Facing a rising stack of plans for large warehouses, Hemet’s City Council on Tuesday night, Dec. 10, approved a 45-day moratorium on new warehouses that aren’t already in the planning pipeline. The 5-0 vote followed a public hearing in which residents shared fears about becoming the latest community to be enveloped by a wave of logistics development that’s turned the Inland Empire into a sprawling landscape of mega-warehouses — often 1 million square feet or larger — to help satisfy Americans’ online shopping demand. The hearing also featured testimony from unionized construction workers, who yearn for work sites that don’t require them to wake at daybreak in order to get a job with decent wages and benefits. As warehouse-saturated communities in western Riverside and San Bernardino counties run out of space, developers are looking east to build warehouses supplied by the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. In recent years, mega-warehouses have been sought for sites in the San Gorgonio Pass and Coachella Valley. One Hemet project already in the pipeline would build a distribution center on part of a 64-acre vacant lot near The Lakes at Hemet West. The 55-and-older community’s residents have organized to fight the project. View this document on Scribd Hemet “has experienced a significant increase in proposals for the development and expansion of large-scale warehouse and distribution facilities,” a city report on the moratorium states. These plans, according to the report, “raise concerns regarding traffic, environmental impacts and public health,” especially regarding diesel emissions from warehouse-bound trucks. Hemet’s existing land-use rules might not be up to the task of easing these concerns, the report states. The moratorium is meant to give city officials time to create new rules and regulations guiding logistics growth. Hemet isn’t the first Inland Empire city to enact a logistics moratorium. Riverside, Jurupa Valley, Colton and Pomona also have imposed pauses on new warehouses in the past decade. Hemet’s moratorium, which takes effect immediately, only applies to warehouse planning applications filed after it starts. The council can extend it for up to two years, though City Attorney Steven Graham Pacifico said it won’t take that long for officials to craft new warehouse rules. Residents in favor of the moratorium warned of truck traffic clogging roads, dirtier air, noise and other ills they blame on unchecked warehouse development. “Existing potholes will become the size of kiddie wading pools,” Harriet Brunner told the council, later adding: “Listen to the people you serve, not the developers.” Related Articles News | Judge sides with Perris in dispute with Menifee over warehouse project News | How might Donald Trump’s tariffs affect Southern California ports, logistics industries? News | The bigger the warehouse, the worse the air pollution, NASA-funded study finds News | Delving into ‘slow violence of the supply chain’ in Inland Empire News | In Riverside County, land meant for homes is being eyed for warehouses Filling the audience were construction laborers, clad in orange-and-yellow work vests, who opposed the moratorium. They spoke of waking at 3 a.m. to get to work at Los Angeles County sites. New warehouses, they said, let them avoid the long commutes while supporting high-paying jobs with good benefits. “We would like an opportunity to not have to get up and not race away from our children and our grandchildren,” said Dwayne Johnson, a Hemet resident and a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. The council passed the moratorium without discussion by councilmembers.