The Riverside City Council voted 4-3 Tuesday to amend its zoning code to comply with a recently-enacted state law that sets stricter requirements for new storage and distribution facilities.
The council also adopted several additional regulations residents concerned with the negative impacts of the warehousing industry requested. Council members Steven Robillard, Chuck Conder and Sean Mill voted against the code changes.
“It’s been a long time,” Jen Larratt-Smith, chair of Riverside Neighbors Opposing Warehouses (R-NOW), told The Riverside Record. “The community would love to have more [regulation], but we’d be happy to have something at this point because we’ve been waiting for years for them to move on this.”
The changes to the zoning code were made in response to Assembly Bill 98, a law passed in 2024 that went into effect on January 1, the city’s associate planner Daniel Palafox told the council at the January 27 meeting.
The law established new statewide warehouse development standards and requires local governments to set trucking routes that minimize the impact to residents. Warehouses designated for the logistics industry that are near “sensitive receptors,” like schools, parks and nursing homes, will now be subject to regulations that previously only applied to logistics projects near residential zones.
Other changes to the city’s zoning code included prohibiting facilities over 400,000 square feet from almost all industrial zones, adding stricter building size limits based on how close the proposed site was to residential areas, increasing the notification radius for industrial projects from 300 feet to 1,000 feet and extending both wall and landscape buffers for facilities near residential zones.
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At the direction of the council, however, these stricter standards will not apply to warehousing that will be used for manufacturing and technology industry uses. According to the staff report, this carve out would give greater flexibility for economic drivers that are not logistics, which city leaders, including Robillard, have publicly supported.
A number of these changes were the result of outreach the city conducted following the council’s approval of the Sycamore Hills Distribution Center project in 2022 despite significant community opposition. At that time, the city was undergoing a review of its Good Neighbor Guidelines, first adopted in 2008 and updated in 2020, to see if new regulations were necessary.
But the introduction of AB 98 paused that work, and led the council to keep the 2020 Good Neighbor Guidelines in place. Tuesday’s updates did not impact the existing guidelines.
“All other industrial development will maintain, by and large, the standards that are already on the books today,” Palafox said. “What’s really changing is how we are regulating the warehousing and distribution facilities to be consistent with state law and those additional standards that the city council in the community identified.”
Proponents of the changes, like Councilmembers Clarissa Cervantes and Philip Falcone, said they felt the updates “thread the needle” by setting additional regulations on the logistics industry while also not harming other industries that the city wants to attract.
“I think we already threaded that needle with the Good Neighbor policy,” Robillard said in response. “This is strolling into a hammer-type situation.”
Robillard also said the new restrictions would be financially impossible for small businesses, keep vacant lots empty and disincentivize new companies from coming to the city.
But some residents, like Larratt-Smith, said the policy changes didn’t go far enough, since the carve outs could exempt manufacturing companies with environmentally harmful products from the stricter regulations.
Opponents of the policy change, like the Western States Carpenters Union and the Greater Riverside Chamber of Commerce, said the changes would push businesses away from the city and shut down all types of new warehouse construction.
The council is expected to bring the newly adopted regulations back to the council for a review in a year. The city also plans to hold community meetings to help identify and finalize trucking routes by 2027, according to city staff.
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