Business Parks

Professional matchmaker Julie Ferman, chief executive of Cupid's Coach, used to meet with clients in a hotel lobby or one of a dozen restaurants around town to save them the drive to her home-based office in Westlake Village. It wasn't always the best choice for clients expected to share personal information for their dating profiles, but like many start-up founders she was pinching pennies and testing her concept. Ferman spent the time between appointments trying to work in her parked car.

Re: "Empty spaces in the supply chain," April 16: About 20 years ago, my daughter moved to Rialto and eventually to Highland. I traveled the I-60, I-10, I-215 freeways many times over the years and watched the landscape change from open land to shopping malls, auto dealerships, housing tracts and business parks. I know the economy relies on construction and development for jobs, but I'm not sorry to see the slowing in overdevelopment that has altered the landscape and contributed to the economic disaster we are in. Marty Wilson Whittier

It's a vacant lot now, but Los Angeles officials hope to turn the former brownfield site downtown into a cluster of "green" manufacturing businesses to meet the region's growing demand for solar and wind power and other clean technologies. The proposed CleanTech Manufacturing Center would be established on a city-owned 20-acre parcel in an industrial area near the intersection of 15th Street and Santa Fe Avenue, south of the 10 Freeway and west of the Los Angeles River.

A long-delayed project to attract computer chip makers to the Mexico-California border is getting a green makeover. Silicon Border Development said Wednesday that it had obtained financing to move ahead with a science park in Mexicali, Mexico, thanks largely to a new strategy of targeting companies in the fast-growing solar energy industry. German solar cell manufacturer Q-Cells is on track to break ground soon in the 3,000-acre site just across the border from Calexico, Calif.

A private development firm is expected to break ground today in Mexicali, Mexico, on a proposed industrial park that the developers hope will lure technology companies from Asia with tax incentives and government grants. The 15-square-mile site is just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, 120 miles east of San Diego. Silicon Border Development plans to spend $425 million on infrastructure for the site, including utilities, roads and water and sewer lines.

In a move designed to jump start western Riverside County's economy, Southern California Edison on Tuesday announced plans to invest more than $23 million to help transform a portion of the former March Air Force Base into a business park and air cargo hub. The money will upgrade the old base's electrical infrastructure over a decade, allowing for redevelopment and the creation of an estimated 15,000 jobs over 10 to 15 years in the commuter-choked region.

In the latest court ruling that forces developers to prove a reliable water supply, a state appeals panel in Los Angeles has blocked construction of a large industrial park in Santa Clarita after finding the project relied on imported "paper water" that may not be delivered. A three-justice panel of the 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled this week that Santa Clarita and the developer of a 4.

Construction of a speculative $110-million industrial park being developed by the Southwest Carpenters Pension Trust has begun near the junction of the 60 and 605 freeways in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County. Gateway Pointe Industrial Park, at the intersection of Workman Mill and Mission Mill roads, will include 1.6 million square feet of warehouse and manufacturing space, said Chris Bell, project manager for Whittier-based contractor Oltmans Construction Co.

American investors and Mexican officials unveiled an ambitious plan Wednesday for an industrial park in Mexico on the California border to entice computer chip companies to build multibillion-dollar factories there instead of exporting production to Asia.

The Santa Clarita City Council will consider plans Tuesday for an industrial park that could eventually provide 7,000 jobs and take untold commuters off the clogged freeways heading south to Los Angeles. But building it would mean cutting down 1,400 oak trees -- in a valley where a tree-sitting protester captured imaginations with his efforts to save just one ancient oak a few miles away.