Editor’s note: This story has been updated with comment from the county.
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The Sierra Club and the Rural Association of Mead Valley (RAMV) announced this week they had reached an agreement with Industrial VI Enterprises, the developer of a megawarehouse project known as the Cajalco Commerce Center.
“There’s times we will litigate, and we’ll take them to the mat, and we will win, and the project goes away,” George Hague, Conservation Co-Chair of Sierra Club’s San Gorgonio Chapter Box Springs Group, said in an interview with The Riverside Record. “And there’s other times when we decide we can see what the developer is willing to do to reduce the project’s impacts.”
In this case, Hague said the developer was willing to agree to a number of provisions to decrease the project’s impacts, improve conditions for warehouse workers and truck drivers and provide additional community benefits for Mead Valley residents. Representatives for Hillwood, the parent company of Industrial VI Enterprises, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The project, as approved by the Riverside County Board of Supervisors last November, includes a 1,003,510-square-foot warehouse with 152 truck loading bays and a parking lot with 336 spaces on 44 acres, with the rest of the 58-acre project site set to be used for a park complex with a total of 87 parking spaces split between two lots.
In response, the Sierra Club and RAMV filed a lawsuit claiming the county violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) by approving the project and certifying the environmental impact, which found the project would create “unavoidable” harm to the community, without requiring any further mitigation.
“We really wanted the county involved in this because the county would have reduced impacts even more, but the county said they would not be involved in any part of the settlement, which frustrated us,” Hague said. “I think if they would have been involved, the people of Mead Valley would have been even better protected.”
The Riverside County Transportation and Land Management Agency, which oversees development in the county, said in a statement to The Record that in CEQA cases involving private parties, it was “common for the county not to be involved in settlement agreements,” since the county was “not a party to those private agreements.”
As part of the settlement, the developer must take significant steps to mitigate air pollution, greenhouse gases and harm to the local environmental justice communities already disproportionately impacted by pollution along with other threats posted by the warehouse project.
That includes using electric construction equipment as well as low- and zero-emission trucks and freight handling equipment; ensuring the facility is powered by on-site solar energy; routing truck traffic away from smaller roads; incorporating fire-resistant and drought-tolerant landscaping, including a tree-screen around the entire warehouse site to minimize light, noise and diesel pollution. The agreement also prohibits the site from being used for cold-storage.
“There’s quite a few things in this that reduce the pollution that would have normally impacted the residents directly, and the rest of us in the Inland Empire with our nonattainment air quality that we live with all the time,” Hague said.
The settlement also includes provisions for workers, including minimum staffing requirements to ensure it doesn’t become a “dark warehouse,” where the bulk of the work is done by machines instead of people.
“It’s very important to have something related to protecting the number of jobs, because what happens is you’re covering all of the land that’s available for employment with buildings that have no employment, and so what do the residents have to do,” Hague said. “They have to get on the freeway and commute to other areas to find a job, and that is what is happening with all the warehouses in the Inland Empire.”
It also provides heat safety provisions like an air conditioned lounge with cold-water drinking fountains with bottle fillers and well-maintained air conditioned restrooms. Additionally, on days when the temperature is above 80 degrees inside the warehouse, employees will be provided with water free of charge during their shifts.
“Doing things to help the workers, this is something that Sierra Club has been doing now for several years,” Hague said. “In the past, warehouses would be built, and there would be nothing related to climate control in the building, whether it’s a huge industrial fan or even a lounge.”
Hague said by including these provisions in the settlement, it provided workers a common space that “respects their dignity,” instead of having to endure the conditions of working in a warehouse without reprieve.
As for the community, the settlement requires the developer to establish an open-space buffer between the warehouse and the planned park, provide an additional three acres of park land in the Downtown Core of Mead Valley and pay into a housing displacement fund for the renters and mobile home residents displaced by the project.
“We’re glad we could raise the baseline standards for freight pollution, electrification, jobs, housing displacement and required community benefits from another mega-warehouse in Mead Valley,” said Michael McCarthy, Conservation Co-Chair of Sierra Club’s San Gorgonio Chapter Box Springs Group in a release announcing the agreement. “Every new warehouse in our region should be held to a higher standard to protect our communities and the environment.”
Hague said it was his hope that Riverside and San Bernardino counties, as well as the different cities across the Inland Empire, would look at the provisions in the settlement and start requiring similar conditions for warehouse developers.
“This is possible,” he said. “The very fact that the developer is willing to do [this] means the requirements that are in that settlement are feasible, and if they’re feasible, that is something that every jurisdiction — Riverside County, San Bernardino County and all the cities in the Inland Empire — should be demanding of warehouses.”
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