On a day of triple-digit heat in August, about 100 people gathered in the shade beneath a canopy in Bakersfield. Among them were a congressman, the mayor, city council members, and state and county officials.
“We’re celebrating a great day of community coming together,” Bakersfield Mayor Karen Goh said from a podium. “A day of partnership where indeed we can look into the future and say, together we come in strength, joy, vitality, and belonging.”
The group was there to break ground on a new senior center and affordable housing complex, the marquee project of Southeast Strong, a clean-environment initiative concentrated in a 5-square-mile area of southeast Bakersfield.
The city was awarded $22 million from California’s Transformative Climate Communities program to launch Southeast Strong. The state-run grant program supports projects aimed at reducing air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions in areas with disproportionate levels of environmental, health and economic burdens. Other Southeast Strong projects include community gardens, solar installations, tree planting, and improvements to sidewalks and bike lanes.
But any environmental gains that result from the initiative will have to compete with emissions from a slew of planned industrial projects in Bakersfield and the surrounding Kern County.
About four years ago, as Bakersfield officials were seeking a grant from Transformative Climate Communities, they also approved Bakersfield Gateway, an industrial warehouse complex near the area that would become Southeast Strong. Bakersfield Gateway is now planned for a site less than three miles from the TCC project area.
While the Gateway warehouses promise economic gains for the city, they also come with a significant environmental cost. Even after mitigation measures, hundreds of additional truck and passenger-vehicle trips each day would substantially increase local greenhouse-gas and particulate matter emissions.
The environmental data for the two projects reveal a stark imbalance. Bakersfield officials expect Southeast Strong to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by nearly 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide over the five-year grant term. The Gateway environmental impact report states that, once operational, the project will produce more than 20,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year.
In addition to Gateway, at least four other industrial projects have been proposed or approved within a 5-mile radius of Southeast Strong.
Bakersfield Commons is a two-warehouse complex on a former commercial site that was rezoned for industrial use. Tortuga Bay Water Park includes plans for warehouses adjacent to the attraction. Hageman Industrial Park plans to construct more than 30 new buildings for manufacturing and warehousing.
A few weeks ago, the city announced that Ross Stores Inc. will break ground on a 1.75 million square foot distribution center that will sit directly on the border of Southeast Strong.
Just outside the city limits, even bigger projects are popping up. Malibu Vineyards Industrial Parkway Project, about six miles from Southeast Strong, is a proposed warehouse complex eight times the size of Gateway.
While California has poured resources into combatting climate change to meet its ambitious goal of carbon neutrality by 2045, the state’s ability to protect its environmental investments from local projects that conflict with that agenda is limited.
“ I don’t know that there is a path where the state could say…, ‘You can’t do this in a place that we just put all this money in,’” said Louise Bedsworth, executive director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment. “From a state perspective, land use…is entirely local.”
Bedsworth pointed out that the Central Valley is facing a daunting mix of economic and environmental pressures, including climate change, groundwater management, data centers and other developments. But, she said, such pressures offer an opportunity for Central Valley leaders to solve longstanding issues.
“That’s going to take some bold political leadership,” she said. “It’s going to take investment and doing more things like TCC, but at a scale that is larger.”
While the state lacks the authority to halt specific projects or zoning decisions, local governments must adhere to the state’s environmental regulations like the California Environmental Quality Act. Local governments are also bound by regional air district policies and their own general plans, the latter of which outlines goals for long-term development.
Bakersfield isn’t the only city in the Valley struggling to untangle issues of environmental justice and economic development. Last year, Fresno completed its TCC project with a $66 million investment from the state and $125 million from other stakeholders in southwest Fresno. A corner of the project area has for years been at the center of legal disputes pitting landowners and a long-standing industrial business against the city’s environmental justice policies for the area.
Ashley Swearengin was Fresno’s mayor during the planning and early implementation of the city’s TCC project. She now leads the Central Valley Community Foundation, which manages civic philanthropic investments in six counties.
“ We have to both build the economy and ensure local people have the skills and tools they need to access those jobs,” she said. “And we need to do so in a way that doesn’t create more environmental hardship… It’s literally the hardest thing that any local government has to do.”
New jobs vs. clean air
In Bakersfield, where unemployment rates are twice the national average, prioritizing industrial projects that promise jobs over improving environmental health can be a compelling tradeoff.
In late 2022, labor union members in construction, carpentry and iron work packed city council chambers and spoke in favor of Bakersfield Gateway, which was expected to create 1,700 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs. Some community advocates raised concerns about the potential health impacts of the project’s emissions on nearby neighborhoods and the 19 schools within a two-mile radius.
The project’s environmental report detailed measures to mitigate air pollution including limiting truck idling, providing electrical hookups for refrigerated trucks and installing solar and electric-vehicle infrastructure. But the report also detailed unavoidable emissions that exceeded a threshold established by the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District.
Despite those concerns, Bakersfield city council members unanimously approved the project and signed a Statement of Overriding Considerations which deemed the “unavoidable” pollution “acceptable” because the economic benefits outweighed the environmental cost. The council did, however, require the developer to fund projects in the region that would reduce emissions by the same amount the project would create. The regional air district calculated that would cost $4.5 million.
Pastor Marisa Banks has lived in southeast Bakersfield her entire life and has worked at a church across from the site of the new senior center for more than 25 years. She said she was involved in meetings to decide which projects Southeast Strong should focus on and is excited for the new senior center. While she was unfamiliar with the Bakersfield Gateway project, she said she supports development in the city.
“…I do believe Bakersfield is a place that needs to provide even more jobs, paying jobs, livable wages,” Banks said. “ I just would want some assurances that those who are living in these areas would benefit from those jobs.”
Unlike the Bakersfield Gateway, the new Ross distribution center was not subject to public hearings. Instead, the Ross project bypassed the typical review process by modifying an existing plan that had already been approved in 2022 for another, larger warehouse project on the property that never moved forward. Since the 2022 development complied with existing city code and zoning regulations, the Ross project was allowed to skip a new state environmental review and public comment.
Officials estimate that the Ross facility will bring in nearly 1,000 new permanent jobs.
A toll on health
At the heart of local concerns about expanding development and environmental impact in Bakersfield and Kern County is health. In its annual air quality reports, the American Lung Association has repeatedly ranked Bakersfield among the nation’s most polluted cities.
While the warehouse boom is a recent development in the area, it did not cause Bakersfield’s air quality crisis. The region’s polluted air is a result of compounding factors, including dust from agricultural operations, airborne methane from livestock and leaking oil wells, emissions from heavy-freight traffic and other pollutants that become trapped inside the Valley’s bowl-like topography.
One of the most harmful components of such pollution is particulate matter 2.5, a category of pollutants made up of small particles measuring 2.5 micrometers or less that can be inhaled deeply into the lungs. They are emitted from a range of sources including vehicle and industrial emissions.
“ There is no safe level of PM 2.5, so any exposure is negative,” said Rebecca Sugrue, a post doctoral scholar at University of California San Francisco. She studies how air pollutants impact health and has specialized in mitigating harms from diesel particulate matter and truck emissions.
Sugrue said PM 2.5 exposure is associated with a range of adverse health outcomes, including asthma, cancer, heart disease and pregnancy-related complications, and can worsen existing health conditions.
Much of Bakersfield’s pollution is concentrated on the east side of the city. According to CalEnviroScreen, a state tool that measures pollution, health and socioeconomic conditions, the Southeast Strong project area encompasses a census tract with the worst PM 2.5 levels in the state.
City documents show that in some areas of southwest Bakersfield, people live an average of nearly 15 years longer than people in parts of east Bakersfield. City reports also describe geographic disparities related to asthma, lead exposure and access to healthy food.
The state requires local municipalities to incorporate “environmental justice” policies as part of their general plans to address geographic health disparities.
Bakersfield is currently in the process of updating its general plan. In the 500-page document, the city lists proposals meant to address health disparities. One proposal calls for reducing emissions caused by industry and transportation. Another would update zoning codes to minimize air-quality impacts from new development, and establish thresholds for evaluating them.
The update also includes plans to increase industrial land use in Bakersfield from 2.7% to 9.5% of the total land area in the city – in other terms, from 2,288 acres to 8,014 acres.
Some environmental justice advocates say the update could do more to address health equity in southeast Bakersfield and other neighborhoods.
“They’re missing a lot of actionable steps,” said Abby Power of the nonprofit Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability. “We’re trying to get the city to take a stronger approach to environmental justice.”
Power, a land-use policy advocate who works on pollution exposure in Kern and Tulare counties, wants the city to remove truck routes from parts of east Bakersfield and create buffers between industrial and residential areas. She views the city’s General Plan Update as a critical opportunity to reverse decades of short-sighted local zoning.
“ It just shows how planning decisions that the city has previously made have really starkly impacted residents’ health,” she said.
The General Plan Update is scheduled to be adopted in 2027 after the city addresses public comments on the draft and completes an environmental review.
Renée Bartlett-Webber is a California Local News Fellow covering health equity in the Central Valley across a spectrum of community issues. Contact her at renee@cvlocaljournalism.org.