Inland Empire Activists Seek to Curb Warehouse Boom

Everybody here has a story about a truck.

There’s the one about horses rearing up and tossing their riders, startled by a semi rumbling through a residential neighborhood that was once a quiet, rural haven. About kids forced to play their street hockey games between two enormous trailers. About the 18-wheeler that clipped the curb of Penny Newman’s quarter-acre corner lot in nearby Glen Avon.

“And my grandkids were out there in the yard,” said Newman, the executive director of the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, a nonprofit activist organization in this western Riverside County community.

Now, armed with two damning studies about air quality, residents and environmental activists are trying to derail the Inland Empire’s drive to become the warehouse district of the southwestern United States--and to push out some of those trucks.

Since the 1880s, when railroads set up shop here, Riverside and San Bernardino counties have offered plenty of cheap land and handy access to truck, rail and air routes that stretch through the Southwest. Those elements have made the region a natural for warehousing and goods distribution.

In recent years, the two counties have taken that role to unprecedented levels. As the population has soared to 3.2 million, about the same as that of Oregon, the region has catered increasingly to giant distribution centers put up by companies such as GE Plastics and Target Corp. in Ontario, Upland, Rancho Cucamonga and, more recently, Mira Loma.

The warehouses--about 30 million square feet of them to date--hold everything from deodorant to best-selling novels.

Many see distribution as the Inland Empire’s economic future, in a region where population growth has long outpaced job growth.

Led largely by the blue-collar work that warehouses bring, the region has created 275,000 jobs in the last decade, more than any other sector of California, according to the San Bernardino-based Inland Empire Economic Partnership, a nonprofit business-boosting organization.

Many area residents and environmental activists, however, are beginning to see the dark side of the trend.

The warehouses, many of which contain more than a million square feet, have begun to dominate the rugged landscape. They are pit stops for thousands of trucks each day, which are beginning to clog already busy highways and take over residential neighborhoods. And, what is perhaps most urgent, they add to an air pollution problem that is already among the worst in the nation.

Mira Loma and Glen Avon, two adjacent unincorporated communities west of Riverside that are home to about 20,000 people combined, have become the latest stops for those distribution centers--and the newest battleground in the debate.

Leaders of the movement to reject the warehouses, calling themselves HOME--for Help Our Mira Loma Environment--have enlisted block leaders to walk door to door each evening, collecting petition signatures. The petitions will be presented to county supervisors to urge more aggressive review of projects’ environmental baggage before approval.

The organization is putting together neighborhood meetings every two weeks, including a gathering earlier this month at Mira Loma’s Jurupa Valley High School that drew more than 300 residents.

The group is working with attorneys to weigh its legal options, said leader Colleen Smethers, a retired nurse practitioner and mother of five who has lived in Mira Loma since 1972.

“We are not going to allow this to continue,” she said. “I don’t mean to sound like I think we can stop the world. But this is wrong. This is being done to us with full knowledge that it is detrimental to our health.

“We are really coming together as a community. And it’s all for the common good--or because of the common bad, I guess.”

Perhaps more than any other portion of the Inland Empire, Mira Loma has been altered forever by warehousing operations. Traditionally a farming area, the community attracted many families in the 1980s and early 1990s with affordable half-acre lots.

Many children in the modest, pleasant neighborhoods are in horse clubs, which dispense cherished ribbons almost every weekend, and homes are near small riding trails that wind their way to the Santa Ana River.

All of that is changing.

“It is very much a country feel,” said Newman, who became an activist more than two decades ago, battling for cleanup of the notorious Stringfellow acid pits nearby.

“That’s why people moved here. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a horse’s reaction to a huge truck barreling down the street, but it’s very scary. This is very real.”

The foremost concern, though, is air quality, in a region that is already bathed in smoggy air blown east from Los Angeles and Orange counties. Two recent studies have suggested that diesel trucks are hurting, not only the quality of life, but also the quality of the air.

The first study, by the South Coast Air Quality Management District last year, found that diesel particles in the air are to blame for 70% of the cancer caused by air toxins.

In addition, USC’s Environmental Health Center recently completed a study of air quality in 12 Southern California communities, and found higher concentrations of particulate pollution in the air over Mira Loma than in any of the other test spots.

Mira Loma’s air contained 67 micrograms of particulates--including diesel emissions--per cubic meter of air, compared with 18 micrograms in an area north of Santa Barbara.

That study also tracked residents’ lung development, and found that children in Mira Loma had 4% to 5% less lung capacity than their counterparts in less polluted areas.

Studies Will Assess Effect of Trucks

The AQMD and USC have both embarked on ambitious new studies to better assess the share of blame that diesel trucks must shoulder, work that also could help determine how much of the region’s pollution is locally generated.

In any case, said James Gauderman, an assistant professor in USC’s department of preventive medicine and an author of the study, “It’s not good.”

Those studies were the center of attention at the packed meeting this month. In Mira Loma, they are seen as the most potent ammunition residents have amassed.

“It’s very difficult for the county to say that there is no impact when you have two studies coming out that contradict that,” Newman said. “It doesn’t really pass the giggle test.”

Backers of warehouse construction, however, are not convinced that the trucks add significantly to the area’s smog problem.

On the contrary, they may help air quality by creating local jobs in a region where about 400,000 people commute west or south to work in neighboring counties.

What’s more, the economic benefits of the warehouses and distribution centers are clear, supporters say.

As the distribution centers become more high-tech and critical to the region’s economy, they are offering better wages and benefits, including retirement packages and profit-sharing plans, said Teri Ooms, president and chief executive officer of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership.

Economically, “I think the logistics infrastructure is extremely important to our region,” she said.

Marc Burns, first vice president of CB Richard Ellis in Ontario and an industrial broker who handles leases and sales of property in the region, said complaints in the Mira Loma area are isolated. Like others in the business, he expects the logistics industry to expand east--into Riverside, Moreno Valley, Redlands and Perris--and soon.

Resident opposition “is a small blip in our market,” said Burns, who helped broker a $40-million, 1.2-million-square-foot deal for a Target Corp. distribution center in Ontario in December. “I don’t think . . . that is going to have a dampening effect on the industry.”

Increasingly, however, local government officials are agreeing that more attention must be paid to environmental and lifestyle concerns.

“There is a balancing act with regard to the advantages and disadvantages. And we may be up against the line,” said Riverside County Executive Officer Larry Parrish.

“We’ve made a very concerted effort to get quality jobs that allow people to come here and stay,” he said. “But there is a tension there. And it would be disingenuous of me to say that there isn’t some appropriate criticism.”

Riverside County supervisors have begun rejecting some plans for distribution centers, and have proposed measures designed to appease communities like Mira Loma.

Some, for example, are pushing the county to open a facility that would help trucks refrigerate perishable goods without running their diesel engines at night. And Supervisor Bob Buster has proposed that the county charge companies a fee if their businesses generate new traffic.