The workshop occurred five months into the city's yearlong moratorium on new warehouses.
Mark Tomich is the Development Services Director for Colton and hosted the event. He spoke of the city's motivation to host the workshop. "Primarily to give residents and local interested parties an opportunity to express their concerns, their frustrations, and also hopefully some productive input on what they think," said Tomich.
The city formed a Warehouse Moratorium Ad Hoc Committee for the hiatus consisting of two city council members and two planning commissioners.
The committee will look at reports on things such as air quality, noise data, and traffic. Tomich says the City Council has not expressed a policy decision for what occurs after the moratorium ends.
Cruz is a lifelong Colton resident and is going by a pseudonym out of concern for her employment. Cruz and her sister Lizette run the Instagram page @UniteForColton and participated in the workshop. Cruz said, "What our recommendations would be is we need to extend and have the moratorium for years to come."
The sisters expressed many concerns over the city's current state and want the city to take a different development direction. "We live in North Colton, and there's not a park close to us; we would have to walk a mile down Mount Vernon in order to get to any kind of park. There's no recreation areas out here for kids that go to school and that just live out here," added Cruz.
Input received from Thursday's meeting will now be relayed to the ad hoc committee, who will meet in November. The current moratorium expires on May 9 of 2022.
