For Fontana's steel firms, the tariff question isn't whether they import metal — it's where they sit in the chain
Citrus Belt Review: A proclamation signed Monday temporarily trims Section 232 tariffs on a narrow band of metal-containing imports, Supply Chain Dive reports. Starting June 8, farm equipment like combines and harvesters drops to a 15% tariff from 25%, and the same rate now covers some home HVAC systems and parts. Bulldozers and forklifts also qualify for 15%, but only from trade-deal partners like the EU, Japan, and South Korea — everyone else stays at 25%. The cuts run through Dec. 31, 2027.
For the IE, that relief is mostly a footnote. The thing that matters is the 50% tariff on imported steel and aluminum, in place since June 2025, plus a 2025 change that taxes a product's full value instead of just the metal in it. Those moves push up the price of American-made metal — good for anyone selling it, costly for anyone buying it to build something. The line is simple: make metal, and the tariffs help you; buy metal as a raw material, and they squeeze you.
California Steel Industries, the Fontana institution on a 430-acre site, sits in the most interesting spot — and it breaks the easy "domestic mill wins" rule. CSI doesn't melt steel. It buys half-finished steel slab and rolls it into sheet and pipe. That slab is taxed at 50% when it comes from abroad. So CSI pays the tariff on the steel it buys, even as the same tariff raises the price of the sheet it sells. Whether that comes out ahead depends on where CSI can get its slab — and that's where its owner matters. Nucor, the largest U.S. steelmaker, took control of CSI in 2022 and runs mills that make slab in America. A Fontana mill rebuilding where it buys raw steel, to stay ahead of the tariff, is the real local story here — bigger than any single rate change.
Downstream, the squeeze is plainer. IE steel fabricators, machine shops, and metal warehouses buy metal that now costs more, then pass the cost to customers — which cools demand, at a moment when contractors are already bidding jobs without knowing what their materials will finally cost. Aluminum shapers feel it too, unless they make their own raw stock; Merit Aluminum, for one, says it casts its own billet, which would shield it from the 50% tariff that hits rivals buying on the open market. But the biggest exposure isn't any one metal firm. It's the warehouse boom that runs the regional economy. Steel goes into every new distribution center, and the 50% tariff raises the cost of all of it. The June HVAC cut helps builders a little; the weight still falls the other way.