A largely agricultural area encompassing nearly 3,000 acres at the southern fringe of Fresno is being eyed by the Fresno County Board of Supervisors as a potential site for a large business and industrial campus.
Board members are expected to discuss taking the first step toward that effort at their meeting Tuesday. They are considering approval of the site to study the feasibility of the eventual development.
The area is generally bounded on the north side by North Avenue, American Avenue to the south, Fowler Avenue to the east, and Highway 99 and Peach avenue to the west. Much of the property is east of the unincorporated community of Malaga, south of Fresno and east of Highway 99.
Supervisor Buddy Mendes, whose District 4 includes the prospective business campus, said the idea is intended to expand the availability of sites for industrial development as a means of increasing the diversification of the county’s economy from its historic reliance on agriculture and farming.
“There is a lack of sites for any kind of industrial development any more,” Mendes told The Bee on Monday. “A lot of the people who do industrial development have run out of places to put it.”
Lee Ann Eager, president and CEO of the Fresno County Economic Development Corporation, said the shortage of available space hampers the growth of new jobs outside of farming.
“This will open up a whole new world for us to go back out there and start marketing hard, to tell companies, ‘We do have space for you,’” Eager said of the proposed business campus. “We’re talking about tens of thousands of jobs that this will open up for folks here in Fresno County.”
In recent years, major warehouse development including fulfillment centers for Amazon, Ulta Beauty and others have sprung up at the south end of Fresno, within the city limits, but those have not come without difficulty as neighbors concerned over more traffic and pollution challenged the city’s environmental assessments.
As a result, Mendes said, “some developers don’t want to go through the laborious bureaucracy to do it in the city of Fresno.”
A vote on Tuesday would authorize the county’s staff to assess whether it even makes sense to do a more substantive analysis down the road. Among the key issues is the availability of infrastructure to the area. Mendes said that services like water and sewer connections could easily be provided by the Malaga County Water District.
Other infrastructure needs to be studied are storm drainage, fire protection, electrical and gas service, and access via roads and highways.
“Part of the problem is there’s not a lot of easy freeway access,” he said. “Clovis Avenue has a full interchange (at Highway 99, south of the study area), but American Avenue is a half-interchange, and Central Avenue (at Highway 99 to the west) has its problems. … Those kinds of things all have to be worked out as we move forward.”
A staff report to supervisors outlines the need for stimulating job creation by providing sites for existing businesses to expand and for new employers to locate in the area, as well as seeking diversification of the jobs base in Fresno County “through the expansion of non-agricultural industry clusters.”
Mendes said he has little doubt that the idea will come to fruition, but progress is likely to be measured in years, not months.
“It’ll take a couple of years just to get the permitting and environmental stuff done,” Mendes said. “And in the meantime, agriculture can still be agriculture in this deal until it gets filled in.” Much of the existing agriculture in the study area is a mix of fruit or nut orchards and grape vineyards.
Some pieces of property in the study area are already zoned in the county’s M3 district for heavy industrial uses, including about 980 acres that overlaps with the existing Malaga Industrial Area. Mendes said he anticipates most of the future uses, if the business/industrial park is ultimately approved, would be light industrial, including logistics and warehousing. That, he added, is an important consideration for water supplies in the area.
“Light industrial, especially warehousing, probably uses the least amount of water of anything else, including farming,” Mendes said. “When you think about warehouses, really all they have (for water use) is bathrooms, except for a little landscaping.”
Eager told The Bee on Monday that within the past week, her organization fielded leads from six companies that had identified Fresno as their first choice for a new location, “but we had nothing for them.”
Most of that interest is from light industrial including warehousing and logistics/distribution, Eager said.
“But another industry that we have a lot of people looking here is manufacturing, especially ag manufacturing because they want to be want to be here in the ag capital of the world,” she said. “Manufacturing continues to grow here in Fresno County and the Central Valley.”
“Our local manufacturers are expanding and growing, too, and they want someplace that they can grow into as well,” Eager added.
