An Orange County judge has ruled against Riverside’s 2009 lawsuit seeking to block expansion of the Port of Los Angeles and force the port to help pay for transportation improvements the project would require.
Orange County Superior Court Judge Ronald L. Bauer wrote in a March 10 ruling, made public this week, that the port expansion would have “an insignificant impact” on Riverside and that Inland-area demand for products will create increased train traffic even without the expansion.
I don’t know about you, but I seem to recall the City paying John Husing lots of money for his insight on how to promote the Inland Empire as the home of “cheap dirt”.
Our economic destiny was supposed to come because of our unique suitability as a logistics hub. After all we were only an hour from the mountains, an hour from the beach and an hour from the desert. Just the perfect spot to sort crap and ship it on it’s way.
It just didn’t make economic sense to sort all those goods at the port or pay for the full costs of shipping them from cheap labor countries to cheap dirt ones.
No, they had to stage them in the Inland Empire because we didn’t have the educational levels to support more advanced businesses like those that might come from green jobs.
I remember the Friends Of Riverside’s Hills suing the City and developers over the apparent disagreement over the value of cheap dirt in the Residential Conservation (RC) zoned areas of Riverside.
Husing questioned the city’s decision to take on the issue in court, particularly at a time when the recession has slowed shipping and train traffic. As if a 25 percent drop from 2006 to 2009 makes everything all right now.
An then there’s Moreno Valley permitting a Sketchers warehouse for additional truck trips. Maybe one day they’ll regret that decision and start to realize as Riverside apparently has, that seizing our destiny goes well beyond short term solutions. And that disregarding the true costs, impacts and consequences of those them does little to prepare us for overcoming them.
