmental stability, introduce a continuous stream of trucks and pollutants during construction and operation. Developers often do the bare minimum to mitigate these impacts, extracting resources from the community without adequate compensation or consideration. This parasitic relationship must be reformed through stronger legislative measures to ensure developers contribute positively to the communities they exploit.
A coalition of environmental groups, including the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition, Fresno Building Healthy Communities, Friends of Calwa, Cultiva La Salud, the Peoples Collective for Environmental Justice, the East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, the Central California Asthma Collective, the Inland Valley Alliance for Environmental Justice, the Mead Valley Coalition for Clean Air, Perris Neighbors in Action, the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Lab, the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Unite for Colton, Valley Improvement Projects, Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles, Neighbors Opposing Warehouses, the Robert Redford ConservancyPitzer College, Concerned Neighbors of Bloomington, Earthjustice, Air Quality Modeling and Exposure Lab, and Active San Gabriel Valley. the Center For Community Action and Environmental Justice, which had supported Gómez Reyes in her push to get Assembly bills 1000, 2840 and 1547 passed, made repeated public statement to the effect that they were disappointed with the inadequacies in Assembly Bill 98, in particular that the 300 -foot and 500-foot setback requirements, which were far less exacting that the 1,000 foot setbacks in Gómez Reyes’ previous legislative efforts.
“The bill sets dangerously low standards for warehouse siting and operations that would fail to protect the people who will be the unenviable neighbors of new and expanding facilities,” according to a letter to California elected leaders signed by the leaders of those of environmental groups. “[The bill] includes toothless setbacks that would set a harmful precedent in California. AB 98 falls far short of establishing adequate protections and may even exacerbate harms for many neighborhoods by enshrining meager distance requirements between warehouse loadingdocks and homes, blessing the use of the status quo development that so many neighborhoods have challenged. Most alarmingly, AB 98 would write minimum setback distances of as few as300 feet to 500 feet from loading bay to sensitive receptors into state law. Such minimal distance requirements between loading docks – and the trucks queuing up to access those loading docks – and homes, schools, senior centers, and places of worship would not only fail to protect the health of the communities that we work with, but it would also make our work on the ground much more difficult, as many of the local jurisdictions that we engage with would likely refuse to adopt a regulation or set conditions stronger than the state standards.Our own state officials at the California Air Resources Board have cited that warehouse property lines should be at least 1,000 feet from sensitive receptors at a minimum to avoid the worst impacts from air pollution.”
According to the letter, “Some of the most contested warehouse projects in our neighborhoods ended up with 300 feet and 500 feet setbacks. This is the status quo and what has been long documented by residents as inadequate. Codifying these setbacks would make it harder for local communities to push for more protections, albeit it is stated as a floor, we know our local cities and warehouse developers would consider it a ceiling.”
The letter maintains that “The bill also does not address the high emissions of nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, alongwith other pollution, from the thousands of diesel trucks and personal vehicles directly linked to warehouse growth. Research shows that warehouses worsen local air pollution, with an averagenear-warehouse nitrogen dioxide enhancement of almost 20 percent. Warehouses also meanhigher emissions of diesel particulate matter (DPM). DPM is responsible for about 70% of cancer risk from air toxics in California, as well as contributes to cardiac and circulatory disease.”
“According to the Center For Community Action and Environmental Justice, which had supported Gómez Reyes with regard to her efforts with AB 1000, AB 1748 and AB 1547, “Current state regulations fail to protect sensitive receptors like homes, schools, and parks from the adverse effects of nearby warehouses. Developers exploit this regulatory gap, placing polluting facilities dangerously close to residential areas. Without substantial state regulation, reckless development practices continue unchecked, further endangering community health and well-being. The well-documented correlation between warehouse proximity and higher rates of asthma and respiratory illnesses highlights the Commercial Real Estate Development Association’s disregard for community health, particularly that of children.”
In a statement about the passage of Assembly Bill 98, Gómez Reyes said that despite the legislation establishing “21st Century building and design standards, mandatory truck routes, two for one replacement of demolished housing and 12 month rent payment to displaced renters, and significant property line buffers for new warehouses… I want to be abundantly clear: I do not believe the sensitive receptor setbacks in this bill go far enough to protect our most vulnerable communities. The distances outlined in this bill are only a minimum, and cities may adopt more stringent standards than what is outlined in AB 98. I urge cities and counties to expand on the standard set in this bill.”
Gómez Reyes said, “It is also clear that the status quo is unacceptable and immediate action is needed on this issue. I believe AB 98 is an important step forward and contains many provisions that will better protect communities in the Inland Empire and across California. There is still work to be done to protect public health, ensure the proper planning of logistics uses, and support a high quality of life for all Californians. The reporting requirements in this bill ensure that we are measuring policy outcomes, and I am committed to holding our local governments accountable for properly planning our communities. This is the first step, not the last, and I look forward to the work ahead.”
Gómez Reyes, who was first elected to the Assembly in 2016, is set to depart from the Assembly in December, at which point she will move into the California Senate. Under California’s current term limitations, legislators can serve 12 years in either or both houses, the Assembly and State Senate. Previously, limits were set at three two-year terms in the Assembly and two four-year terms in the State Senate. Thus, with the dozen year restriction, Gómez Reyes had to leave the Assembly now in order to run for the State Senate, otherwise being locked out from the upper house if she had remain in the Assembly, as in 2026 she would have had ten years in Sacramento, meaning she could not be elected to a four-year term in the State Senate.
She is thus competing in the 29th State Senate District, which because of redistricting that took place in 2021, entails no incumbent competing in this year’s election. As a Democrat competing against the Republican in the race, Upland Councilman Carlos Garcia, Gómez Reyes is a shoo-in, as the Democratic registration in the 29th greatly favors her party, with 224,615 or 45.2 percent of the district’s 497,449 voters registered as Democrats and 121,681 or 24.5 percent registered as Republicans. Fully 21.8 percent of the district’s voters – 108,329 – list no party preference, while the remaining 8.5 percent are members of the American Independent, Green, Libertarian Peace & Freedom or other more obscure parties.

There have been multiple lesions in the security set-up at the California Institution for Men in Chino which would allow and, on occasion, has allowed inmates to take unauthorized leave from the facility, the San Bernardino County Sentinel is informed.
Renewed attention to the protocols and physical barriers relating to preventing escape from the prison has intensified in the aftermath of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s known transfer of 39 Death Row inmates to the 83-year-old institution which was originally designed as a low-security holding yard for the state least serious and nonviolent criminal offenders, which was followed by an August 11, 2024 incident in which double murderer Kevin G. Roby used a makeshift knife he had obtained in an unsuccessful effort to kill a guard.
In the aftermath of the transfer of what was quantified as 39 Death Row inmates to Chino by April and an announcement that another round of condemned inmates were to follow them to the California Institution for Men, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation senior staff and Governor Gavin Newsom’s office offered Chino and San Bernardino governmental officials and residents of Chino Valley assurances that sufficient precautions had been and were being taken and a redundancy of security measures were in place to prevent any escapes.
Prison escape is a particularly sensitive topic in Chino Valley as a consequence of the now escape, more than 41years ago, of Kevin Cooper, who was incarcerated at the California Institution of Men under the falsely assumed identity of David Trautman as the result of felony burglary convictions in Los Angeles County. In June 1983, Cooper walked off of the prison yard in Chino, leaving by means of a hole in the fence. He headed roughly 4.5 miles due west, where he holed up in what he thought was an unoccupied residence immediately proximate – some 450 feet away from – the home of Doug and Peggy Ryen. On the night of June 4/early morning of June 5, 1983, he attacked the Ryens, using a hatchet and knife to kill them, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and Christopher Hughes, 11, a family friend who was spending the night. He slashed the throat of the Ryens’ son, Joshua, 8, who survived the ordeal. Cooper then drove the Ryen family’s station wagon to Long Beach, where he abandoned it after nearly running it out of gas. From Long Beach he headed south to Baja California, where he befriended an American couple on a sailboat. He accompanied them north, where at the end of July 1983, he was arrested upon attempting to flee after boarding another watercraft, a 26-foot sailboat moored off Santa Cruz Island, a few miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, and raping a woman. Ultimately, he was convicted of the murders of the three members of the Ryen Family and Hughes.
Issues with the security of the California Institution for Men have persisted ever since.
A 2,500-acre complex consisting of four facilities under a single warden addressed at 14901 Central Avenue and existing on a campus that extends from Central Avenue on the west, El Prado Road on the southwest, lying generally south of Eucalyptus Avenue, bordered on the east by the westernmost extension of the now shuttered Heman J. Stark Youth Correctional Facility which fronts to the east on Euclid Avenue and set generally north of Kimball Avenue, Chino Institution for Men was constructed in 1941 to less than exacting standards than many other California prisons because it initially was not intended to house the most violent of the state’s inmates. It was augmented with a high fence topped with razor wire, but prisoners seeking to escape in the 1960s were able to, and occasionally did, defeat that obstacle by throwing the thick woolen blankets used on the prison’s beds over the razor wire and climbing atop it to reach the outer side.
After the Cooper escape, state prison officials made what they said were multiple and redundant security improvements that they confidently maintained made escape from the facility unlikely. Specifically, the addition of electrification to one of the perimeter fences, more razor wire atop the other fence, multiple but relatively primitive guard towers, motion detectors, intensive nighttime illumination that creates a 175-yard gauntlet through which a would-be escapee must pass underneath the eyes of constantly vigilant nocturnal personnel before reaching the electrified perimeter, constant motorized patrols near the perimeter and siren signals effectively deter breakout attempts, the prison’s operators insisted.
Nevertheless, there have been constant and recurring breakdowns in the electrical circuitry for the sirens, motion detectors and fence which officials have been loath to admit. Over the years, holes in the perimeter fence which have not been addressed in a timely manner have been observed. In 2018, Michael Garrett escaped from the prison, after which it was revealed that the motion detector on the fence had been inoperable for five years.
Even when the motion detectors were fully functional, their utility in preventing escapes was marginal. Moving objects as insubstantial as insects, birds, rodents and even rain, wind, shadows and reflected light can trigger them. The constant repetition of such false readings can lead to desensitization and decreased vigilance in the guards who are charged with multiple tasks which include watching the prison perimeter and monitoring electronic sensors and adapt a reflexive disregard for what they consider to be false alarms or misreadings. Moreover, the sheer size of the prison campus results in multiple spots which fall outside the reach of the motion detectors.
In addition, the Sentinel is told, the lethal electrified fence that rings the highest level security unit contained within the prison’s 2,500-acre campus provides a false sense of security in many respects. Installed 19 years ago at a cost exceeding $1.5 million between two parallel, chain-link perimeter security fences which surround what is referred to as the prison’s “C” yard consisting of dormitories, a dining hall and facilities reserved for the most dangerous portion of the population incarcerated at CIM, the electrified fence consists of 16 stainless-steel stranded wires, horizontally oriented and installed on insulators attached to metal fence posts. The top wire is a foot higher than the two perimeter security fences. A concrete-grade beam elevates the bottom wire to approximately 13 inches above the finish grade and prohibits anyone from crawling under the fence. Circular, stainless-steel detection rings, attached to the lower electrified fence wires, trigger an alarm if the wires are spread vertically and come in contact with an adjacent ring/wire. The electrified wires are charged with more than 5,000 volts and very low amperage many times the intensity needed to electrocute a human being. Alarms are transmitted by radio to a dedicated 24-hour roving patrol vehicle should the electrical fence be touched.
The fence has resulted in the occasional electrocution of rodents such as squirrels and gophers as well as birds, rabbits and lizards. On multiple occasions the fence has gone inoperable, the most recent example of which was a five-day interlude nearly six weeks ago.
While under normal conditions the electrified fence presents a daunting barrier to anyone who would leave the C Yard without authorization, there have been circumstances in which members of the serious offender population that is, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, to be constantly and without exception confined to C Yard have roamed outside of C Yard, either as part of a rehabilitative assignment or, far less frequently, out of some other necessity or by mistake. Outside the confines of C Yard, there are other sections of the prison that have varying levels of security, ranging from yet-substantial restriction measures all the way to the largest set of dormitories reserved for the prison’s Level I inmate population, composed of non-violent offenders who were convicted of what are generally considered to be offenses at the lower level of seriousness on the criminal spectrum. These Level I inmates are housed in open dormitories within a less than fully secure perimeter from which escape would be difficult but nonetheless possible.
An issue creating the possibility for the serious offender population, including those who were formerly on Death Row to migrate into the general population and from there, conceivably, into the Level I population is the raison d’être for having transferred the Death Row Inmates to facilities such as the California Institution for Men in the first place: fulfilling the requirements of Proposition 66, passed by California’s voters in 2016. Proposition 66 stipulated a requirement that condemned prisoners work at in-prison employment settings, receiving what was originally 8 cents per hour to 37 cents an hour and is now 16 cents an hour to 74 cents an hour, depending on the skill level, to earn money used to pay restitution to their victims. Proposition 66 required that the prisoners be housed in a facility that had the workshops or foundries where such work could be carried out.
Beginning in 2020, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation undertook the Condemned Inmate Transfer Pilot Program in which what was limited to 100 Death Row Inmates were transferred to seven institutions that had the workshops and space therein to put them to work. Those seven did not include the California Institution for Men but rather the California Correctional Institution at Tehachapi, the California Medical Facility – Stockton, California State Prison–Corcoran, Centinela State Prison, Kern Valley State Prison, the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility and Salinas Valley State Prison.
After that pilot program was deemed a success, the plan was hatched to eliminate Death Row at San Quentin Prison altogether a transfer all of the states condemned prisoners to 19 difference institutions, one of them being the California Institution for Men. As it turns out, CIM-Chino now houses the fourth highest number of condemned prisoners outside of San Quentin, 46, behind California Health Care Facility, Stockton, California State Prison, Sacramento and Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility.
According to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Secretary Jeff Macomber, his department has made efforts to ensure the former Death Row prisoners are institutionalized in settings where the requisite degree of security is available to thwart any attempts at escape those inmates might make.
“Participants are placed in high-security institutions while still integrating with the general population,” Macomber stated.
It is that integration and what it might lead to – namely that these condemned killers will blend in with their less mayhem-prone prison colleagues and escape – critics maintain, that is keeping many people in Chino Valley awake at night.