WITH ITS 40TH ANNIVERSARY coming up next year, Eliminator Boats is celebrating early with the development of a planned 18- acre industrial park in Perris called Eliminator Business Park.

The project is currently under construction and the company hopes to begin leasing by this May, according to Brandie Leach, president of marketing for Eliminator Boats. The company is building the first seven of the planned 14-building complex now as part of a project that is divided into two phases.

Eliminator, which started in Orange County, has done business for the past 20 years in the Mira Loma area. The same need to expand that brought the company to Riverside County is driving another move, this time to Perris. The project is located at the northeast corner of Citrus and Harvill Avenues and is near recent development already undertaken by Lowe’s, Ross, Tesco and DHL.

“The 215 corridor is the next area of growth,” Leach said. Eliminator is an industry-leading manufacturer of top-of-the-line boats. The company will build its custom watercraft at the site using a specially-designed manufacturing facility. World-famous race car driver Darrell Waltrip recently piloted an Eliminator boat at the Daytona 500 pre-race festivities.

“We’ve always been very cutting edge, with offshore racing and putting a lot of money and energy into research and development, so we are always at the top of our game,” Leach said. “We stand behind the product, so we have a lot of return customers.”

The company decided to stay and expand in Riverside County in part because of attention it received from the Riverside County Economic Development Agency, which put the company on the Fast Track. The pay-off for the county is additional jobs and tax revenue from retail tenants.

The ability to cluster like-minded businesses together already is generating interest from potential tenants, said Janet Valentin, a broker with CB Richard Ellis who represents the property. For example, a business that sells custom boat trailers or one that does custom paint jobs would be a good fit, she said.

“We see some synergy being created there,” Valentin said. “All these businesses complement each other. That is the kind of industries that are calling, the people who are in related industries.”

The project offers close access to Interstate 215 at the Nuevo Road exit, near Harvill Avenue. The company has always enjoyed being freeway-close, first at its initial location in Anaheim near the intersection of highways 91 and 55, then in Mira Loma near Interstate 15 and Highway 60.

“An easy on/off site is ideal for people who are towing something,” Leach said. “And we are on the way to the desert and the river.” The initial seven buildings offer great flexibility for tenants, who can choose to configure the space inside the unit, with a combination of office and storage uses. “Pretty much whatever you want, we can do,” Leach said. The project includes 430 storage units designed for boats and recreational vehicles, with 14-foot roll-up doors and all-concrete driving surfaces. The units start at 40-feet deep, and some are as big as 90-feet with pull-through capability made possible by roll-up doors on each end. “It makes for a lot of ease in terms of getting in and out of the unit,” Leach said. “The way that these things are constructed, they are just ideal for this.”

Eliminator owns another seven-acre parcel across Harvill Avenue from the current site, and expects to build light-commercial development there in early 2009. The company hopes to create a cluster of offroad, boating and other outdoor recreation businesses at the new site. “Eliminator Boats is going to draw a lot of like-minded businesses to the area,” Leach said. “It will be kind of a one-stop shop kind of place.”

A CONVERTED CLAY MINE could bring thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in new assessed value to the Interstate 15 corridor, as well as traffic relief for residents of a nearby neighborhood. The 485-acre Serrano Commerce Center is planned to include industrial, office and retail uses, said Blair Dahl of Rosetta Advisors, the developer. The $800 million project is on the east side of Interstate 15 at Temescal Canyon Road, across the freeway from Tom’s Farms.

When completed, Serrano Commerce Center could have about 7,000 people working in the area, and add more than $850 million in new assessed valuation to the county’s tax rolls, Dahl said. He called the property the largest contiguous piece of industrial land in an infill location in Southern California. “We believe there are a lot of parallels between this and Alisa Viejo,” in Orange County, Dahl said. “It will change over time, but we believe it will be a big job center.” An environmental impact report for the project likely will be ready for review in late spring, and the project likely will be reviewed by the county Planning Commission later this year, Dahl said. Groundbreaking is scheduled for next year.

The project breakdown calls for: 5.9 million square feet of industrial space, 600,000 square feet of office space, and 200,000 square feet of retail space. Dahl said the industrial development would be done first, which he said would increase Corona’s existing industrial base by about 20 percent. Office development would come next or some of the office uses could be converted to industrial, he said. “The industrial (component) really is the driver behind being able to finance something of this scale,” Dahl said.

The project can help reduce the existing housing/jobs imbalance in the Inland area, which now requires many residents to commute to Orange or Los Angeles counties. “This kind of project takes cars off the 91 and reduces trip distances,” Dahl said. The project also would help reroute truck traffic away from the nearby Trilogy residential area. About 1,200 trucks filled with rock, sand and gravel extracted from mines in the area would instead be routed through the new industrial park. The additional roadwork also would provide for better emergency access in the event of a natural disaster. “It’s a major, major deal,” Dahl said.

MERIDIAN BUSINESS PARK, a 1290-acre, master-planned job center being built west of Interstate 215, now has completed more than 2.4 million square feet of buildings, with another 615,000 square feet under construction, including a 415,000-square-foot office development next to a planned Moreno Valley/March station of the Metrolink commuter railroad.

Meridian Business Park is expected to generate 20,000 jobs at full build-out. Meridian is one of three planning areas under the jurisdiction of the March Joint Powers Authority, or March JPA, which was established to bring jobs back to the region after March Air Force Base was downsized to become March Air Reserve Base. The March JPA aims to create 38,000 jobs through the careful and complete redevelopment of the base, which also includes planning areas that have been designated as March Inland Port and the Northeast Corner.

March Inland Port, or MIP, is comprised of 375 acres of airportrelated developable property that enjoys joint use of the March Air Reserve Base airfield. The air cargo company DHL operates its West Coast Hub, with domestic and international operations, out of March Inland Port, which has brought 470 associated jobs to the airfield. A medical campus has been proposed for the Northeast Corner, and the March JPA is currently in the Exclusive Right to Negotiate phase of that development.

The proposed medical campus is expected to generate 10,000 jobs by integrating much-needed and complimentary medical services into one comprehensive site that will offer convenience and easy access to both patients and doctors.