Over the past 12 months, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors has approved the initiation of 35 Foundation General Plan Amendments (FGPA), a number of which have drawn the ire of residents over concerns about increased industrial development in unincorporated parts of the county.
“I like the idea of the park and stuff in there, we do need parks in there,” Mead Valley resident David Hernandez said during a July 29 public hearing on the FGPA initiation in connection with a megawarehouse project. “My concern is just that another warehouse is being built there and also the change of 23 low density housing areas getting changed out to a different higher density or commercial.”
That request sought to change 23 parcels of land in the Mead Valley area from the Rural Community: Very Low Density Residential land use designation to Community Development and Open Space to allow for the submission of a proposed megawarehouse project that also included a roughly 15-acre community park space.
Supervisors unanimously approved the initiation, and three months later unanimously approved the project, which included a 1,003,510-square-foot warehouse.
Throughout this process, supervisors and Riverside County Planning Department staff have reiterated that an FGPA initiation is an administrative process that, if approved, allows a developer to submit a project proposal that wouldn’t have been permitted under the property’s current land use designation.
“If they decide to initiate it, that gives the developer and property owner the opportunity to move forward to the next step,” Planning Director John Hildebrand said in an interview with The Riverside Record. “It doesn’t change the general plan land use at that point; they can’t build anything.”
Within Riverside County’s general plan land uses, there are five foundations, which Hildebrand describes as buckets: agriculture, rural, rural community, open space and community development. Within those buckets are 30 land use designations, which determine what can and cannot be developed on a parcel of land.
“To change a land use from one bucket to another bucket is this special FGPA, this foundation general plan amendment cycle that we do every eight years,” Hildebrand said.
The process, Hildebrand explained, is unique to Riverside County and was the result of a settlement agreement with the Endangered Habitats League, which in 2003 filed suit against the county’s comprehensive general plan overhaul. The group filed the suit in an effort to “combat piecemeal general plan amendments (GPAs) and potential sprawl.”
During the first cycle, in 2008, the county received 156 applications. The following cycle, in 2016, the county received 32 applications. During the 2024 application cycle, the county received 76 applications, 14 of which have since been withdrawn and three of which are on hold. Approximately 18 of the applications proposed a change that would allow industrial uses.
Hildebrand said of the 76, about 20 were workshopping ideas for the implementing project and roughly 10 submitted the proposed project at the same time as the FGPA initiation application in an effort to shave some time off of the process. The remainder of the applicants fell somewhere in between.
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“Some developers have chosen, at their own risk, to concurrently submit the project before they get into initiation,” he said. “They’re allowed to do that, but we’re not going to take the project forward to public hearings until after the initiation happens, if it gets initiated.”
When reviewing the initiation, Hildebrand said county staff, the General Plan Advisory Committee, the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors are asked to consider whether the proposed change in land use makes sense within the larger context of the area instead of assessing the merits of a potential implementation project.
“We’re not considering those details at this point in time, because there’s nothing to consider,” he said. “We don’t want to take any action on the project itself, just the concept, to give them the opportunity to move forward to the next step.”
At that point, the developer has six months to submit the implementing project, or at least work with the county to make meaningful progress to move the project forward in the process.
“One of the reasons we require a project to be submitted within six months is we want to ensure that these aren’t just speculative land use changes where they flip the property, change it and move on,” Hildebrand said. “It needs to be a real project.”
Once an implementing project is submitted, it goes through the standard Planning Commission process, coming back before the supervisors as a public hearing. At that point, the supervisors would consider the details of the project before making a decision on whether to approve the general plan amendment, the plot plan, tentative parcel map and any other necessary administrative approvals for the project to move forward.
If, however, the supervisors approve the FGPA initiation and the developer does not take meaningful steps to advance the proposed project, Hildebrand said the initiation would become null and void and the land use designation would remain unchanged.
Hildebrand said the multi-step process was a way of controlling the growth of the county, where developments go and ensuring that the developer was responsible for moving the project forward.
Critics of the process have called it deeply inefficient, to which Hildebrand agreed. It’s why he said he’s planning to hold a workshop in January on the process in hopes of making it work better for property owners, developers and county staff.
“We’re inundated with so many of these applications at the very same time, and it makes it hard to process all of them because of resources and timing and all that kind of stuff,” he said. “So we want to give a more flexible opportunity for people to be able to submit these things, more meaningfully review them and not have them all clustered at the exact same time.”
Another issue is that the process, as it currently stands, is inconsistent with state law when it comes to housing development, Hildebrand said.
“We can’t tell somebody you have to wait to do something with your land for eight years, when the state is forcing housing production almost as a by-right use in a lot of cases now,” he said. “Some of these projects can be by right, you don’t even have to go through this entitlement process anymore, and that’s the way that the state’s trying to streamline housing production.”
While Hildebrand was not sure what the process would look like going forward, he said it was his hope to streamline the process and allow property owners to submit applications on a rolling basis.
“That way they’re spaced out much better, and it would give us a better chance to really process these things more efficiently,” he said.
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