With the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, coupled with the extensive logistics sector in the Inland Empire, Southern California is a major hub of getting goods around.
So what does a majority of the California Assembly want to do so? Make it harder and costlier for goods to get around.
Asm. Eloise Gomez Reyes, D-San Bernardino, has proposed Assembly 2840.
“I believe it is time for the state to establish reasonable standards to protect communities while at the same time allow commerce to flourish,” Reyes wrote in an author’s statement. “This bill simply requires a buffer zone between warehouse facilities and sensitive receptors while containing labor protections.”
To accomplish this, the bill would strip local governments of authority to approve warehouse projects of a certain size if they come within 1,000 feet of “sensitive receptors,” which includes community centers, jails, homes and schools.
As business groups note, “AB 2840 … relies on an almost two-decade old 2005 CARB advisory document recommending that sensitive receptors be cited away from warehouses using a now arbitrary 1,000-foot prohibition as a proxy for environmental protection.”
Technology has improved a lot in the decades since. “Seventeen years ago when this advisory document was released, CARB did not have an Advanced Clean Trucks Rule nor was the agency developing the Advanced Clean Fleets Rule,” they note.
The end result of this policy, then, is to restrict needed space to accommodate an ever-shifting market and thereby aggravate the nation’s supply-chain woes.
But on top of that, the proposal calls for a labor mandate requiring construction of logistics projects to be done by a “skilled and trained workforce,” regardless of either the cost or availability of such a workforce.
As the business groups note, this is merely “a one-size fits all statewide labor mandate” that will quash development.
AB 2840, if implemented, would come at great cost to consumers and workers alike. It has regrettably passed the Assembly, though fortunately some Democrats voted against it. We urge rational Senate Democrats to reject this legislation.