The Riverside County Board of Supervisors last week approved responses to a number of reports from the civil grand jury, including one concerning the economic future of the city of Blythe in the wake of the planned closure of Chuckawalla Valley State Prison.
“This report provides various recommendations for how the city can improve on their economic outlook, and certainly the city is working on those, but it also does talk about what efforts the county can take to help the city through these challenges and help the region,” Juan Perez, Riverside County chief operating officer (COO), said.
One of those recommendations included increased use of the Blythe Airport to attract businesses engaged in the rental or storage of small aircraft, such as a year round flight school, but as Supervisor V. Manuel Perez said the recommendation did not seem to take into consideration the region’s existing climate.
“The weather out there is extreme, and that idea of a year-round flight school, for example, came up, and it’s just so difficult to have something like that out there because it’s just so so hot,” he said. “Maybe not year round, but potentially a few months out of the year might be something that’s possible.”
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Other recommendations included that the county create plans and seek out additional funding to help the community mitigate the impacts of the prison’s closure, which the COO said the county has been working on since 2023 when a task force was set up in response to the announcement that the prison would be closing. That task force worked with a company to prepare an economic development overview to examine how the county, city and greater region can work together to capitalize on economic opportunities including grant funding through both the state and federal governments, Perez said.
“We continue to look for opportunities working through the governor’s office, working through the legislative delegation and working with the city to see how we can affect and be able to ideally have additional investments from the state to help offset some of those impacts on the community and help poise the community of Blythe for the best future possible through economic development opportunity,” he said.
The county’s response comes less than a month after the Blythe City Council approved its response addressing the concerns and recommendations brought forth in the report.
But, as Supervisor Perez said, the precarious economic situation in Blythe is not new, though the prison’s closure will have an outsized negative impact, one that he said he hopes can be turned around.
“It’s been a struggle for years, and my hope is that it gets better [rather] than worse,” he said.
The supervisors also approved responses to two other grand jury reports: One concerning the March Joint Powers Authority and the other concerning the 911 system outages in August 2023.
A full recording of the meeting can be found here on the county’s website.
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