Residents of Yucaipa oppose the plan for a huge camp

When David Matuszak looks out over Live Oak Canyon from his four-acre horse ranch, he gets a sweeping view of fields and grazing cattle. For nearly 40 years, he has been riding on horseback on trails lined with coast live oak, chamise and buckwheat and backed by the snow-capped mountains of the San Gorgonio Wilderness.

“It's one of the most scenic areas in Southern California,” says the author and retired high school teacher, who also serves as chairman of the Friends of Live Oak Canyon, which he describes as a grassroots association of green homeowners.

But Matuszak and others fear that could change if the city of Yucaipa gives the green light to build two massive warehouses in a vacant lot about a mile from Matuszak's ranch. They say the project would destroy natural spaces and undermine the town's rural character, leading to more traffic congestion and air pollution. They fear it's part of a city government effort to turn Yucaipa into another Inland Empire logistics hub, dominated by massive fulfillment centers and roaring diesel trucks.

“That's exactly what we're worried about: that we're going to be the next Fontana, Ontario or San Bernardino,” said Kathy Sellers, a retired San Bernardino court reporter who has lived in Yucaipa for 38 years. “That's why we all live out here, to escape that.”

San Bernardino and Riverside counties already have an estimated 4,000 warehouses spread over about 37 square miles – the largest contiguous concentration on the planet, according to a report released last year by environmental groups. The sprawling area east of Los Angeles is near highways and rail lines that transport goods to and from the busy ports of LA and Long Beach. Demand for the fulfillment centers has been further boosted by an explosion of e-commerce during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The rise in warehouse development has raised concerns about poor air quality, increased cancer risk and the destruction of green spaces that act as natural carbon sinks. More than 60 organizations, including Friends of Live Oak Canyon, have signed a letter calling the rise one of the region's most critical environmental issues and calling on Governor Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency because of the public health impacts.

Studies show the Inland Empire already has some of the worst air quality in the country. The region struggles with high levels of diesel particulate matter, says Timothy Mullins, who moved to Yucaipa 25 years ago to escape development in Redlands.

“The implementation of this project will place an even greater burden on us and affect the health of the population,” he said.

Read more: Why a bill to regulate warehouse construction in California is facing widespread opposition

Until recently, Yucaipa was largely spared from this type of development. Now, a 363,000-foot warehouse near the Calimesa border is scheduled to be completed in the next few months. And the project currently under consideration – called Pacific Oaks Commerce Center – would consist of two buildings, each with about 1 million square feet, and generate about 1,100 truck trips a day, according to a traffic study.

The project would be a financial boon to the city, which is struggling with a growing budget deficit and is planning cuts to public safety and municipal services if voters fail to pass a sales tax increase bill in November.

The developers would pay about $14 million in development fees and invest millions more in infrastructure improvements, including building a water main and widening a portion of Live Oak Canyon Road, said Benjamin Matlock, Yucaipa's city planner and deputy director of community development. That would help the city attract more projects to the area, including much-needed housing, he said. The developers have also agreed to provide funding for an aerial ladder for the Yucaipa Fire Department, he said.

The infrastructure improvements would total more than $37 million and would be financed without taxpayer money or bonds, said Dan Floriani, co-founder of project developer Pacific Industrial. The project would include 96 acres of permanent open space with a publicly accessible walking trail. An economic benefit analysis by an outside consultant estimates that 1,200 to 1,600 permanent jobs would be created, he wrote in an email.

Edward Timmons, whose fifth-generation children live in Yucaipa, once worked as a manager at a large fulfillment center in Rialto. He said work there was dominated by low-paying, low-skilled jobs with high turnover. “The average employee stayed there about three months, the average manager stayed there four to six months,” he said. “It's not a place where you build a career. It's a place where you fill in the gaps until you find a better job.”

He also questioned whether the project would deliver the long-term economic benefits the city hopes for. The local logistics industry has cooled since the pandemic. According to an LA Times report published earlier this year, warehouse jobs have declined for the first time in more than two decades and industrial building vacancies have risen.

Timmons, who now works as a real estate agent and mortgage lender, looked at listings within a 30-mile radius of Yucaipa and found about 27 million square feet of vacant warehouse space when it comes to warehouses larger than 250,000 square feet.

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Timmons and other residents said that although discussions between the city and the developers have been going on for four years, many residents did not learn about the proposal until June, when it was presented to the Planning Commission. In July, the commission voted 3-2 against the project.

“Nobody wants that,” Timmons said.

For the project to move forward, the Yucaipa City Council must approve it and update a 2008 plan that lays out how to develop the city's freeway corridor – a 1,200-acre area bisected by Interstate 10 – and the council is expected to vote on it Sept. 23.

The 2008 plan already allows warehouses in certain areas, city planner Matlock said. The proposed update would reconfigure the locations of those warehouses, from an area closer to the highway to a more discreet location, he said. Developers have made “exhaustive efforts” to design the site to be adjacent to a wastewater treatment plant and behind hills, he added.

Kristine Mohler was on the committee that drafted the 2008 highway corridor plan during two years of meetings. She said the decision to locate retail, commercial and industrial properties alongside the highway was a conscious one “so that people could get on and off the highway to shop and do things like that without having such a significant impact on residential areas and land.”

The original plan called for housing and open space in the inner part of the corridor, while the proposed modernization would see the warehouse project form the core of the corridor with housing built around it, she said.

“It's just absurd for this area,” she said. “What we originally planned, which we thought would be very efficient and as non-invasive as possible, has become a huge storage center. And that's just not what we had in mind.”

Read more: The warehouse boom transformed the Inland Empire. Are the jobs worth the environmental destruction?

Although the camp complex would not be visible from the highway, it would be visible from nearby trails and open spaces, said Sherli Leonard, president of the Redlands Conservancy. The nonprofit manages a 341-acre conservation area about a half-mile from the proposed complex and another 70 acres nearby.

“The view is beautiful,” she said. “And not only is it beautiful, it's good for the human psyche. Look at car commercials: they never show anyone driving through a warehouse district or even a residential area.”

The land earmarked for the complex is privately owned and not open to the public, but she said it is a wildlife corridor for mountain lions, coyotes, foxes, bobcats and the occasional bear.

“It would cause significant damage to that environment, to that habitat, and also open the door to more of this kind of thing – from a conservationist's perspective,” she said. “From any perspective, it's putting semi-trucks on a highway exit that is already very congested at many times of the day, and there's no way to mitigate that, you just have to deal with it.”

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When Matuszak moved to Yucaipa in 1977 to teach exercise science and biomechanics at the local high school, the nearby communities of San Bernardino and Redlands were characterized by orange groves and open fields where farmers grew strawberries and onions, he said.

“Now there are kilometers of warehouses and they are made of concrete – concrete roofs, concrete walls, parking lots and so on,” he said. This has created a heat island effect that, in addition to global warming, has caused local temperatures to rise by several degrees, he said.

“We're seeing the beginnings of the same push to expand the so-called logistics capital of the world into our area,” he said. “And we're just angry about it. We're going to do everything we can to stop that.”

This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.