THIS WEEK’S LEAD
Inland Empire trucking employment fell 3.1% over the past year, with general-freight trucking down 3.8% and courier work down more than 11%. At the same time, the invoice-factoring market that small carriers lean on to survive is consolidating and repricing upward — a working-capital squeeze arriving just as the region's small-carrier base thins.
SUPPORTING FEATURES
REAL ESTATE
An auto-parts distributor has signed a $42 million lease for a 522,267-square-foot building in Chino — a deal that landed in one of the West IE's tightest submarkets even as the region's headline vacancy climbs.
MANUFACTURING & LOGISTICS
The Port of Los Angeles is forecasting a 7% drop in container volume next fiscal year, with importers rerouting through Mexico and Canada — a structural problem for a region whose warehouses were built to handle Asian imports off the ports.
CAPITAL MARKETS
Rialto adopted a $175.9 million General Fund budget for 2026-27 with a projected surplus, then spent roughly $1 million of it on new permanent positions — weighted toward development-review capacity and toward moving work off contractors and sworn officers. Behind the surplus sits an $18.3 million CalPERS pension bill that keeps rising faster than the rest of the city's costs.