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California prison towns grasp for new jobs after closures: ‘No one is coming to save us’
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Developer agrees to environment safeguards for Cajalco warehouse project
By Nigel Duara, CalMatters
By Joe Taglieri joet@civicnewsgroup.com
This story was originally published by CalMatters.
C
alifornia prison towns made a grim bargain decades ago. They built their economies around an industry that relied on an ever-growing prison population, mostly from California’s major metropolitan areas. Then, about 15 years ago, legislators changed sentencing laws in ways that caused the prison population to drop, and the prisons started going away. Gov. Jerry Brown oversaw massive reductions in California’s prison population in the 2010s. Gov. Gavin Newsom has closed five prisons since taking office in 2019. Now, some of those towns face difficult choices if they’re going to survive. One prison town is still fighting the closure, one is betting on businesses to make up its losses and a third — the town of Susanville — is remote, isolated and in deeper trouble than the rest. Perched on one of the last major stops before Reno and the desert deep in the Lassen National Forest, Susanville has always been the kind of place California puts the things it doesn’t want to see, hear, smell, or really even
T
The California Correctional Center in Susanville on April 9. The California Correctional Center was officially deactivated and closed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in June 2023. | Photo courtesy of Larry Valenzuela/CalMatters
think about. “Prisons in communities are not popular, so they tend to be located in areas that are desperate economically,” said Dan Newton, who worked for the city of Susanville for 20 years and was its city manager until recently. “That would describe this area.” The city’s management was informed in 2021 that the prison was scheduled for closure. They went to court to challenge the closure,
arguing the state’s environmental review process hadn’t taken into account the prison closure’s impact on the town. Newsom had a solution: A budget bill that exempted correctional facility closures from the environmental review process. “There was initially a lot of panic,” said Susanville Mayor Mendy Schuster. “Houses went on the market.
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People left town. State jobs are good jobs with a good income, and they were going to leave.” Since the closure announcement, the population of Susanville has fallen from a peak of about 16,000 in 2021, the year Newsom announced the prison would close, to 14,000 in 2024, the last year for which American Community Survey data was
See Prison closures Page 14
he Sierra Club and Rural Association of Mead Valley have reached an agreement environmental protections with the developer of the Cajalco Commerce Center, a proposed warehouse project totaling over 1 million square feet. According to an Aug. 10 lawsuit settlement agreement, Industrial VI Enterprises, a subsidiary of Texasbased developer Hillwood, will use electric construction equipment as well as low and zero-emission trucks and freight handling equipment; power the facility with solar energy generated on site; route truck traffic away from smaller roads; and incorporate fire-resistant and drought-tolerant landscaping, including a tree-screen around the site perimeter to minimize light, noise and diesel pollution. The settlement also prohibits cold-storage, which environmental groups said would have caused severe noise and pollution for the site's residential neighbors. The site is at the southeast corner of Cajalco Road
and Seaton Avenue in Mead Valley, an unincorporated community south of Riverside. "The settlement helps to protect residents from the harmful impacts of the warehouse’s diesel trucks by restricting them from certain roads and it will also provide much needed additional park acreage,” Debbie Walsh, Rural Association of Mead Valley president, said in a statement. Hillwood representatives declined to comment on the agreement. The Sierra Club referred to the settlement as "significant steps" to mitigate the air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the large number of diesel trucks that will be going in and out the warehouse. "We're glad we could raise the baseline standards for freight pollution, electrification, jobs, housing displacement, and required community benefits from another mega-warehouse in Mead Valley," Michael McCarthy from the Sierra Club's San Gorgonio Chapter Box
See Cajalco warehouse Page 15
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