About the Grove Warehouses
Warehouses Surrounded by Neighborhoods
The current plan being proposed to the March Joint Powers Authority repurposes 800 acres of open land, currently occupied by March Air Force Base weapons storage. The proposal includes over 143 acres of industrial warehouses, 66 acres of business park, and over 43 acres of mixed-use space. Unfortunately, the developer has planned to build truck bays for the business park and mixed-use spaces as well, signaling that these will also be warehouses. Thus, the total square footage is likely to be more than 4.7 million square feet of industrial warehouses in an area surrounded on more than three sides by homes and directly adjacent to The Grove Community Church (pictured in the lower left-hand corner above).
The developers plan to pave Barton Rd through to Alessandro, which the builder anticipates will add over 30,000 cars to our neighborhoods daily. They claim they will open a public park, but in recent meetings, they clarified that they will only fund a "park feasibility study" and provide no money for the actual building of it. (We at R-NOW like to call it "The Pretend Park.") They will preserve a buffer of conservation space, because they were forced to concede this in a settlement agreement with the Center for Biological Diversity (for more information, click here). The industrial warehouses would be on the scale of the Amazon warehouse recently built on Krameria south of Van Buren, stretching the length of our neighborhoods and dwarfing The Grove Community Church and surrounding homes. It would greatly increase truck traffic, noise, and pollution and disturb wildlife in the area including the threatened Stephen's kangaroo rat and the burrowing owl.
The March Joint Powers Authority (JPA) are charged with repurposing the land from the former March Air Force Reserve Base and replacing the jobs lost in its closing. Per the March JPA website, when the base closed, 10,000 jobs were lost. March JPA has already repurposed much of the land and claims to be creating 38,000 jobs — 6,000 of which are to come from the West Upper Plateau project.
Enough is enough! Riverside does not need more warehouses, and since they have already more than fulfilled their mandate to replace more than the 10,000 jobs lost, there is no excuse for increasing the industrial encroachment on our open spaces and neighborhoods.