Bloomington residents concerned about what they called their rural lifestyle couldn’t convince a majority of San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors to vote against a new truck and trailer storage facility in their community.
“You wouldn’t want this in your back yard,” said Bloomington resident Anna Carlos. “You wouldn’t even want this in your neighborhood.”
On Tuesday, Feb. 8, the supervisors voted to rezone an 8.95-acre parcel at 10746 Cedar Ave., on the west side of Cedar Avenue between Santa Ana and Slover avenues. The parcel was originally zoned for commercial uses, meaning it could be used for shops or other commercial businesses. Instead, it is now zoned for service commercial uses and will be used for a 260-space truck and trailer storage yard, with an office building and service bay building. The yard is expected to create about 25 new jobs.
The land itself wasn’t zoned for residential use, but butts up against land zoned for residential use on all four sides of the property and existing homes to the north, east and south.
The project has been controversial through the whole public process, with 13 people speaking in opposition to it at the Planning Commission’s July 22 public hearing on the project.
A total of 59 letters and emails were sent to the Board of Supervisors about the project, both from members of the public as well as the state Attorney General’s Bureau of Environmental Justice, the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, South Coast Air Quality Management District and the Colton Joint Unified School District. Commenters, both in written messages and at Tuesday’s meeting, focused on air-quality concerns, pedestrian safety and traffic concerns.
“While we recognize the development trend and proliferation of logistical and warehouse demands on the region, we request the county be more proactive and deliberate in its approach,” Owen Chang, director of facilities for the Colton school district, told supervisors on Tuesday. “This project would increase truck traffic significantly on Cedar and the Cedar interchange, which is already overburdened.”
Slover Mountain High School is located about a quarter-mile from the project, Chang said.
And the project wasn’t a slam dunk on Tuesday, with Supervisor Joe Baca Jr., who represents Bloomington on the board, expressing concerns.
“With those trucks being on the road, we don’t have the ability, as a county, to maintain those roads or have the money to maintain those roads,” he said.
But other board members pushed back.
“What I heard this community say, over the course of many years, which is that they’re looking for a way to get help getting trucks and trailers off of streets and off of dirt lots,” Second District Supervisor Janice Rutherford said.
And, board Chairman Curt Hagman pointed out, pushing the logistics industry and trucking out of Bloomington just meant kicking it to another jurisdiction and possibly creating even more problems.
“Do we really want to push (the logistics industry) out to another jurisdiction? How far out would that be?” Hagman said. “We don’t want another 5,000 trucks going up and down the Cajon Pass.”
In the end, the board voted 3-2 to approve the rezoning and permit, with Baca and First District Supervisor Paul Cook dissenting.
No timeline for completion of the project was presented on Tuesday, but the permit expires in three years, so the project will have to be built by July 2025 or the Planning Commission will have to approve an optional three-year extension. Rutherford said Tuesday she expects the issue to end up in court and ultimately be decided by a judge.
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