Business View Magazine | August 2019

228 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE AUGUST 2019 military, and freight use. Logistics is now the main business in Adelanto, population 37,000, as well as in much of the surrounding communities, which, together, extend the population to over 200,000 within the city’s ten-mile radius. And according to City Manager Jessie Flores, his city’s central location in southern California is a chief attraction for further development of the sector. “The City of Adelanto is a very unique city,” he states. “We have two major arteries that travel through our city, or are adjacent to our city, and that is Highway 395 and Highway 15. Both of these arteries travel north and south and are great arteries for distribution and logistics. Highway 15 travels all the way to Nevada and Utah and down south into San Diego and the Mexican border. Highway 395 comes all the way in from the Canadian border into Bishop, Mammoth, and it pours into the City of Adelanto and merges with the 15 Freeway, heading southbound. We also have another artery, known as Highway 18 that connects our county with the County of Los Angeles.” “Those are all great opportunities for potential development for retail and commercial centers within our city and we’re aggressively working toward that,” Flores adds. “We’re 53 square miles and only about 15-18 percent of our land is built out, so there’s a lot of opportunity to grow within our city. We’re about an hour and a half to Los Angeles; two hours to San Diego; about two and half hours to Las Vegas; and two and a half hours to Arizona. That puts us in a logistical hub position and it’s a great opportunity to attract such companies as Amazon to create fulfillment centers or other types of distribution, cold storage, or warehousing.” Another asset that Flores believes gives Adelanto a competitive advantage in attracting new business is the way in which the city has decided to professionalize its outreach to those potential new residents. “Most cities will tell you that they’re business-friendly and when developers show up to their city, they encounter a tremendous amount of bureaucracy and delay,” he explains. “One of the things that the City Council has created is a