Moving forward, the city of Irvine will keep greater control over the location of new warehouses. And, the city will stop the expansion of warehousing facilities into new planning areas.
A highly anticipated ordinance recently approved by the City Council will require prospective warehouse developers to go through additional permitting processes with the city to see their projects come to fruition. As a formality, the City Council will need to approve the ordinance’s second reading at its June 24 meeting.
The ordinance will also grant the city the power to set specific development standards related to warehouse facilities to “ensure the projects are compatible with potential sensitive or residential uses in the vicinity.”
These standards could relate to various building features, ranging from truck bays to a warehouse facility’s color palette and design for natural light.
The move comes on the heels of Assembly Bill 98, which set statewide rules for warehouse locations and truck routes to curb air pollution and traffic from distribution centers, especially around residential neighborhoods.
Cities across California have until 2026 to incorporate AB 98 into their planning codes. But earlier this year, the Irvine City Council considered taking local restrictions against warehouses even further.
The enormity of a proposed 540,000-square-foot warehouse facility at the Von Karman Corporate Center in the Irvine Business Complex that came to the council in January — the size of five Costcos in the middle of a residential area — prompted Mayor Larry Agran and Councilmember Kathleen Treseder to call for “enhanced warehouse and logistic facility regulations” across the city.
Within a month, the city struck a deal with the real estate developers to build housing on the land instead. But city officials continued to look at warehousing regulations in the city.
Agran supported the new ordinance even though it did not set as expansive of regulations as he suggested earlier in the year.
He reckoned Irvine’s warehousing ordinance will continue to evolve as the city “gains some experience” evaluating new conditional use permits on a case-by-case basis.
“The proliferation of warehouses, some of them in the wrong places, caused considerable harm to Irvine,” he said at the June 10 City Council meeting when the first reading of the ordinance was approved.
Irvine has more than 17 million square feet of existing warehousing facilities spread across more than 330 complexes, city officials said. However, much of that space is spread across small facilities.
Fewer than 30 complexes include more than 100,000 square feet of warehousing space.
Only two complexes — the Koll Airport Center and an Albertsons distribution center — have as much warehousing space as the Von Karman project proposed earlier this year.
In the past two years, the city has approved 10 new warehouse facilities in planning areas near the Spectrum, the Irvine Business Complex and the Great Park. These three areas are also where the city, according to its 2045 General Plan, expects thousands of new housing units to be built in the coming years.
City staff, in a report to the council, said the city recognized that warehouses “are necessary, support a robust economy and can offer good-paying jobs.”
“However,” officials said, “they can also be the source of land use incompatibilities with the 2045 General Plan if not properly located or managed.”
Councilmember Melinda Liu said the new ordinance finds the middle ground.
“I’m glad to see,” she said, “that we’re able to come to a great balance between economic development and in preserving our master plan.”