Smog or jobs? Massive warehouse means mass pollution

A proposed warehouse facility the size of 700 football fields has prompted at least 10 lawsuits, with critics saying it would mark a major setback in the fight to clean up Southern California’s dirty air – some of the most polluted in the country.

The World Logistics Center, expected to begin operations in 2018 if it survives the lawsuits, would be one of the largest warehouse complexes in the world, adding 40.6 million square feet of industrial buildings — the size of the Palm Springs International Airport campus — along the crowded Highway 60 corridor in Moreno Valley about 45 minutes west of Palm Springs. The facility will serve as a hub for receiving goods from around the world and shipping them across the United States.

Backers say the Riverside County warehouse complex would bring more than 20,300 jobs and $38 million in annual revenue to the city, where unemployment is 9.7 percent and per capita income is 40 percent below the state average. The project is also expected to bring 68,000 extra vehicle trips per day, including 14,000 big rig trips. Those cars and trucks would unleash a slew of harmful air pollution, including smog-forming ozone and lung- and heart-damaging particulate matter, according to air-quality officials.

The story of the how the World Logistics Center came to be approved is riddled with controversies, including big campaign donations by the developer and the Moreno Valley City Council exploiting a legal loophole to approve the project over the objections of residents and environmental activists. The story has been further complicated by the firing of Southern California’s top air-quality official, two weeks after his agency filed its second lawsuit against the project — and there may be more twists and turns before a shovel hits the ground, if that ever happens.

The average Moreno Valley resident commutes more than 35 minutes to work, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, so the promise of jobs closer to home has been a selling point for the center.

Officials at the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which is responsible for cleaning up Southern California’s air, have spoken out against the project since developer Iddo Benzeevi first proposed it to Moreno Valley leaders in 2011. Those air-quality officials included Barry Wallerstein, the AQMD's longtime executive officer, who oversaw a significant reduction in harmful emissions in the region.

Wallerstein, who came to the agency in 1984 and became its executive officer in 1997, was abruptly ousted by the district board’s new Republican majority in a 7-6 closed session vote in March. Riverside County's representatives on the board — Supervisor John Benoit and his son, Wildomar City Councilmember Ben Benoit — both voted to remove Wallerstein.

READ MORE: John and Ben Benoit discussed county business using personal email

Critics called Wallerstein’s removal a coup for polluting industries that have long battled the agency over its air-quality regulations.

UCLA law professor Sean Hecht, co-executive director of the university's Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said a variety of factors probably contributed to the board's decision to fire Wallerstein, who long ago earned the respect of environmental and public health groups. Hecht said it wouldn't surprise him if AQMD's legal action against the World Logistics Center was one of those factors.

"Obviously the politicians in the Inland Empire are exercising quite a bit of power," he said.

Despite Wallerstein's firing, the AQMD is moving forward with its two lawsuits against Moreno Valley, which approved the World Logistics Center and has tried to avoid legal challenges to its environmental analysis of the project. Still, some observers wonder whether the district will continue to fight pollution as vigorously as it has in the past.

“I really can’t say at this moment. We have to wait and see,” said Bonnie Holmes-Gen, senior director of air quality and climate change at the American Lung Association in California. “We certainly hope they’re going in the right direction. We need bold leadership, we need a strong commitment to moving away from petroleum fuels and embracing the cleanest technologies. It’s a critical time right now.”

Breathing toxic air

The air district’s board appointed Wayne Nastri April 1 as acting executive officer less than a month after Wallerstein’s firing, also in a closed vote. Nastri served as an administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency's Pacific Southwest region from 2001 to 2009. As a condition of his appointment, he resigned as the co-president of E4 Strategic Solutions, an environmental and energy consulting firm that has represented businesses that have come before the AQMD, including Celanese, an international chemical production corporation, and Quemetco, a lead-acid battery recycling plant in the City of Industry.

Among other conditions, he cannot be involved in discussions or decisions relating to clients he had during the past 12 months.

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When Benzeevi’s company, Highland Fairview, submitted its Draft Environmental Impact Report for the World Logistics Center in 2013, Wallerstein and AQMD Project Supervisor Ian MacMillan responded with a letter to the city saying the document grossly underplayed the health risks from the project’s air pollution, including the increased risk of cancer to people living within 20 miles of the project. The letter also said the developer didn’t consider adequate mitigation measures.

Two years later, the AQMD filed its first lawsuit against Moreno Valley and Highland Fairview, claiming the project's environmental impact report was inadequately prepared.

“This massive warehouse complex will generate emissions of smog-forming nitrogen oxides at levels similar to a major refinery or power plant, primarily due to the 14,000 truck trips occurring at the facility every day,” Wallerstein said in a statement at the time. “The mitigations approved by the Moreno Valley City Council will not adequately protect residents from the potentially harmful health effects of these pollutants.”

Soon, nine other groups filed their own lawsuits, including the California Clean Energy Committee, the Riverside County Transportation Commission, the SoCal Environmental Justice Alliance, Laborers International Union of North America Local Union 1184, Residents for a Livable Moreno Valley and the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice.

Those groups have pointed to the World Logistics Center’s environmental analysis, which says the project would generate significant air pollution that cannot be mitigated. Those pollutants would include particulates from diesel truck exhaust, a likely carcinogen, as well as nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, which combine in sunlight to form ground-level ozone, the main component of smog.

Those emissions, critics say, would only exacerbate Southern California’s worst-in-the-nation air quality.

“By most metrics, air quality is about 75 percent cleaner than it was at its peak” pollution levels, said Suzanne Paulson, an atmospheric scientist at UCLA and director of the university’s Center for Clean Air.The region’s air has improved significantly since the smog-choked 1970s, thanks to strict regulations that have reduced tailpipe emissions and forced power plants and other big polluters to clean up their acts. The highest-impact reform may have been requiring oil refineries to create a special, cleaner brand of gasoline just for California, which is why Californians consistently pay more for gas than the rest of the country does.

Studies have consistently found that Southern Californians are benefiting from the cleaner air. Scientists at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, for instance, reported last year that as nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter emissions have decreased, children’s lungs have grown stronger, and the number of children with poor lung function has declined. Children with asthma have benefited the most, with their lung development improving about twice as much as for other children, the study found.

But Southern California has a long way to go.

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In its most recent State of the Air report, the American Lung Association reported that the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area — which includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties — suffers from more days with unhealthy ozone levels than anywhere else in the country. The region also endures the ninth-most days with unhealthy particle pollution, among the 197 metro areas for which the Lung Association analyzed Environmental Protection Agency data.

Between 2012 and 2014 — the most recent years for which good data is available — the region averaged 153 days with unhealthy ozone levels. That’s down from 230 such days between 1998 and 2000, but still dozens more than any other metro area in the country. Phoenix, by comparison, had 43 such days. San Diego had 28. New York had 24.

“It’s a big problem if it’s five days. When you’re talking about 150 days, it’s an especially big problem,” said Holmes-Gen, from the American Lung Association in California. “These are toxic pollutants. These are lung damaging gases and particles.”

Air-quality experts describe Southern California’s progress on particle pollution as more of a success story. The region experienced just 11 days with unhealthy particle pollution between 2012 and 2014 — still ninth-most in the country, but down from 107 a decade before, according to the Lung Association.

At the same time, those gains mask the risks posed by local particle pollution hotspots — and the tens of thousands of cars and trucks passing through the World Logistics Center daily would create such a hotspot.

Particle pollution consists of tiny particles that can lodge in the lungs, making it harder to breath and increasing the risk of heart attack and stroke. The kind of particulate matter emitted by diesel-powered trucks is especially dangerous, with many studies indicating it can increase the risk of lung cancer. The World Logistics Center's environmental impact report estimates that one out of every 10,000 people living in close proximity to the project could get cancer if exposed continuously to its emissions over a long period of time, and one out of every 50,000 within the wider area. The mitigated risks are approximately one in 60,000 for close proximity and one in 230,000 for the wider area.

Critics say the World Logistics Center would make it harder for Southern California to comply with air-quality rules issued under the Clean Air Act. The Los Angeles region never came into compliance with the Environmental Protection Agency’s 75 parts per billion standard for ozone, which the agency replaced last year with a stricter 70 parts per billion rule, which environmental groups say still isn't good enough to protect public health. In 2014, Southern California’s ozone levels averaged 110 parts per billion over the standard eight-hour measuring period, according to the Air Quality Management District.

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It’s rare for the AQMD to join a lawsuit against a project approved by another government entity, said Yana Garcia, an attorney at Earthjustice, which is representing a coalition of groups that have filed suit against the city. The district’s involvement reflects the project’s potential impacts not only to Moreno Valley, but to Southern California as a whole, she said. Many of the truck trips the project is expected to generate would span the 80-mile distance from Moreno Valley to the Port of Los Angeles, spreading pollution across the region.

AQMD sued “not only (because of) the localized health impacts, but also the regional significance this project has,” Garcia said. “I really can’t emphasize enough how significant it is on both levels.”

Pushing forward 

Despite the legal maelstrom surrounding the logistics center and several lawsuits that had already been filed, the City Council approved the project in a 3-2 vote at an August meeting.

Moreno Valley Mayor Yxstian Gutierrez said he voted to approve the project based on assurances he was given of the logistics center’s use of green technology as well as the jobs it would bring to his city.

When the Moreno Valley ALDI grocery store hosted a job fair for 100 openings a few months ago, Gutierrez said more than 27,000 people filled out applications.

“We’re trying to bring more local jobs to the community. That’s why I voted for it,” he said. “If we don’t take this project, some other city will.”

AQMD's first lawsuit challenged the adequacy of the project's environmental review, as did other lawsuits. In response to those suits, a group backed financially by developer Highland Fairview gathered nearly 50,000 signatures for petitions asking the city council to repeal its initial approvals of the World Logistics Project and replace them with approvals for an identical project. The city council approved the voter-backed initiatives.

Environmentalists say Highland Fairview was trying to circumvent the lawsuits by exploiting a legal loophole that exempts initiative-backed projects from litigation challenging the adequacy of environmental analyses. Large companies like Walmart have used this method in setting up new locations across the country.

Benzeevi cited the nearly 50,000 signatures in favor of his project as a sign of strong public support.

“We know there’s tremendous amount of support,” Benzeevi said. “You can’t gather that many signatures in about 30 days without that kind of support," he said.

(Above: An excerpt from the AQMD’s first lawsuit against Moreno Valley contends that the environmental documents prepared for the World Logistics Center are deficient and that mitigation measures are inadequate to protect residents from the harmful health effects of air pollutants the project would generate.)

Two weeks before Wallerstein was fired, the AQMD filed another lawsuit against the city and the developer, asking a judge to throw out the voter-backed initiatives approved by the city council. The district is arguing that the legal loophole shouldn't apply.

“The World Logistics Center development agreement could not be adopted by initiative, because under the state constitution and other state laws only legislative bodies have the power to enter into development agreements,” the AQMD said in a statement. “The lawsuit also argues that the state constitution prohibits initiatives from benefitting private organizations such as the developer of the World Logistics Center.”

Moreno Valley responded, telling the AQMD to back off.

“In filing a lawsuit challenging the city council’s unanimous approval of several citizen initiated petitions, the South Coast Air Quality Management District is overstepping its authority and attempting to thwart development of a project which will lead California in implementing the highest environmental standards and producing thousands of local jobs,” the city said in a statement.

Benzeevi also claims that the use of the word “significant” in the environmental impact report has misled some people as to the extent of the project’s impact. The report says the logistics center would exceed daily “significance thresholds” for various pollutants, including volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides. Those thresholds apply to all industrial projects, and don’t necessarily mean the warehouse facility’s impacts would be “significant” in the colloquial sense, Benzeevi said.

“There’s a confluence of things that create (critics’) reaction and I have a lot of empathy for this,” he said. “I don’t blame people for thinking and reacting in this way to this project.”

“It’s just interesting because in Riverside and other cities, they’ve built more development, maybe little by little, but more development than Moreno Valley,” Mayor Gutierrez told The Desert Sun.

Benzeevi believes the lawsuit is one of many systemic abuses of the California Environmental Quality Act.

“It seems like in 40 years of CEQA, not one (developer), including the government, has been able to produce a sufficient (environmental impact report),” he said. “It’s unfortunately highly abused and easy to do.”

Gutierrez said he believes the lawsuits filed by the Riverside County Transportation Commission and Riverside County will soon be settled and that he is feeling optimistic about the direction the project is heading.

“I think it is moving along,” he said. “Within the next couple of weeks I think you’ll see some movement with settlements.”

John and Ben Benoit serve on the board of the Riverside County Transportation Commission. They both voted in favor of the commission's lawsuit against Moreno Valley, which alleges that Highway 60 and other nearby roads won't be able to handle the tens of thousands of additional vehicle trips per day the World Logistics Center will generate. They also voted in favor of AQMD filing its lawsuits against the city, in their capacity on that board.

A history of contention and campaign donations

Benzeevi’s company, Highland Fairview, is known for successfully pushing large industrial projects through the Moreno Valley City Council. The company is based in the city, where Benzeevi has a home.

In 2011, the developer opened Highland Fairview Corporate Park, which is home to a 1.8-million-square-foot Skechers show distribution center.

Two years after the distribution center opened, three former city staffers filed a lawsuit saying that top city officials had pressured them to approve Benzeevi’s project, despite its failure to meet certain code standards. The lawsuit was later dismissed.

The promised job growth Benzeevi used to sell the Skechers project also fell through. Despite a promise of more than 2,500 jobs, only about 600 were ever filled, many of which were transfers from a Skechers facility in Ontario.

The millionaire developer is also known for his campaign contributions.

In 2014’s Moreno Valley city elections, voters recalled then-Mayor Tom Owings and then-Councilmember Victoria Baca. Benzeevi donated more than $600,000 to their opponents' campaigns, according to financial documents.

“We should all be involved in our community and local government as much as we can,” Benzeevi said when asked about his contributions. With regards to claims that he's buying politicians, “None of it is based in any sort of reality," he said.

Still, Benzeevi’s heavy spending has led many to raise an eyebrow at the World Logistics Center and similar projects — especially considering Moreno Valley's recent history of alleged corruption.

A year after the World Logistics Center plan was introduced, the city government found itself under a microscope when Councilmember Marcelo Co was arrested after being caught on video accepting a $2.36 million bribe from an undercover FBI agent posing as a real estate broker.

FBI officials called it “the largest bribe ever accepted by a public (official) in an undercover operation” at the time.

In exchange for the money, Co promised the city council would rezone a piece of land belonging to the fake real estate agent in order to increase its value by more than $4 million. He had also asked for thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the undercover agent and an FBI informant in order to elect candidates who would be friendly to the agents’ fake business ventures.

Co has since pleaded guilty in federal court and received a 5-year prison sentence.

In April 2015, Moreno Valley City Hall was hit with a corruption probe by the FBI and Riverside County District Attorney's Office.

Law enforcement searched the homes of four city council members and the office of Highland Fairview as well as City Hall, where they seized tens of thousands of documents relating to Highland Fairview, Benzeevi and other construction and development projects in the city.

Two months later, the DA's Office said no charges would be filed as a result of the corruption investigation.

On Feb. 17, Moreno Valley announced on its Facebook page that the Inland Empire Economic Partnership had selected the World Logistics Center as a finalist for its “Turning Red Tape into Red Carpet” Award for its efforts to promote “business friendly practices and for job creation.”

'Etched on the lungs of Coachella Valley residents'

The political battles have real repercussions for the Southern Californians who breathe in polluted air every day.

Eastern Coachella Valley communities such as Coachella, Indio, Mecca and Thermal have some of the worst air quality and highest poverty levels in the state.

Because of the area's geography, much of the toxic haze that drifts through the Coachella Valley comes to rest in these communities.

Within the next few years, the Coachella Valley will be hit with the emissions from the World Logistics Center. It will also experience the consequences of the AQMD board's recent decision to reject a Wallerstein-backed plan to limit smog-forming nitrogen oxide emissions from oil refineries, power plants and other major polluters. In a 7-5 vote, the board instead approved a less stringent smog plan supported by the Western States Petroleum Association. John Benoit had proposed a compromise plan, but the board voted it down. Benoit ultimately voted against the oil industry-backed proposal, as did his son Ben.

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Both of these developments concern Coachella Mayor Steve Hernandez, who says now is not the time to be making concessions on air quality.

“I’m not sure we can afford as a valley to have partisan lines etched on the lungs of Coachella Valley residents,” he said. “I think we’re setting ourselves up for a smoggy future.”

The promise of 20,000 jobs is alluring, but Hernandez said he isn’t convinced that another logistics center will bring significant economic change to Moreno Valley.

“Just look at Skechers,” he said.

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Thinking of his constituents who are forced to carry asthma inhalers, or who suffer from heart disease, strokes and stunted lung growth, Hernandez said he worries about the health and future of Coachella residents.

“We know the effects of NOx and we know the effects of particle matter and diesel soot,” he said. “If you’re going to be building these massive million-foot facilities, at the end of the day, at whose expense is it?”

UPDATE: This story has been corrected to reflect that Wayne Nastri is no longer with E4 Strategic Solutions, an environmental and energy consulting firm. It also adds conditions of Nastri’s appointment as acting executive officer of the AQMD.

EDITOR'S NOTE: As originally published, this story about the proposed World Logistics Center in Moreno Valley correctly stated "one out of every 10,000 people living in close proximity to the project could get cancer if exposed continuously to its emissions over a long period of time, and one out of every 50,000 within the wider area.” Those figures predict the “unmitigated” cancer risk. The story did not include the project’s “mitigated” cancer risks predicted in the final Environmental Impact Statement. Those mitigated risks are approximately one in 60,000 for close proximity and one in 230,000 for the wider area.

Air pollution by the numbers

U.S. metro areas with the highest number of unhealthy ozone days per year (2012-14 average):

1. Los Angeles, Calif.: 153
2. Bakersfield, Calif.: 113
3. Visalia, Calif.: 108
4. Fresno, Calif.: 104
5. Phoenix, Ariz.: 43
6. Sacramento, Calif.: 41
7. Modesto, Calif.: 40
8. Denver, Colo.: 36
9. Las Vegas, Nev.: 35
10. Fort Collins, Colo.: 32

U.S. counties with the highest number of unhealthy ozone days per year (2012-14 average):

1. San Bernardino, Calif.: 153
2. Riverside, Calif.: 140
3. Kern, Calif.: 113
4. Los Angeles, Calif.: 109
5. Tulare, Calif.: 108
6. Fresno, Calif.: 104
7. Madera, Calif.: 58
8. Kings, Calif.: 44
9. Maricopa, Ariz.: 43
10. El Dorado, Calif.: 41

U.S. metro areas with the highest number of unhealthy particle pollution (PM-2.5) days per year (2012-14 average):

1. Bakersfield, Calif.: 49
2. Fresno, Calif.: 45
3. Visalia, Calif.: 41
4. Modesto, Calif.: 33
5. Fairbanks, Ark.: 23
6. Salt Lake City, Utah: 20
7. Logan, Utah: 20
8. Bay Area, Calif.: 19
9. Los Angeles, Calif.: 11
10. Missoula, Mont.: 9

Source: American Lung Association

Online producer Rob Hopwood contributed to this report.