Posted on June 1, 2020 by Sonoma Valley Sun
The grassroots groups Mobilize Sonoma and the Valley of the Moon Alliance (VOTMA) have filed a joint request with County Planning Department to re-review the approval of Amazon’s plans to convert a huge new, vacant warehouse in Schellville into a distribution center.
The groups contend that Amazon’s plans for the site are significantly more intense than what the building was initially cleared for, and that the deal went down without planning review or public comment.
In its first foray into Sonoma County, Amazon inked a deal for the 250k-square-foot Victory Station warehouse space on Eighth Street and Highway 12. The facility, which sits outside the Sonoma city limits, has been vacant since its 2018 completion. Amazon will reportedly spend $15 million to ready the delivery center for opening later this year.
The draw for Amazon is frontage access to a highway linking key regions of three counties. But the traffic and activity that hub would generate, the groups contend, constitute too great a variance from the initial County guidelines.
“Amazon seems to be proposing a very traffic-intensive, regional scale, retail-delivery and distribution center that would operate 24-hours a day, year-round,” said Kathy Pons of VOTMA. “There has been no indication that Amazon will respect the conditions of the original approval under which the facility was built.”
Pons said that the operation would have more than 250 workers and drivers, two to three shifts per day, all of whom would commute long distances to work there. “Taken together with the intensity of the operation and the truck traffic involved, that expansion constitutes a change of use under County codes, and it should be reviewed as such.”
Norman Gilroy, speaking for Mobilize Sonoma, said the Victory Station warehouse complex is at a very sensitive location for traffic circulation in the Sonoma Valley. “It was approved in 2017 as a wholesale wine-storage facility to serve the local industry, with few employees and minimal truck activity spread out over the year. The conditions of approval even banned truck traffic from the facility during the morning and evening peak hours, and channeled truck egress away from Highway 121 and onto 8th Street East and Napa Road.”
Gilroy said the limitations were to last at least until the installation of a nearby traffic circle, and stop light, which are “at least four years away.”
An additional concern, Gilroy said, “is placing such a people-intensive facility right across the street from the highly explosive, five-million-gallon capacity, LPG rail-storage yard at the foot of 8th Street. (It) boggles the imagination.”
In their joint statement to County planner Tennis Wick, Pons and Gilroy said that despite their concerns, they have not taken a formal position on the project. “But so far, the review of Amazon’s proposal has been behind the scenes at Permit Sonoma, and without public input. For that reason, we have asked Planning Director Wick to intervene, and to allow the communities that would be most affected to express their views before an irretrievable step is taken that could change Sonoma Valley lifestyles forever.”
