Orange County Planning Commissioner points out warehouse pros and cons

The town of Chester is buzzing with development, as several warehouse projects are currently being planned, reviewed, and constructed. Orange County Planning Commissioner Alan Sorensen provided insight into the origins, benefits, and challenges that stem from the area’s industrial growth.

The town established its industrial parks a decade ago, and projects have been surfacing over the last few years. Chester is a particularly appealing site for applicants due to its location, natural features, and housing.

“With ease of access off the quick way as well as proximity to marketplaces, it’s a town that has a number of nice residential areas. There are nearby state parks, things of that nature that make it an attractive location to not only establish a business but also to live,” Sorensen said.

One of the biggest advantages that Chester has over other sites is its industrial parks, allowing for multiple businesses to build projects within a compact space, a more optimized arrangement than having isolated warehouses, he said.

“It becomes a location where multiple businesses can be established, share some of the roadway infrastructures and access to water and sewer,” Sorensen said. “They’re grouped together and it’s kind of like a business campus setting,” he said.

Some of the notable benefits that these projects provide include increasing Chester’s tax base and creating local employment opportunities for both warehouse and construction workers. However, the increased traffic is a big development issue.

“Traffic is always a potentially adverse impact. You’ve got a lot of trucks going to and from. It depends on the type of business going into this big box. But they’re typically high traffic generators, between the workforce and goods that are coming to and from the facilities,” Sorensen said.

Another challenge that the county’s planning department faces is mitigating environmental impacts as much as possible. Sorensen and his department have encouraged Chester’s applicants to install solar panels in their warehouses but have not been successful.

“We’ve been encouraging the developers of these warehouse distribution centers to place solar panels on their rooftops as a way to provide additional renewable energy, as well as offset any potential climate impacts,” Sorensen said.

Additionally, Orange County adopted C-PACE, or Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy Financing, a state program that provides financing to projects that utilize clean and renewable energy.

“The way the C-PACE programs works is that the developer, if they decide to put rooftop solar on their project, can finance the cost of that rooftop solar and the installation based on the projected savings and energy for their project. So it’s a way to bring capital to the project. It’s an incentive to encourage new warehouses to incorporate that technology,” Sorensen said.

Currently, a storage facility in Harriman is the first and only project in Orange County that has used C-PACE’s financing.

“We are encouraging and providing access to the C-PACE program as an incentive for them to participate,” Sorensen said, noting that information for the program can be found on the county’s website.

He says he is unsure about why applicants are declining the solar panel and financing suggestions, but says he suspects that “they don’t want to be the first to go,” and are waiting to see how other warehouses fare with solar panels.

As development continues, the Orange County Planning Department will review these projects to see how they affect the entire county and suggest adjustments when necessary.

“We want to make sure that, if there are needed roadway improvements that occur in conjunction with the review and the approval of the project, we comment on those areas. If there are potential aesthetic impacts, we raise those issues and look for visual assessment. We’re doing a higher-level review, looking at it from a countywide perspective,” Sorensen said.