Business View Magazine | January 2020

217 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JANUARY 2020 COACHELLA , CAL I FORNI A reports. “A lot of companies are partnering with Canadian companies or Colorado or northern California-based companies and here in the Coachella Valley, we’ve created the second- largest market for cannabis cultivation and retailing outside of northern California.” Lopez believes that several factors have contributed to the city’s growing connection to the cannabis industry. “They really like their name on their products, because Coachella has universal recognition through the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival; it’s a worldwide brand, even though the festivals are actually next door, in Indio. Another reason is that we have a lot of vacant industrial land that’s relatively inexpensive and we also have inexpensive power out here. Our power purveyor is the Imperial Irrigation District from Imperial County and their rates are a lot lower than Edison’s.” As industrial development has increased, Coachella has also experienced a lot of infill development in the oldest part of the city. “Recently, we’ve seen an uptick in high-density meeting, the homeowners settled on “Coachella.” The origin of the name Coachella is unclear. Some locals believe it was a misspelling of Conchilla, a Spanish word for the small white snail shells found in the valley’s sandy soil, vestiges of a lake which dried up over 3,000 years ago. Coachella began as a 2.5-square-mile territory gridded out on the mesquite-covered desert floor. It became a city in 1946, and in the 1950s began to expand into its present range of about 32 square miles, which contains many large, year-round agricultural corporate farms and fruit groves, particularly of lemons, oranges, grapefruit, and date palms. With a current population of about 47,000, 96 percent of which is Hispanic, Coachella is officially a bilingual city. According to Luis Lopez, Coachella’s Development Services Director, over the past three years, the city has experienced a major boom in the areas of commercial and industrial development. “We’ve entitled close to two million square feet of industrial park projects, largely driven by the cannabis cultivation industry,” he