Chamber Seeks To Add 1,700 Acres For New Industry

Tulare - Tulare Chamber of Commerce is asking the city through the on-going general plan process to increase the land available for industrial park development by 1,700 acres once the plan is adopted later this year. “Our industrial land inventory is low when you take into account all the development activity we’ve seen in the past 12 months,” says economic development director Bob Reynolds. “We are getting a lot more requests for land from 20 to 200 acres, particularly for warehouse distribution,” he says. Tulare is likely to see more of this type business given its location in the middle of the state right along Highway 99.

Reynolds says a large southern California development company is considering sites in Tulare to set up industrial and office parks ideal for job creation. “New jobs is number one for us,” notes Reynolds.

Tulare chief planner Mark Kielty says a consultant advised the city recently and suggested Tulare should “have about 1000 acres ready to go of vacant industrial land” at any given time to be competitive when new industry comes looking for sites. Another study suggested the need for large parcels, medium size and smaller ½ acre to 2 acre sites with the need for several hundred acres in each category.

Right now acreage is scattered around town,” says Kielty, clearly suggesting the need for larger parcels of available land once the general plan update is completed this October. “If a big user came today we wouldn’t have anyplace to put them.”

Earlier this month a workshop on land use issues was held and Kielty says the city plans another community meeting in later April or early May.

The pace of development has helped fill several tracts of land in recent years south of Downtown including the purchase of land between Bardsley and Continental next to the industrial park and on land across the freeway from the AgriCenter on Commercial Ave. where most of the land is now spoken for.

In this area the US Post Office recently purchased 2 acres, Ruiz Foods has completed a $10 million expansion of a facility where they are employing 225, TF Tire is building a new warehouse and San Joaquin Dairy Supply is expanding.

The available parcels that were there before have been gobbled up in the past months.

Reynolds says a committee has sent city planning director Mark Kielty a map of areas they believe additional industrial acreage can be planned requiring annexation into the city in anticipation of growth over the next 20 years.

Prospects include sites with large acreage and good Highway 99 or major street frontage in town north and south of the city. Rail access is important too.

Sites suggested by an ad hoc committee are the following sites using the numbers on this map. Exhibit Area 2 is 369 acres between Bardsley and Paige along I Street with a large parcel and only a few owners. “This is our first choice,” says Reynolds. This is the area the chamber sought to get approved last year but the process was halted with objections that the project ought to wait for the general plan update - was shelved pending this plan update.

Exhibit Area 4 is second priority, says Reynolds - north of the UC veterinary site where there is 280 acres in the airport flight path that could be brought into the city for warehousing and distribution.

The third choice, says Reynolds, is land next to the wastewater treatment plant that could be designated “industrial reserve” perhaps appropriate for food processing since that industry needs sewer capacity. Area 3 and 1 would each be industrial reserve as well.

Tulare’s claim to fame has been how it set aside land and infrastructure to attract industry to provide jobs for their people. They have succeeded in largest milk based assortment of manufacturing companies in the US in one place with several thousand jobs to show for it. That’s a tradition they want to continue.

Tulare Chamber has a long history in town providing a place where industry can grow. As far back as 1901 - its predecessor, the Board of Trade, helped found the first creamery. Today it’s the nation’s dairy capital. In 1962 the chamber sold the fairgrounds to the state and used the proceeds to organize a foundation that in turn built the existing industrial park between Paige and Bardsley south of Blackstone. In addition, the chamber helped launch the first Farm Show in 1968 that became the World Ag Expo.

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Re-Greening of Tulare in Full Bloom

Tulare - A concerted citywide effort to set aside open space and plant more trees and flowers -- dubbed by some the “re-greening of Tulare” -- appears to be in full bloom.

All around Tulare, once renowned for its exotic flora and fauna and lush landscaping, various civic groups and public entities are doing their part to ensure that as the city experiences steady growth, plenty of green will be mixed in with all of the concrete and steel.

At a recent meeting of the Valley Oak Garden Club, held at the Tulare Historical Museum, club members handed out checks to various civic groups totaling $8,000. The funds were earmarked for landscaping and building projects orchestrated by the Kiwanis Club, Salvation Army and LiteHouse Home for homeless women and children.

The garden club, which has donated more than $40,000 to various civic improvement projects over its 35-year history, helped re-landscape the former ‘Miracle Mile’ on Tulare Street east of Highway 99, planted trees along the Santa Fe Trail and a new rose garden at Tulare District Hospital.

“We’ve put trees or flowers in every city park,” said Bernice Green, current garden club president. “We have also helped [with landscaping] at youth ball parks and soccer fields around town.”

Garden club members take Tulare’s designation by the National Arbor Society as a “Tree City” very seriously.

“Last year alone,” said former club president Francine Hill, “we planted over a thousand trees in Tulare.”

The city’s Tree Committee serves in an advisory capacity to the Parks and Community Services Commission, City Council and city staff regarding street trees to be removed or planted, standards for landscape enhancement and tree preservation policy. Its nine members are appointed by the City Council and serve four-year terms. The committee holds regular meetings on the first Wednesday of the month.

One hot topic discussed frequently by the committee and others around city hall are the so-called ‘impact fees,’ which the city charges developers in order to approve their projects. With the city’s mushrooming growth, impact fees are increasingly contributing to the landscaping push and to the creation of ‘pocket parks’ within many of the city’s new subdivisions.

“There is certainly a lot of greening going on around town,” said Laurel Barton, management analyst in the city’s recreation and parks department. “And many of these opportunities have come about because of development.”

Barton said the city is insisting that developers design plenty of walkways and green space in their blueprints.

“We’ve been working with developers to make sure street trees get planted,” she said. “A lot of the new subdivisions will have walks around them and we are making sure there is good landscaping around those developments.”

Barton added that there are also some new, interconnected bicycle trails planned as part of these new developments.

“Many people are unaware that Tulare has a really fine class-one bike trail,” Barton said. “It’s five miles long and runs east and west following an old rail road right of way. Now we’ve been making an effort to develop trails the go north-south, too.”

One of the largest park projects currently on the drawing board is connected to the Del Lago subdivision, a master planned, square-mile community to feature mixed commercial and residential development. Barton said the Del Lago developer’s plans also include the creation of a 28-acre “community” park.

As part of the general plan update process the city is currently going through, Barton said attendees at a recent public workshop were very interested to know what the city had planned in terms of future parks and open space.

“It was clear that people hold parks as a high community value,” said Barton. “Having open green space is something people want to see as Tulare grows.

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A Painful Legacy:
City Linked to One of America’s Darkest Chapters
Thousands of Japanese-Americans Sent to Concentration Camps from
Tulare Assembly Center During WWII

By George Lurie

Tulare - In a quiet corner of the Tulare Historical Museum, a few artifacts from what was once referred to as “the Jap camp” are on display.

There’s a simple wooden stool from the camp’s mess hall and several faded posters, one offering “instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry” on how to comply with a government order to evacuate from their West Coast homes.

Helen McCourt, a volunteer at the museum, said many visitors to the facility are unaware of the area’s direct connection to the internment camps that existed in America during World War II.

“It was one of the most troubling episodes in our history, a very dark period of time,” said McCourt of the forced evacuation from the West Coast and subsequent internment of some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry – two-thirds of whom were American citizens.

For thousands of ethnic Japanese, both U.S. citizens and resident aliens, who were uprooted from their homes following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Tulare Assembly Center was the first stop on an odyssey that, for many, would last more than three years.

The Tulare Assembly Center was conceived and built in a matter of weeks, coming quickly into existence on April 20, 1942 -- and closing just as hastily, some four and a half months later, on September 4, 1942.

Located at what was then known as the Tulare-Kings County Fairgrounds and also, farther to the south, on a section of the Tulare Hospital, the assembly center was one of nearly two dozen transit hubs for people of Japanese ancestry being forcibly relocated from newly designated West Coast “security defense zones” to internment camps hastily constructed in remote locations in the nation’s interior.

The Tulare center, situated mostly on the fairground’s race track, was built under U.S. Army supervision. Existing fairgrounds buildings were converted into barracks and rows and rows of new barracks were also erected.

Long time Tulare resident Ray Minyard, who attended Tulare Union High School from 1939 to 1943, said: “After they set up the center, the fairgrounds became off limits to everybody except the people who worked there. Even if you walked around the fence, they’d question you. It was pretty strict.”

One of Minyard’s friends was a Japanese-American named Fred Ichinaga.

“We worked at a job together,” Minyard said. “Fred was a really likable guy. His parents owned the first Chinese restaurant in Tulare. One of his sisters was a school nurse.”

Minyard, who attended high school with Ichinaga, added: “Fred was born here and told me he didn’t really know anything about Japan. But one day he just disappeared. He didn’t know anything about what was going to happen until right at the last minute.

“And even though his family was one of the more well-known and respected families in this area,” Minyard said, “when this happened, the Ichinagas were treated just like foreigners. I heard they were sent back east, somewhere like Kansas. When I ran into Fred some years later, I remember him telling me how cold it was living in those tar-paper shacks.”

The Tulare Assembly Center was spurred into existence following the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, which compelled then U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 9066 requiring all persons of Japanese ancestry – including Japanese-Americans – to report to designated “evacuation areas” along the West Coast.

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, anyone with Japanese ancestry was suddenly considered a security risk.

Evacuation areas, or assembly centers as they came to be called, were also set up in places like Fresno and Merced.

In 1941, only a handful of Japanese families lived in the city of Tulare. But an estimated 4,000-5,000 ethnic Japanese were living in and around Tulare and Kings counties and those who did not leave their West Coast homes voluntarily were forcibly removed.

A front page story in the April 27, 1942 edition of the Tulare Advance-Register reported that newly arriving evacuees at the Tulare Center were being treated “humanely” and further proclaimed: “Uncle Sam is giving the Japanese no possible ground to complain on treatment of Japanese detained in our country by the exigencies of war. The American democracy is setting an example in fair treatment of enemy aliens…”

Many evacuees lose everything

Given just a few days notice in most cases and allowed to bring only one bag to the assembly centers, many of the internees would wind up losing everything they owned during the mandatory evacuation -- bank accounts, businesses, personal property. Some evacuees were fortunate to have friends or neighbors watch over their properties and businesses and returned to their homes more than three years later to resume their lives. But the majority of evacuees were forced to start from scratch after their release.

Most evacuees were transported to assembly centers under armed guards in caravans of automobiles, trucks, even Greyhound buses.

Many local businesses along the evacuation routes posted signs in their windows reading: “Japs Go Home!” and “Japs Not Welcome Here.”

At the peak of its operation, the Tulare Assembly Center had a population of 4,989 residents.

Many of those being transited through the center wound up at one of California’s two internment camps, which were located in the far northern part of the state at Tule Lake and in the desert south at Manzanar. Others were shipped, many in rail road cattle cars, to camps in Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, Arizona and Arkansas.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that most U.S. history books gave more than a passing mention to the internment camp episode.

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush issued an official apology and individual checks in the amount of $20,000 to all former internees. For many, the apology and financial reparations came too late. Today, it is estimated that less than a quarter of all former internees are still alive.

Earlier this year, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) encouraged U.S. Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton to designate the former site of the Tule Lake Segregation Center as a National Historic Landmark.

Tule Lake was the largest and most infamous of the ten internment camps. Prisoners there held frequent demonstrations and strikes, demanding their rights under the U.S. Constitution. As a result, Tule Lake was designated a “segregation camp” and internees from other camps around the country who refused to take a loyalty oath to the U.S. or had caused disturbances were sent there.

At its peak, Tule Lake held nearly 20,000 internees and was one of the last camps to be shuttered, staying in operation nearly nine months after the formal end of World War II.

“It is important that we recognize the historical significance of Tule Lake Segregation Center within the lifetimes of the few surviving Japanese-American internees, before many of their stories are lost,” Feinstein said.

Sixty years later, one former internee looks back

Hanford native Naomi Tagawa was 22 at the time of the evacuation.

Since the 1915, the Tagawa family had owned and operated a laundry in Hanford called Kings Hand Laundry, located just across street from the Imperial Dynasty on Green Street. Today, Tagawa, a spry and energetic 86 years old, still runs the laundry on a part-time basis.

“I had gone through a fashion arts school in San Francisco and come back home just before Pearl Harbor,” she said. “That day, December 7, changed everybody’s lives.”

Tagawa recently related some of her experiences as an internee to COS teacher Katherine Singh’s Ethnic Studies class.

“I never heard about the camps until I got in this class,” said COS student Brian Ellis. “At first, I couldn’t really believe something like that had happened here. But I guess it was war and if they can draft kids into the army, they can send people to camps like this.”

Of the dozen or so students in Singh’s class, only half said they were aware of the Japanese-American internment camps before taking the course.

“It was really very upsetting when we heard about the president’s Executive Order,” Tagawa told the students. “We were already under curfew. We couldn’t travel more than 25 miles from town and had to turn in any guns we had as well as things like short-wave radios. All of our assets were frozen in the bank. I can’t even remember how we got from our home to the [Hanford] Civic Auditorium before we were bused to the assembly center.”

At the Fresno Assembly Center, accommodations were similar to those at the Tulare center. Evacuees were housed in what had previously been the animal stalls of the Fresno Fairgrounds. Tagawa worked in the facility’s make-shift hospital.

“It was very crowded and hot. We slept on hay mattresses. There was no refrigeration and so there was quite a bit of food poisoning and people were just laid out,” she said. “We had to laugh about it.”

After spending months at the Fresno Assembly Center, Tagawa was sent to Camp Jerome in Arkansas.

“Arkansas was hot and humid and very different from California, of course,” she said. “I worked as the secretary to the high school principal. It was an interesting job and I met some wonderful people there, especially southern teachers. They were very friendly and thoughtful…

“I remember the storms, which were just terrible, lots of lightning and thunder. There was no air conditioning in those days. If we were lucky, we had a fan. In the winter, we burned wood in a pot-bellied stove to stay warm.

“Everything was set up like an army camp,” Tagawa continued. “We lived in a barracks with other families. It was rough but we endured it.”

Tagawa left the camp in Arkansas in1945 and after taking the civil service exam, became a secretary in Washington, D.C., working for the war relocation authority before eventually returning to California.

Tagawa said that her family was “fortunate to have a teacher friend and her husband look after our property” in Hanford during the years they were gone.

Her family eventually recovered bank assets that had been frozen and decades later, received reparation payments from U.S. government. After spending some time picking grapes and cotton as field laborers, the Tagawas reopened the family laundry on Green Street.

Reflecting on the camps six decades later, Tagawa is philosophical and remarkably upbeat.

“Sure it was an injustice but we have a good nation that apologized for what had been done,” she said. “In fact, it turned out to be a very interesting experience. Some of my friends felt very bitter about it, but they are all gone now. I’m not bitter at all. We have to be forgiving.”

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