But the Inland Empire’s warehouse boom has turned what once was a serene escape into a never-ending chorus of beeping loading docks surrounded by staggering gray walls. 

When I first covered this topic in my article with the Frontline Observer, I approached it not just as a first-time journalist but as a resident of Rialto. I live right across from the Target Distribution Center. As I’m writing this, I hear beeping trucks outside my window. 

The noises and obstructed views alone raise pertinent issues, but reporting on warehouse development made me realize the true cost of warehouses is much worse. 

What once was white noise to me, blending into my everyday routine, became a sounding alarm for the action that needs to happen for the region’s future. 

Community members have already been sounding the alarm for years. On Tuesday, Nov. 18, the Perris City Council voted 5-0 to draft a moratorium that will be considered on Dec. 9. 

The decision reflects the community’s initiatives towards confronting the cumulative impacts of warehouse development. 

With nearly 4,000 warehouses concentrated in the region, most of which rely on diesel trucks that release nitrogen dioxide, the transportation and logistics industries are jointly responsible for growing environmental and health concerns. Both San Bernardino and Riverside counties rank among the top five most ozone-polluted areas in the United States, posing a greater risk to the communities within the region.

The demand for online shopping transformed the Inland Empire into a hotspot for warehouse development. To meet growing demands during the pandemic, corporations rushed to construction without considering the proximity of warehouses next to neighborhoods, schools and parks. 

Two warehouses in Bloomington are located less than a mile from Joe Baca Middle School. Caitlin Towne, an educator at the school, says many of the students suffer from asthma. 

Granted, the number of warehouses across the Inland Empire has opened many jobs to the community. Currently, the transportation and logistics job category is second in job growth, with projections of a 1.7% increase by 2028. 

Towne says many of her former students were working at warehouses in Fontana and Bloomington during the height of the pandemic.

What seems like a great economic industry for the region is, however, an overreliance on low-wage labor. Transportation and logistics are among the lowest-paid positions available, according to the University of California, Riverside’s Inland Empire Labor and Community Center. 

Many residents in the Inland Empire endure pothole-filled roads and congested commutes only to work low-wage, high-risk jobs. Some residents even have to travel outside of the region to get a fulfilling and well-paying job.

Even more concerning is that the low-wage jobs available in the region may be cut in half as automation is expected to expand to cut costs and increase efficiency. 

As of August, the Inland Empire’s unemployment rate was 6.1%, surpassing both California’s seasonally adjusted 5.8% and the nation’s 4.5%. 

Many people are struggling to make ends meet. Entering the workforce and landing a job in logistics isn’t much of a choice, but it is the only option. As Towne said to me, “It’s almost like that’s all they expect of the people in Bloomington is to just work in a warehouse.”

The Inland Empire – a place that offered many homeowners mountain views is now covered in lines of warehouses. We have reached a dead end, and the dead end is warehouses. Caring about the environment and the region’s economy are not mutually exclusive. We must care about both our economy and our environment. 

We have seen what courageous community involvement can do for the region. The dead end that we have long faced with warehouses does not have to define our future. We can use our voices to pave a new path for ourselves by calling on our city leaders to make these changes.  

To ensure a promising future, both economically diverse and environmentally sustainable, we must demand more than warehouses. Warehouses and low-wage positions shouldn’t come at the cost of the community’s public health, quality of life and environment. 

The Inland Empire residents deserve to breathe freely and find peace in the comfort of their own backyards.

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Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric have long complained about the financial credits to households that generate more solar energy than they can use — credits that can keep rising electricity costs in check for those with panels.

But the energy generated by rooftop solar also puts a dent in utility sales of electricity, and the big utility companies successfully pressed the state Public Utilities Commission in 2022 to reduce the value of the billing credits for panels installed after April 15, 2023.

Now, the credits for consumers who installed panels before that date are becoming a target.

The commission staff, with the support of its consumer-focused Public Advocates Office, is making a case for cutting credits to those who installed rooftop panels before April 2023. Those panel owners are paid the retail rate for the excess electricity they send to the grid, while later adopters are paid a fraction of that price.

Among the ideas floated in a report by commission staff last week is to limit the number of years those customers can receive the retail rate, or end it when a home is sold. The commission staff also suggested adding a new monthly charge to solar owners’ bills, saying it would reduce the costs needed to maintain the electrical grid that it says are shifted to other customers.

The report, issued in response to last fall’s executive order by Gov. Gavin Newsom calling for recommendations to stem rising electric rates, comes after a series of reports from the Public Advocates Office critical of how people with solar installations are compensated for the excess solar power they generate.

“Rooftop solar customers do not contribute their fair share of fixed grid costs, such as maintaining power lines and ensuring grid reliability,” the advocates office said in a December report. “These costs are shifted onto non-solar customers, who shoulder a disproportionate financial burden.”

Any action to cut the electric bill credits would have to be approved by the state Public Utilities Commission. Municipal utilities such as those in the cities of Los Angeles, Glendale and Pasadena aren’t affected by its decisions.

Rooftop solar advocates and environmentalist groups say that strong incentives are needed to encourage people to spend thousands of dollars on rooftop systems that help wean California off fossil fuels.

“It’s the utilities preserving their monopoly,” said William Anastas, a resident of Long Beach, who paid nearly $18,000 to install the panels on his home in 2018. “This is fixed against us. They will get their way.”

The commission and the advocates office blame rooftop solar payments as a major reason for California’s fast-rising electric rates, but critics point to other factors.

Utilities such as Edison, PG&E and SDG&E make much of their profit not by selling more electricity, but by building infrastructure, such as the towers and lines needed to link solar farms far from cities to the grid. On its website, for example, PG&E notes that regulators want to encourage customers to conserve power, so as a result the company “does not make more money when customers use more energy.”

Economist Richard McCann performed an analysis for the rooftop solar industry that found electric rates had risen as the utilities spent more on infrastructure.

Even though homeowners’ solar panels helped keep public electricity demand flat for 20 years, the three companies’ spending on transmission and distribution infrastructure increased by more than 300%, according to McCann, who works for the public policy consulting firm M.Cubed.

Much of that spending, which led to rate increases, was approved by the state’s Public Utilities Commission. The five-member panel appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom has long been faulted for favoring utilities over customers, and those complaints have been heightened in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires.

Less than two weeks after the fires began last month, for example, the commission approved Edison’s wildfire mitigation plan even though regulators had detailed myriad problems with how the company was trying to keep its equipment from sparking fires.

Then on Jan. 30, the commission overrode objections from the public and voted to raise Edison’s electric rates so that customers would cover most of the payments made to victims of the 2017 Thomas fire, which according to investigators was ignited by company equipment. After the vote, seven Democratic state legislators sent a letter to the commission, saying the action harmed customers and failed to hold Edison accountable.

“They’re letting utilities treat ratepayers as an ATM,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, former executive director at the California Solar & Storage Assn., which represents companies selling rooftop systems.

California Public Utilities Commission spokeswoman Terrie Prosper disputed that contention. The commission estimates that the rooftop panels are adding 11% to 25% to the electric bills of customers who don’t have them, she said, while not significantly reducing the need for spending on poles and other grid infrastructure.

“While rooftop solar panels can in theory avoid some transmission costs,” Prosper said, “many transmission costs — such as infrastructure upgrades to mitigate wildfire risk — cannot be avoided.”

Edison supports solar power, said Dan Hopper, the utility’s managing director of regulatory policy, but asked state officials to reduce the rooftop incentives because the program was resulting in electrical grid costs “being pushed onto other customers that don’t have solar.”

“We’re concerned about that sort of inequity,” Hopper said. “It’s an inaccurate statement, from my perspective, to say it’s about utility profits.”

PG&E and SDG&E declined to make executives available for comment.

California’s electricity rates are now the second highest in the nation and have increased significantly faster than those in the rest of the nation, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office said in a recent report.

Although general inflation increased by about 18% from 2019 to 2023, the analyst said, rates charged by the three utilities have climbed 48% to 67%.

At the same time, the companies continue to post big profits. PG&E said this month that it earned a profit of almost $2.5 billion in 2024, up 10% from the year before. Edison and SDG&E will report 2024 results later this month. In 2023, the parent of Edison recorded $1.2 billion in profit — a jump of 95% from the year before. SDG&E made $936 million in 2023, up from $915 million in 2022.

The solar threat

The electric utility industry has long recognized the threat posed by rooftop solar.

David Owens, an executive with the Edison Electric Institute, an industry trade group, noted during a 2012 conference that California state officials had given nearly $2 billion in incentives to homeowners installing rooftop solar panels, which meant declining electricity sales for the utilities.

“How do you grow earnings in this environment?” he asked, according to slides in his presentation.

Under California’s system, rooftop solar owners get a credit on their electric bills for the solar energy they don’t use and send to the grid. The credit was based on the current retail electric rate for each utility, which grew in value as the state’s Public Utilities Commission approved rate increases requested by the companies.

In January 2016, the state’s utility commissioners, who had been appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown, voted 3 to 2 to keep paying new rooftop solar customers retail rates for energy they sent to the grid.

That year, the Edison Electric Institute revealed at an executive meeting that it had hired a New York public relations firm, Maslansky and Partners, to polish the utility companies’ public image, as reported previously by the Huffington Post.

The plan, called the Lexicon Project, suggested that utility companies describe rooftop panels as “private solar” that “benefits only a limited number of owners” and raises costs for others.

When the California PUC took up the rate issue again five years later, the utilities emerged as part of a new coalition called Affordable Clean Energy for All that painted rooftop solar as benefiting the wealthy.

“Rooftop solar is adding to income inequality,” said one of the coalition’s social media advertisements.

Whether that is the case continues to be debated. Statistics from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory show that 39% of the owners of the rooftop panels in 2023 had household incomes of less than $100,000. About 12% had incomes below $50,000.

The Times and others detailed how two-thirds of the community groups that had joined the coalition had received money from the state’s utilities.

That financial support, and the fact that the three utilities had paid to create the Affordable Green Energy for All coalition, weren’t always disclosed in the coalition’s public announcements.

The utilities say they followed laws in disclosing their funding. “The coalition’s website clearly showed how it was financially supported,” PG&E said in a statement.

In December 2022, the California commission voted unanimously to reduce financial incentives that homeowners could receive from the panels by about 75%, starting with those purchasing the systems on April 15, 2023.

The commission estimated that homeowners installing the systems after that date could still save about $100 on their bill each month and pay off their systems in about nine years.

The homeowners also can continue to get a 30% federal tax credit on their rooftop systems, which was extended by the Biden administration for the next decade.

The commission said its new rooftop program “controls electricity costs and improves electric bill affordability for all Californians.”

Environmentalists are trying to overturn the 2022 decision in court.

The Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Working Group and the Protect Our Communities Foundation say the commission has not considered certain benefits of the solar panels. Among those, the groups say, is how they reduce greenhouse gases and can limit the amount of land cleared for industrial-scale solar farms.

A state appeals court ruled in late 2023 against a lawsuit brought by the groups. They then took the case to the state Supreme Court, which agreed to hear their arguments. No date for that hearing has been set.

Roger Lin, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the groups question whether the rooftop panel incentives are actually shifting costs to those without the systems.

“There are so many other drivers of high electric bills,” he said, including the rate increases for infrastructure that the companies asked the commission for approval to build.

“It’s like the utilities are saying, ‘Don’t look here, look over there,’“ Lin said.

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That’s how much new logistics space is potentially on the county’s horizon, according to Riverside environmental consultant Mike McCarthy.

Using publicly available data, McCarthy found that Riverside County is home to seven of the 10 biggest warehouse projects being studied for their environmental impact in California.

The projects, stretching from the desert city of Cathedral City to the Temescal Valley south of Corona, don’t include what’s already been approved, including the World Logistics Center, which will add 40 million square feet of warehouses to eastern Moreno Valley.

It’s enough to make McCarthy, a critic of adding warehouses, question how the county is going to handle it all.

“There’s already a ton of warehouses in the pipeline, and then we’re going to add a whole bunch more onto it, and I just don’t see that we have the infrastructure to handle it,” he said.

Alicia Aguayo, a spokesperson for the San Bernardino-based People’s Collective for Environmental Justice, lamented the prospect of more warehouses in a logistics-saturated Inland Empire.

“It’s unfortunate that the industry continues to expand in our backyards because we do not have the protections or reassurance that there will be enough mitigations to offset more toxins into a region with the worst air quality,” Aguayo said via email.

More warehouses means more jobs, argued Paul Granillo, president and CEO of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership.

He cited a new U.S. Chamber of Commerce study, which found that, among other benefits, a new Inland distribution center creates more than 3,300 jobs outside the warehouse and generates $51 million in local tax revenue.

“We have to find a way to appreciate the upside of the economic impact of logistics and make sure we’re mitigating against the downside,” Granillo said.

The projects on McCarthy’s list are subject to downsizing and changes if and when they are approved, and it’s possible they won’t entirely consist of warehouses, since warehouses’ industrial zoning opens the door for manufacturing or other non-logistics uses.

Who approves the projects depends on where they are. Cities have land-use authority within their boundaries while the counties control what gets built in unincorporated areas.

An hour’s drive from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the Inland Empire — home to rail yards, freeways, plenty of flat undeveloped land and a blue-collar workforce — is home to a massive logistics industry with few peers worldwide.

As of 2022, the region had an estimated 1 billion square feet of warehouses. A steady stream of big rigs supply warehouses approaching 1 million square feet or larger, providing local jobs for thousands of workers fulfilling online orders for Amazon, big box stores and other retailers.

Logistics is credited with helping the Inland economy avoid the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and companies like Amazon argue that their Inland facilities offer a ticket to a free college education and a middle-class life.

Critics counter that most warehouse jobs offer substandard wages and benefits in hazardous work conditions. Warehouses also are blamed for noise and light pollution, and emissions from warehouse-bound, diesel-powered trucks are linked to cancer, heart disease and other health problems.

To make his top 10 list, McCarthy used data from CEQAnet, a state database of projects needing a California Environmental Quality Act review before they can be approved.

Large warehouses often need environmental impact reports or EIRs — in-depth studies, hundreds or thousands of pages in length, that analyze what a project will do to the local environment if built.

Topping McCarthy’s list is the Westside Annexation project in unincorporated Los Angeles County. The project near Lancaster would add up to 38.5 million square feet of warehouses.

Next is a 24.8 million-square-foot project in Northern California. Third on the list is the San Jacinto Commerce Center, a 9 million-square-foot project sought for 514 acres between Record Road, Odell Avenue, Sanderson Avenue and Cottonwood Road.

The next six projects are in Riverside County:

• CV Conference Center in Cathedral City (7.9 million square feet)
• Serrano Commerce Center in the Temescal Valley (6.5 million square feet)
• Beaumont Heights Business Centre Project in Beaumont (5.7 million square feet)
• Harvest Landing Retail Center & Business Park Project in Perris (5.7 million square feet)
• Mesa Verde Specific Plan in Calimesa (4.4 million square feet)
• New Perris Commerce Center Specific Plan Project in Perris (3.7 million square feet)

In all, the Riverside County projects total 42.9 million square feet. Also making the list is the Lake Creek Logistics Center project — 3.5 million square feet — in the San Bernardino County High Desert community of Apple Valley.

McCarthy said it’s possible warehouse developers are eyeing Riverside County “because there’s a little bit more undeveloped land in Riverside County than in the inland parts of San Bernardino County.”

His list doesn’t include projects in various stages of development in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. For example, there’s the 3.2 million-square-foot Bloomington Business Park in unincorporated San Bernardino County.

The list also doesn’t include the 7.3 million-square foot Stoneridge Commerce Center sought for the unincorporated Riverside County community of Nuevo and the West Campus Upper Plateau, a 4.7 million-square-foot project envisioned for ex-March Air Force Base land near Riverside that’s currently stalled.

McCarthy worries Riverside County is ill-prepared for more warehouses.

“There’s the air quality impacts, there’s the land use impacts, the environmental justice impacts … and just the congestion and traffic impacts,” he said. “And so each of these individual projects have all of those problems. But put them all together and it just amplifies it.”

Unlike San Bernardino County, which has more rail infrastructure, more goods would have to be moved in Riverside County by truck, McCarthy said, adding that warehouses are being built further and further from the ports, requiring longer truck trips.

“It’s the worst kind of logistics sprawl,” he said. “So I think the question is, what is the overall plan?”

Riverside County analyzes development projects on a case-by-case basis and tailors conditions of approval — landscape buffers and noise limits, for example —  to each project’s location, John Hildebrand, county planning director, said via email.

“Roadways are widened and utilities are installed or upsized to accommodate the growth,” Hildebrand said, adding the county uses “good neighbor” standards to ensure warehouses in unincorporated areas are compatible with their surroundings.

He also noted that a new state law, AB 98, sets development standards for new warehouses requiring landscape buffers and other measures to lessen the effect on neighborhoods.

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The e-commerce giant plans to hire more than 2,000 full-time and part-time workers to staff two new facilities in Fontana and Jurupa. The new facilities, called “inbound cross docks,” launched operations earlier this month and are designed to receive cargo and sort merchandise to send to fulfillment centers, which handle customer orders.

Paul Granillo, president and chief executive of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership, said in a news release on Tuesday that the infusion of new jobs represented a “significant boost” to the local economy.

Granillo said in an interview that Inland Empire communities depend heavily on logistics jobs, since starting wages are typically higher than minimum wage. And the logistics sector was one of just three in the region that saw job growth in 2024, along with healthcare and government, he said.

“Amazon is probably our largest private employer and is important to the economic vitality of the region,” Granillo said.

The new Amazon jobs offer starting pay of $20.75 per hour and benefits such as healthcare, dental and vision coverage, a 401(k) with company match and up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave, according to Amazon spokesperson Carly Levy.

The new positions will be added to Amazon’s website in the coming weeks, she said.

Michael McCarthy, an adjunct professor of environmental analysis at Pitzer College had a less rosy view of the region’s freight and logistics sector. He said tariffs being pursued by the Trump administration don’t bode well for Inland Empire warehousing. And, he said, growth in freighting has slowed in the years since the pandemic boost, with warehouses seeing higher job vacancy rates.

“We are overly dependent on warehousing. Devoting such a large share of our land use to it and not diversifying our economy is a problem,” McCarthy said.

The opening of new facilities comes amid tensions over environmental impacts of industrial development in the region. Developers have pursued properties along Inland Empire freeways, demolishing neighborhoods to make way for industrial facilities to convert the area into a logistics corridor for e-commerce arriving in Southern California ports. Community activists and residents have pushed for limits on this type of development, which they say drives pollution, traffic congestion and other problems.

Last year Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a hotly contested bill that established new standards for building and design of industrial warehouses meant to protect the health of residents in surrounding areas. The legislation, which will go into effect in 2026, faced major opposition from those who saw it as a job killer, putting restraints on economic opportunity and infrastructure development.

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But local government groups oppose the legislation, and business groups warn that it would place onerous requirements on warehouse developments and cities, threatening trade and jobs. Gov. Gavin Newsom has until the end of the month to sign or veto the bill.

Assembly Bill 98 passed in the final hours before the Legislature adjourned Saturday, after lawmakers swapped out language from an agricultural bill for the new warehouse restrictions. 

The bill would tighten building standards for new warehouses; ban heavy-duty diesel truck traffic next to sensitive sites including homes, schools, parks and nursing homes; and require local governments to update truck routes to avoid residential streets, said Assemblymember Eloise Gómez Reyes, a San Bernardino Democrat who co-authored the bill.

The measure would also add minimum distance requirements between homes and warehouses, along with buffers featuring walls and landscaping. The bill would also require replacement of two new homes for every one that’s demolished to make room for new logistics centers, along with 12 months rental payment to displaced renters.

Reyes said the bill would counter the environmental and health effects of explosive warehouse growth in the Inland Empire, where 4,000 warehouses occupy a billion square feet combined and generate more than 600,000 truck trips per day.

“We have tried to do as best we can, remembering that it’s the health of the residents of California that has to be the state’s top priority,” she told CalMatters Monday. “Everything else is secondary.”

Although the bill was pushed through the Legislature in the last week of session, Reyes said it’s the product of years of effort and “not something that happened overnight.”

Reyes introduced a separate bill earlier this year that would have created bigger buffers between warehouses and sensitive sites, but it failed in committee. She said this bill is a starting point for better health protections in warehouse planning. 

“I think what we have put together is a common sense approach and it’s a very important first step,” she said. 

However business leaders objected to its rushed passage, arguing that it could put a chokehold on trade, endanger jobs and spike consumer costs. The very fact that an earlier bill didn’t make it out of committee shows that the issue deserved more time and attention, said Paul Granillo, president and CEO of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership.

“Anything that is put together in that short a time, in smoke-filled rooms is not good policy; and AB 98 is not good policy,” he said. 

Granillo said the restrictions could increase the cost of everyday goods and push business out of state. 

“This type of legislation just signals to people that would invest in creating jobs in California that California is not a job-friendly state,” he said.

Melissa Sparks-Kranz, a lobbyist for the League of California Cities, said the bill’s cost to local governments would be prohibitive, forcing cities to spend between $100,000 and several million dollars each to develop the new traffic plans, with penalties of $50,000 for delays in those updates. The league is urging Newsom to veto the bill; the California State Association of Counties is also against it.

Granillo added that the bill’s standards for setbacks and truck routes strip local governments of their land use authority. “The idea that the state thinks it can come up with a solution that will work in all cities of California is ludicrous,” he said.

The California Chamber of Commerce, however, called the bill a “valuable compromise” that could provide a backstop against more extensive legislation and litigation affecting warehouse projects.

Warehouse developments have long been a mixed blessing to communities in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, offering steady employment and economic growth, but worsening the region’s haze of pollution and imposing heavy traffic on neighborhood streets. 

Riverside and San Bernardino rank first and second among the counties with highest ozone levels and among the top dozen for particulate pollution. Activists link the proliferation of warehouses to unusually high rates of asthma and cancer.

Local and state officials have tried to thread the needle between environmental protections and economic growth, but sometimes they leave community members, particularly those in low-income communities of color, with the sense that they are cut out of the conversation. 

Those concerns made for an unlikely alignment between industry groups and environmental justice advocates. The Jurupa Valley-based Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice also opposed the bill, arguing that it didn’t go far enough to control persistent air pollution from the warehouse boom.

Although the legislation set minimum setbacks of 300 to 500 feet from warehouse docks to the property line of sensitive sites, it fell short of the 1,000 feet recommended to avoid the worst diesel exposure, said Ana Gonzalez, the center’s executive director. And it calls for warehouses to use zero-emission engines when “operationally feasible,” which she said leaves loopholes for developers.

Gonzalez admitted that she was surprised to join industry groups in opposition: “It put us in a muddy place, because we never thought we would be on the same side opposing a warehouse or environmental justice bill.”

Other groups said the bill strikes a balance between environmental and economic interests, even if it didn’t please either side.

James Thuerwachter, a lobbyist for the California State Council of Laborers, which represents workers in the construction industry, said the bill accommodates job creation and environmental regulation. 

“AB 98 brings innovative solutions to tackle immediate air quality, safety, and supply chain issues, while also bringing our distribution process into the 21st century,” he said in a state Senate Appropriations Committee hearing last week.

While the bill didn’t meet all her expectations, Gonzalez said it sets baseline environmental health standards that community groups can use to push for greater protections.

“Our organization feels that if the governor signs this bill, there is an opportunity to build from here and do better,” she said.

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