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IN THIS ISSUE – “Some will say those bills were tough votes. But one must remember the whole reason why the public elects lawmakers is for them to take tough votes.”
Mike Gatto, former Democrat legislator, on the practice of quietly killing bills by not voting
- Get Ready to See Red in Newsom’s May Revise Budget
- Newsom Bets Political Future as He Takes Aggressive Climate Message Global
- California Groundwater Levels Up
- Tourists Returning to Golden State
- Wonderful Foods Magnate Expands Logistics Industry in CA
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) curates California policy, legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week. Please feel free to forward this unique client service.
FOR THE WEEK ENDING MAY 10, 2024
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Gov. Newsom later today is scheduled to release his May Revise FY24-25 Budget and give remarks. We will provide you next week with essential context, perspective and legislative reaction articles. To see him deliver the bad fiscal news live, tune in at 11a (or later for a replay): https://www.youtube.com/@cagovernor
Meanwhile…
Get Ready to See Red in Newsom’s May Revise Budget
Politico & CalMatters
Get ready to see red today: Gavin Newsom is about to release his latest budget blueprint, and it’s expected to be rife with spending cuts.
The plan, colloquially known as the May Revise, will be the final iteration of the budget proposal to kick off the toughest stage of negotiations with lawmakers, namely Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and Senate Pro Tem Mike McGuire.
This governor has never faced a tougher budget climate: California’s deficit was previously projected to be between $38 billion and $73 billion.
At a California Chamber of Commerce event Thursday, Newsom acknowledged that “we still have a shortfall,” reported KCRA.
Newsom said he would take a two-year approach to cuts, saying, “We will manage it,
and without tax increases. We’re not just going to try to solve for this year, but also next year. We have to be more disciplined.”
Here are the five key factors we’ll watch for today that could shape the weeks of negotiations ahead:
The actual size of the deficit: There’s no bigger looming question hanging over Sacramento. The governor’s Department of Finance is expected to estimate a smaller deficit than it did in January due to a deal Newsom struck with legislative leaders, offering $17.3 billion in cost savings.
That said, state revenue through March fell $5.8 billion short of what the Newsom administration had baked into its earlier estimate.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office has released far less-rosy projections than Newsom’s budget team. “It’s still unclear,” said Senate Budget Chair Scott Wiener. “The Department of Finance and the LAO still are not fully aligned.”
Enviros in a lather: Few interest groups have felt as jilted by the governor’s January budget plan as environmentalists. They want Newsom to: a) move forward with a plan to offer $600 million in incentives for electric cars, clean trucks and other programs, instead of delaying it by two years, as he has planned, and b) back down on a pledge to cut $200 million from a program to make cities more pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly.
But that’s not the half of it. Climate hawks are also eager to get Newsom’s support for a climate bond to fund programs to reduce planet-warming emissions. Their hopes could be dashed as they compete for his love against two separate infrastructure bond proposals on schools and housing. Moreover, there could be little appetite for putting too many bonds on the November ballot for voters given Newsom’s mental-health measure, Proposition 1, passed by a slim margin in the primary.
Public transit now in limbo: One of the biggest sticking points between Newsom and lawmakers, especially in the Senate, could be his administration’s decision to freeze $2.4 billion in funding for struggling public transit agencies.
That money, approved in last year’s budget, includes funding intended to save bus and rail systems in the Bay Area and Los Angeles from a so-called “fiscal cliff.”
Wiener, who has significant leverage over the budget in the Senate, went to the mat to secure that lifeline for Bay Area agencies, including MUNI and BART in his San Francisco district. If Newsom pushes to claw it back, that could draw protests from lawmakers from the state’s major metro areas.
Education funding gambit, which has a cascading impact on the rest of the budget: School groups are anxiously waiting to see how — and whether — the decline in tax revenue could eat into their funding under Proposition 98, which set a revenue-based minimum for education spending. Newsom has proposed a controversial accounting maneuver to blunt the pain.
The governor wants the state to essentially take out an $8 billion loan from itself to avoid cuts to schools — money that would be repaid using future general funds.
Some education advocates worry that move would merely delay cuts in later years, when Newsom is conveniently out of office. The question now is whether Newsom sticks to that plan.
Health care wages could wither: In his January budget plan, Newsom asked the Legislature to move quickly on limiting California’s march toward a $25 health care wage, potentially by tying the rate of increases to how much revenue is available.
Five months later, we’re still waiting to see language — a reflection of the tricky politics involved for Newsom: He was wary of wage-boosting Senate Bill 525’s price tag but ultimately signed it last year, blessing a deal that SEIU and healthcare players forged from months of intensive negotiations. Now Newsom must balance his desire to curb the fiscal hit with the risk of angering labor allies if he trims too much.
How are revenues working out so far? According to Assembly budget advisor Jason Sisney, general fund revenues at the end of March were nearly $6 billion below projections. April wasn’t looking so great either: Revenue from personal and corporate income taxes were either “barely on track” or below projections, meaning revenue from that month could “come in several hundred million dollars below monthly estimates,” wrote Sisney.
The budget deficit — the second in a row after three years of record surpluses — affects nearly every policy decision legislators make. To get a jump start, Newsom and Democratic legislative leaders announced in March that they aimed to save $12 billion to $18 billion before passing the full state budget in June. A month later, the Legislature and Newsom signed off on the early budget action plan to “shrink the shortfall” by $17 billion.
Legislators Continue to Not Vote, Killing Bills Without Public Debate
CalMatters
Among the most controversial bills that died this spring was a measure prompted by allegations that Gov. Gavin Newsom secured a lucrative benefit for a billionaire supporter by exempting his restaurants from a minimum wage increase.
Newsom dismissed the allegations as “absurd,” but KCRA 3 reported that the public might never get a full accounting of what happened because participants to the bill negotiations signed non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that threatened them with legal action if they spoke about the issue.
The controversy prompted a bill banning NDAs for legislative negotiations, but the bill died last month even though only one Democratic member of the Assembly Committee on Elections voted against it. It failed because five other Democrats on the committee didn’t vote.
As CalMatters revealed in April, not voting is a common practice for California legislators. Last year, at least 15 bills died due to lack of votes instead of lawmakers actually voting “no” to kill them. So far this year, a database at CalMatters’ Digital Democracy indicates that at least 12 bills have died because lawmakers declined to vote.
Insiders say it’s a way for legislators to be polite to colleagues and perhaps avoid a “no” vote on their own legislation. But critics say it’s also a way for legislators to dodge responsibility for their decisions.
“Some will say that those bills were tough votes for lawmakers,” said Mike Gatto, a former Democratic legislator from Los Angeles. “But one must remember that the whole reason why the public elects these lawmakers is for them to take tough votes.”
The Legislature’s bill-tracking website doesn’t distinguish whether a legislator declined to vote, was absent or if the lawmaker announced they were formally abstaining from voting.
Now, with the launch of Digital Democracy, the public has easy access to video and transcripts that show just how often legislators are present in hearings and even engage in discussion, sometimes highly critical of the legislation, before staying silent during the call for a vote. Some legislators say the practice should be changed.
“I think it is appropriate for legislators to basically vote ‘yes’ or vote ‘no,’ ” Santa Ana Democratic Sen. Tom Umberg, a former federal prosecutor, recently told CBS News for a story done in collaboration with CalMatters. “But, you know, that is the system that we have. Should we change it? Probably.”
Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas and Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire didn’t respond to CalMatters’ requests to discuss whether the Legislature’s rules on voting should change.
Among the bills that died recently from California Democrats not voting were several involving public safety issues. They include a bill that would have prohibited sexually violent predators from being released into communities unless they had a place to live. Another would have increased penalties for property crimes. A third would have made it harder for police to charge people with a crime for filing false complaints against officers.
Another bill that died for lack of votes would restrict the controversial practice of gas and electric utilities from using ratepayer money for political lobbying. Senate Bill 938 was in response to a Sacramento Bee investigation last summer that revealed SoCalGas charged at least $36 million to ratepayers for political lobbying to oppose California policies aimed at addressing the climate crisis.
Environmentalists and utility watchdog groups were outraged, arguing that ratepayers’ bills should only reflect the cost to deliver electricity or gas to their homes. They said shareholders should foot the bill for political lobbying.
But Sen. Dave Min, a Democrat from Irvine, saw his bill to ban the practice fail in April before the Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee. The committee has 18 members, so the bill needed at least 10 “yes” votes to advance. In two separate votes, six members of the committee declined to vote. When combined with Republicans’ “no” votes, the abstentions were enough to kill Min’s bill.
Several legislators who helped kill the bill banning NDAs from legislative negotiations were also present during that hearing.
The four Democratic Assemblymembers on the elections committee who declined to vote on the NDA ban are Marc Berman of Cupertino, Steve Bennett of Oxnard, Akilah Weber of La Mesa and Matt Haney of San Francisco. Evan Low of Cupertino, who’s running for Congress, was absent for the hearing. The absence is recorded on the Legislature’s tally of votes the same as the lawmakers who stayed silent. None of them responded to interview requests.
It was a controversial bill in part because it dealt with a scandal about the governor that broke in February when Bloomberg News reported that the Panera Bread chain appeared to be exempt from a new law that raised the state’s minimum wage to $20 for fast food workers. In the Bloomberg investigation, sources said the Newsom administration sought the exemption to benefit a billionaire Panera Bread franchise owner who is a major Newsom donor.
After KCRA revealed that negotiators working on the minimum wage bill were required to sign NDAs, Republican Assemblymember Vince Fong introduced the bill to ban the practice for legislative negotiations. Labor groups opposed the bill, and business groups were split. Fong, who is running for Congress, didn’t return a request for comment.
During the hearing, Assemblymembers Berman and Weber spoke with the bill’s author, but still declined to vote.
“This is an extremely important bill that deals with a very important issue,” Weber said in the hearing. She also suggested the bill was drafted too quickly and she had questions about “whether or not the bill was too broad.”
Gatto, a former Democratic Assemblymember, said it was especially galling that lawmakers refused to vote on the non-disclosure agreement bill, given the legislation “itself involves the sanctity of the (legislative) process.”
“It just feels dirtier somehow,” Gatto said.
Newsom Takes Aggressive Climate Message Global; Risky Politics
Politico
Gov. Gavin Newsom is taking California’s climate story — with its big ambitions and political risks — on the road.
The Democratic governor, Biden surrogate and potential presidential contender is pushing aggressive climate action in appearances from China to the Vatican, selling it as a winning issue beyond the borders of his deep-blue state.
His pitch: The effects of climate change are upon us and the world — including California — ignores them at their peril.
California is “meeting the moment head-on as the hots get hotter, the dries get drier, the wets get wetter, simultaneous droughts and rain bombs,” Newsom said last month in a Central Valley orchard outfitted with solar panels and batteries. “We have to address these issues with a ferocity that is required of us.”
He’s heading to the Vatican next week to meet with Pope Francis and other leaders, where he’ll highlight what’s at stake with “global temperatures hurtling towards alarming new heights.” The trip comes after a swing through China last fall, where he touted California’s sharing of climate policy and technology.
Newsom’s moves to promote electric vehicles and renewable energy while phasing out gas-powered cars, trying to recoup climate-related damages from oil giants and going after refiners’ profits have won strong support in California, but his efforts face a reliable line of attack from the industry and Republicans who say it’s all too expensive.
He’s used to the criticism. A key part of his strategy has been to ascribe high gas prices and utility bills to corporate greed and gouging while beating back proposals that he believes go too far like Proposition 30, which would have raised taxes on the rich in 2022 to funnel money to electric vehicles.
“He wants to make the claim when he runs for president that he’s fixing climate without raising taxes,” said RL Miller, a California-based Democratic National Committee member and founder of the Climate Hawks Vote PAC. (Newsom insists he’s not interested in being president.)
The strategy is untested on a national level and in fossil fuel-rich swing states like Pennsylvania and New Mexico. Democrats in those places are already planning to go on the offensive with new Federal Trade Commission allegations that a Texas-based oil producer colluded with OPEC to raise prices.
He leaned into his role as climate governor in 2020, one of the worst in a series of climate-aggravated wildfire years for the state, when residents were holed up during the Covid pandemic and skies turned orange with smoke amid a deep drought. Newsom was touring burned-down towns while headlines linked the devastation to oil drilling. Rolling blackouts hit the state’s grid in August of that year.
Advisers say the deadly wildfires marked a turning point for Newsom, who is a father of four.
Juan Rodriguez, a partner at California political consulting firm Bearstar Strategies who worked on Newsom’s election campaigns, compared his wildfire response to the way former President Barack Obama reacted to the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in 2012.
“There are these moments for electeds that really become central to how you begin to see the issues that you end up becoming more forceful on,” Rodriguez said.
That September he announced the gas-powered car phaseout. In 2021 he initiated a fracking ban and proposed a ban on new wells within 3,200 feet of most occupied buildings.
By 2022 Newsom was accusing Big Oil of lying to Californians and “gouging” them on gas prices as he pursued legislation that could lead to a cap on refiners’ profits.
“Big Oil has played us for fools for decades and decades, buying off politicians of all political stripes, lying to you, delaying science,” he reiterated at a March rally in Los Angeles to support the setback law, alongside Jane Fonda and former Republican California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Some state and national polls support Newsom’s tactics: Three quarters of respondents in a survey from the left-leaning Data for Progress said oil companies that misled the public on fossil fuel pollution should be held accountable. In a recent California poll, 59 percent of likely voters said the state’s stricter environmental laws are worth the cost — up from 46 percent a decade ago.
“We are paving the way for a political shift in other states and around the nation,” said Lauren Sanchez, Newsom’s top climate adviser. “We can’t do this alone.”
But the approach carries risks for both Newsom and the Biden campaign, exposing them to accusations — true or not — of killing jobs, jeopardizing electricity reliability and raising prices.
“It’s the cost of what it takes to live in this state — it’s becoming problematic,” Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of California’s main oil industry trade group, the Western States Petroleum Association, said in an interview.
The petroleum group got involved in Newsom’s cross-country spat with Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022, when the organization ran ads in the state calling attention to California energy costs that included the message, “California can’t afford Gavin Newsom’s ambition. Can Florida?”
California’s gas is usually the most expensive in the nation averaging $4.88 per gallon last year. Electricity rates have gone up as much as 127 percent over the last 10 years (although California’s residential utility bills are still lower than Florida’s). Natural gas prices are volatile. And the state’s grid, while gaining reliability since the rolling blackouts of 2020, isn’t in the clear yet.
Former President Donald Trump, Republicans and the Wall Street Journal opinion page have tried to associate Biden with the most strident parts of Newsom’s agenda, including California’s phaseout of new gas-powered car sales.
While the state has made huge strides in sales of electric and hybrid vehicles, reaching nearly a quarter of new car sales in 2024, it’s still one of the nation’s biggest gasoline consumers and producers.
Even at home, the results of Newsom’s climate push are still coming in.
MORE:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/09/gavin-newsom-climate-message-california-00156954
Associated Press & Dept. of Water Resources
After massive downpours flooded California’s rivers and packed mountains with snow, the state reported Monday the first increase in groundwater supplies in four years.
The state saw 4.1 million acre-feet of managed groundwater recharge in the water year ending in September, and an 8.7 million acre-feet increase in groundwater storage, California’s Department of Water Resources said. Groundwater supplies are critical to growing much of the country’s fresh produce.
The semiannual report came after water officials stepped up efforts during last year’s rains to capture water flows from melting snowpack in the mountains and encouraged farmers to flood fields to replenish groundwater basins.
“The impressive recharge numbers in 2023 are the result of hard work by the local agencies combined with dedicated efforts from the state, but we must do more to be prepared to capture and store water when the wet years come,” Paul Gosselin, deputy director of sustainable water management for the agency, said in a statement.
California has been seeking to step up groundwater recharge with ever-drier years expected from climate change. Much of the state’s population counts on groundwater for drinking water in their homes, and farmers that grow much of the country’s food rely on the precious resource for crops ranging from carrots and almonds to berries and leafy greens.
For many years, Californians pumped groundwater from wells without measuring how much they were taking. But as some wells ran dry and land began sinking, the state enacted a law requiring local communities to start measuring and regulating groundwater pumping to ensure the basins would be sustainable for years to come.
In Monday’s report, California water officials noted that some areas where land had been sinking saw a rebound as users pumped less groundwater since more surface water was available following the rains. Overall, the state extracted 9.5 million acre-feet of groundwater during the last water year, down from 17 million a year before, the report said.
Some farmers in California have reported seeing a recovery in their wells this year, prompting them to question how much the state needs to cut groundwater pumping. Joaquin Contente, a dairy farmer in the crop-rich San Joaquin Valley, said he has seen recovery in his wells, with one returning to 19 feet (5.8 meters) deep from more than 30 feet (9.1 meters) deep two years ago.
“They’ve already come back to almost a normal level,” he said.
California water officials welcomed the recharge but said it would take five rainy years like last year to boost groundwater storage to levels needed after so many years of overpumping.
DWR Semi-Annual Groundwater Report (Bulletin 118):
https://data.cnra.ca.gov/dataset/calgw_update2020/resource/d2b45d3c-52c0-45ba-b92a-fb3c90c1d4be
Tourists Returning to California
Sacramento Bee
People are visiting California and spending money in record numbers, a sign that the pandemic-era slump is finally over.
According to data released by travel industry nonprofit Visit California, and collected by Dean Runyan Associates, the Golden State’s tourism economy generated $150.4 billion in travel spending for 2023, up from the previous record of $144.9 billion in 2019 — the year before the COVID-19 pandemic led Gov. Gavin Newsom to lock everything down.
The report found that spending was 3.8% higher than in 2019, and 5.6% higher than in 2022, with spending exceeding 2019 levels in 34 out of California’s 58 counties. Meanwhile, three of California’s four international gateways — San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles Counties — were among those exceeding 2019 spending levels. The fourth gateway — San Francisco — was 97.2% recovered, according to the report.
“California tourism is back where it belongs — setting records and providing for the workers, business owners and all Californians who depend on the travel industry as a cornerstone of our state’s economy,” said Visit California CEO Caroline Beteta in a statement.
Visitors to California generated $12.7 billion in state and local tax revenue, up 3% from 2019. Tourism created nearly 65,000 new jobs last year, bringing the total industry employment up to 1.1 million, 98% of where things stood in 2019.
The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown put more than half a million travel and hospitality workers out of work, according to Visit California.
The report found that international visitors spent $24.3 billion in California in 2023, up 38% from 2022 but down from the $28.6 billion peak in 2018.
“Travelers from China and other parts of Asia have been slow to return after the pandemic, hindering full recovery from the international sector,” according to Visit California.
Wonderful Foods Magnate Expands Logistics Industry in CA
LA Times
California’s wealthiest farming family is proposing an expansion of industrial warehousing in Kern County that would fundamentally reshape the economy in the southern San Joaquin Valley.
Outside of Kern, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the billionaire owners of the Wonderful Co., are better known for pomegranates and pistachios. But for more than a decade, they have also owned a master-planned industrial park in the city of Shafter, northwest of Bakersfield, that is home to distribution centers for Fortune 500 companies like Target, Amazon and Walmart.
Now, looking to capitalize on the seismic shift to online shopping, the Resnicks want to position Kern County as a new frontier for the industrial-scale warehousing that is key to connecting customers with their goods. Wonderful is pushing to more than double the size of its industrial park by converting 1,800 acres of its own almond groves into additional warehousing space.
And it’s pursuing costly infrastructure projects that company leaders say will mitigate the impacts of that expansion.
Wonderful says its vision for a scaled-up Wonderful Industrial Park is wholly different from the thousands of sprawling distribution centers that have swallowed up neighborhoods in California’s Inland Empire. The influx of mega-warehouses in Riverside and San Bernardino counties has generated thousands of jobs — but also relentless truck traffic and poor air quality that have given rise to a backlash.
Wonderful’s industrial park sits along railroad tracks on more than 1,600 acres of former farmland several miles outside the Shafter town center. With the exception of a cluster of homes on the other side of the tracks, the surrounding acreage is primarily agricultural. Wonderful describes the park as a job creator in a region hard hit by economic shifts in agriculture and oil.
The company is working with local officials on plans for a new highway that would route trucks away from central Shafter. It also plans to funnel at least $120 million into an inland rail terminal, expected to be completed next spring. The goal is to move more products from coastal ports by rail to Shafter, reducing traffic on State Route 99, already one of the busiest truck routes in California.
If all goes according to plan, Shafter would be transformed from a small town, population 20,162, into an international trade hub; and Kern County — a region that long has prized what’s extracted from the ground — would become ground zero for the growing global goods movement.
Many Shafter residents say the opportunity for steady, relatively well-paying work in areas other than farming and oil would come as a welcome addition. But some are concerned that doubling-down on an industry that will bring more truck and train travel to one of the nation’s most polluted corridors can’t help but have negative consequences.
“I understand that company says it will bring jobs; this is true to some extent,” said Gustavo Aguirre, assistant director of the Delano-based Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. “But it is also true that it’s going to bring health and environmental impacts that are going to impact the neighbors who live near the industrial park.”
The way John Guinn tells it, the Wonderful Industrial Park was created out of necessity.
Several decades ago, as big-box retailers moved into San Joaquin Valley towns, Main Street shoe shops and dry goods stores struggled to survive. Town officials were looking to create employment opportunities.
“The world was changing,” said Guinn, who worked as city manager in Shafter for 17 years. “We had to find a way to do something different.”
So Shafter rezoned a portion of land between Highway 99 and Interstate 5, along the BNSF rail line, and that became the industrial park. The first tenant was Target, which built a warehouse of roughly 2 million square feet in 2003.
In 2011, the Resnicks’ real estate arm bought the development. Guinn retired from the city in 2014 and joined Wonderful as executive vice president and chief operating officer for the real estate team. It’s a role, he said, that will allow him to bring his broader vision for Shafter to light.
Today, the Wonderful Industrial Park typically builds and leases million-square-foot warehouses. Just over half of the 1,625 acres already zoned for industrial buildings have been developed.
It’s proved a profitable form of diversification for Wonderful — which also owns Fiji Water and Justin Vineyards — at a time when almond prices are falling and water supplies are tight.
According to Wonderful, the industrial park has generated about 10,000 jobs, including warehouse employees, truck drivers and services handling shipping logistics. With the planned expansion, company leaders said, the complex eventually could support 50,000 jobs.
Marco Avendaño, 27, has worked for nearly a year as a forklift operator for CJ Logistics in the industrial park. Avendaño, who didn’t go to college, said he’s learned new skills and now finds himself interested in pursuing a management role with the company.
“Even though it just started as a job for me, it made me get a career mindset,” he said.
His schedule — 9:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. — works well for him and his fiancee, a librarian, who are raising three children. By his working nights, he said, “we still grow that bond with our family.”
Avendaño previously held two other jobs in the industrial park — at a manufacturing plant that has closed and for a contractor at the Walmart warehouse. In his current job, he said he’s received several raises and is making $22.69 an hour — “more than I’ve ever made hourly.”
As the park expands, the number of jobs created with each warehouse is likely to slow. Warehouses are quickly becoming more mechanized, meaning more robotics and less need for people. The advancements in technology could stymie Wonderful’s job projections.
“Warehouses are both job creators and job destroyers,” said Ellen Reese, co-director of the Inland Empire Labor & Community Center at UC Riverside. She noted that automation is reducing the number of warehouse employees, but not necessarily making jobs safer.
“A lot of the research actually suggests that more automated warehouses have higher injury rates than less automated warehouses,” she said.
Guinn acknowledged that more efficient warehouses will require less labor. But the remaining jobs, he said, will be more technically skilled and require higher pay.
Inside Walmart’s warehouse, for example, an automated system builds pallets tailored to the needs of individual stores more quickly and accurately than a team of humans could. The facility employs just 400 people across all shifts, many of whom are highly skilled equipment operators trained to troubleshoot technical problems. The average salary is between $28 and $29 an hour.
Along with their farming empire, Stewart and Lynda Resnick are known for their philanthropy, which includes major gifts for climate research, as well as money for scholarships and wellness centers in the valley towns where many of their workers live. So Wonderful is acutely aware of the optics as the company positions the park for a much bigger footprint.
Guinn and others maintain that, with the right planning, the expansion doesn’t have to mirror the trade-offs in the Inland Empire.
The company envisions building the Wonderful Pacific Terminal at the industrial park, so that trains can ferry cargo from California ports directly to the facility. Once built, Guinn estimates that 20% of imported containers could arrive by rail, with each train replacing the equivalent of 240 trucks.
Wonderful is also touting plans for a six-lane highway, the Central Valley Green Pass, that would act as a relief valve for Highway 99.
Both projects are still in the planning phase and in need of multiple approvals.
As another carrot, Wonderful has agreed to create a fund for the local park district if Shafter officials approve the company’s rezoning application. New warehouse tenants would pay 2 cents per square foot per month — or $240,000 annually for a million-square-foot warehouse — into a fund dedicated to enhancing sports programs, arts and crafts and community events.