By Faughn Economy • New Location • Quality of Life • Workforce 0 Comments

Meet the couple behind Tulare’s first Chick-fil-A

Brett McKinnon spent 19 years working for Chick-fil-A before becoming the first operator to open a location in the South Valley — a milestone he called “humbling and incredibly rewarding.”

McKinnon and his wife, Amber, previously worked as directors, a high-level management role, at a Chick-fil-A in South Carolina before setting their sights on the Central Valley.

Chick-fil-A doesn’t operate as a traditional franchise. The company owns its restaurant locations and equipment, and operators are selected through a competitive application and development process, with only a $10,000 upfront fee.

The McKinnons’ Tulare restaurant, located just off Highway 99 on East Cartmill Avenue, held its grand opening May 7, bringing the chain to a market it had not previously served.

To celebrate, the McKinnons and their team hosted a “Moove-In” party starting at 6:30 a.m. Customers dressed in a full cow costume or wearing cow-spotted accessories received a free entrée or kids meal.

Chick-fil-A is known for its fried chicken sandwiches, wraps, nuggets and tenders, made from a 60-year-old recipe. Its signature smoky Chick-fil-A sauce and waffle-cut fries are also popular menu items.

A Chick-fil-A location in Visalia is set to begin construction soon, to become Tulare County’s second location.

In honor of the new location, Chick-fil-A pledged to donate $25,000 to the Central California Food Bank, Central California’s largest hunger-relief organization, serving Fresno, Madera, Tulare, Kings and Kern counties.

The new restaurant created around 120 jobs.

There are more than 3,000 Chick-fil-A locations in the U.S., Puerto Rico and Canada, with plans to expand into Europe and Asia. California has about 200 locations. The Tulare restaurant is the fourth in the Central Valley, joining two in Fresno and one in Clovis.

https://thebusinessjournal.com/chick-fil-a-tulare-first-south-valley-location/

By Faughn Economy • Quality of Life 0 Comments

How many homes are getting built in Merced in 2026?

Homebuilding plays a critical role in maintaining a steady housing supply and keeping prices at sustainable levels. As the U.S. population grows, more housing is needed to meet demand. Since the Great Recession, construction has lagged well behind what is needed, which is one of the main reasons home prices are so high today.

Supply has slowly increased over the past few years but is still below what is needed for the market to balance out. Until that gap closes, prices are likely to remain elevated, and many buyers will likely struggle to afford a home.

So, how many homes are getting built in Merced, CA, in 2026? Is construction increasing or decreasing? Redfin Real Estate analyzed the seasonally-adjusted annual rate of housing permits issued in the city each month over the past year to find out. National permit data is a seasonally adjusted annual rate; metro-level permit data is the non-seasonally adjusted total number of permits issued per month.

https://www.mercedsunstar.com/news/local/article312683467.html

By Faughn Energy 0 Comments

Groundbreaking for big NAS Lemoore data center and energy project near | John Lindt

NAS Lemoore is expected to announce groundbreaking for construction of a new $1 billion data center, solar farm and battery storage project that has been proposed by the company Ameresco. The Massachusetts energy giant has a lease for 930 acres with the US Navy on land surrounding the Kings County base.

Ameresco has been working on the project since they bought the company Bright Canyon in 2023 who was talking to the Navy. Even before that, in 2016 the Navy and Recurrent Energy signed a lease agreement to build a 167-megawatt solar facility on the same 930 acres of land at Naval Air Station Lemoore in Kings County, before anyone dreamt of data centers.

So, will it finally happen?

“NAS Lemoore should be announcing soon (within the next couple of months) a ground breaking ceremony for this project,” reports Sarah Thrasher, public affairs officer at Naval Air Station Lemoore as of April 10.

Ameresco and their partner KKR-owned CyrusOne emphasized the data center part of the plan not mentioning solar but describing the project as an “AI-optimized data center to be — with a dedicated on-site energy generation facility built by Ameresco, forming a microgrid system that includes engine generators, control systems, and infrastructure upgrades.”

Last summer in a news release, the base executive officer said, “This initiative directly supports our national priorities in AI and energy dominance,” said NAS Lemoore Captain Jeffry Findlay. “By enabling secure, reliable power and compute infrastructure at NAS Lemoore, we’re strengthening our ability to support critical missions and ensure operational continuity for those who serve.”

An Ameresco news release said CyrusOne has been tapped to deliver the data center infrastructure, which will be part-based on the capabilities of its Intelliscale platform. The platform is designed for AI and high-density computing.

The project is expected to have a construction value of over $1 billion by one speculative estimate. The data center would employ 20 although the construction would need 400 workers. According to the 2023 EIR, the data center would be 600,000 square feet. When the formal announcement comes, we may know if these details are the same.

The lease of land has been around since 2015, passing through a number of private hands and now owned by Ameresco. A 2024 Supplemental EIR was done and is still on the base website saying the project includes 450MW of solar and” additional resilient energy systems (including electric vehicle charging stations, battery energy storage systems [BESS], and backup generation/microgrid.”

The big solar farm would join a dozen or so other big solar farms nearby including one being proposed by KKR-owned Avantus in the Buttonwillow area that is said to be the largest single solar project in California sprawling over both sides of I-5

Last September an Ameresco news release described the Navy project as follows.

The facility at NAS Lemoore will provide our federal customers with the secure, on-premise computing solution they need—paired with the resilience of onsite energy supply,” said John Hatem, EVP and CEO of CyrusOne. “Data centers are foundational to our information economy and critical to maintaining U.S. leadership in technological innovation, especially in AI. We’re proud to deliver this solution through our alliance with Ameresco.”

The first segment of the project is expected to come online in 2027 on land leased by Ameresco from the Department of Defense. The capacity of the data center and associated generation assets has not been disclosed. Ameresco has stated that, although the development agreements are still being finalized, it anticipates that it will be one of its largest energy assets.

“Ameresco is proud to develop energy infrastructure at NAS Lemoore that directly supports the growing demand for AI-ready data centers and related energy infrastructure,” said Nicole Bulgarino, president, Federal Solutions & Utility Infrastructure at Ameresco. “We look forward to working with the Navy and CyrusOne to develop this critical infrastructure that supports energy resiliency for the installation and meets the unique energy and reliability requirements of advanced AI data center workloads.”

A data center publication last summer pointed to the fact that the solar farm was not mentioned in the latest description.

News on the project first emerged back in October of last year, when it was reported that the Navy was working on a deal to lease 920 acres of land around Naval Air Station Lemoore to Ameresco.

According to reports, Ameresco was planning to construct a 425MW solar farm, which would have supplied power to an on-site data center. No news of a solar array was mentioned in the release announcing the partnership with the US Navy and CyrusOne.

One theory might be that the change in administrations and their priorities prompted Ameresco to emphasize the data center aspect of the project while downplaying the renewable power that will allow it to operate. President Donald Trump has expressed opposition to utility-scale solar and wind projects even as data center developers scramble to find power sources needed for these energy-hungry AI related centers.

Data centers are known to be water thirsty as well, an issue that will need to be addressed. One estimate is that large data centers can consume 1 to 5 million gallons of water daily for cooling, equivalent to a town of 10,000–50,000 people.

By Faughn Hi-Tech 0 Comments

Fresno recycling facility adds AI robots, expands capacity with $4.5M state grant

Mid Valley Disposal has planned a ribbon cutting ceremony later this month to mark the completion of upgrades to its Fresno material recovery facility, including the installation of artificial intelliegence-powered robots funded in part by a $4.6 million state grant.

The ceremony is scheduled May 28 at the Mid Valley Disposal facility at 2721 S. Elm Ave., Fresno.

Mid-Valley Recycling, a subsidiary of Mid Valley Disposal, was awarded nearly $4.6 million from CalRecycle’s Beverage Container Quality Infrastructure Grant Program in March. The grant was one of nine awarded statewide from a pool of $46 million distributed across eight counties. CalRecycle received 37 applications requesting a total of $207 million, according to a news release.

The total project cost exceeded $12 million, according to the release.

“For more than a year now, we’ve been working on improving our commercial processing facility,” said Joseph Kalpakoff, president and CEO of Mid Valley Disposal. “This grant supports our own investment in making key improvements to our operational infrastructure and install cutting-edge technology. We feel very blessed to have been selected.”

The upgrades included six AI-powered robots and a new commercial sort line. The robots use vision technology to identify and sort materials such as aluminum cans and plastic beverage containers, according to the release. Each robot can sort an average of 25 items per minute. Combined, the system is capable of recovering an estimated 18.7 million containers per year.

The facility, which opened in 2002, processed more than 130,000 tons of material in 2025, according to the release. The upgraded system increases processing capacity by approximately 60%, adding the ability to process more than 52,000 tons per year.

“The MRF opened in 2002,” said Abel Salazar Jr., manager of post-collections at Mid Valley Disposal, “and over the years we’ve tracked the increase in volume processed at this facility. This grant will help us upgrade our sort lines and the technology we’ve recently installed will help us reduce items that are sent to the landfill.”

Mid Valley Recycling partnered with San Francisco-based company Glacier to deploy the robots. Glacier’s systems also provide real-time data to monitor plant efficiency, according to the release.

“As fellow Californians, we are proud to support Mid-Valley Recycling in setting a new standard for recycling in central California,” said Rebecca Hu-Thrams, CEO and founder of Glacier. “This partnership is a great example of how thoughtful public-private collaboration can rapidly advance sustainability innovation across our state.”

The upgrades also added about a dozen new sorting positions, along with jobs in maintenance and technology roles, according to the release.

 

https://thebusinessjournal.com/fresno-recycling-facility-ai-robots-calrecycle-grant/

By Faughn Energy • Tourism 0 Comments

Economic summit shines spotlight on Kern’s lower-profile industries

The energy sector has long occupied such a central position in the local economy that, when it spun off several years ago from the annual Kern County Economic Summit, less prominent industries couldn’t help but benefit.

That may have been truer Thursday morning than ever before as previously underappreciated industries around Kern County — tourism, aerospace and ag tech — took center stage in front of hundreds of people gathered inside the Bakersfield Marriott at the Convention Center.

Their inclusion in panel and other discussions Thursday generated its own kind of optimism, in that the audience of business and government leaders heard compelling cases for bestowing greater attention and investment on the region’s promising but overlooked clusters.

Oil and renewable energy, the region’s signature industries, did receive mention at Thursday’s event, certainly when recognition was given to their contributions to the wider economy. But it was the underdogs that stole the show.

A panel of recreation and entertainment professionals made the case that hospitality not only represents a natural opportunity for Kern County, but that it deserves greater help from other players in the local economy.

Justin Powers, the founder of Kernville Cowork who’s leading an effort to build a community hub in Lake Isabella, noted the Kern River Valley draws most of its visitors from the Los Angeles Basin and overseas. Greater local benefits await, he said, if the region can attract greater resources.

“It doesn’t take a lot of investment to trigger a lot of economic impacts,” he said.

Co-panelist Kari Crutcher, executive director of the Ridgecrest Area Convention & Visitors Bureau, acknowledged that the city isn’t usually thought of as a destination. But she said that as a full-service community calling itself the Gateway to Death Valley, Ridgecrest is “a great stop on your way” to major tourism hot spots.

President Chris Kelley of the new Hard Rock Casino Tejon added employment considerations to the discussion. More than three-quarters of the casino’s employees are native to Kern, he said, and as part of that, the facility’s turnover rate is half that of the company’s other properties.

“That’s extremely impactful in a business like ours,” he said.

Kelley added that the casino’s performance has exceeded expectations: It’s on track to attract about 3 million visitors per year — 50% more than was anticipated, he said — and the share coming from L.A. is twice to four times the expected rate.

Earlier in the four-hour event, aerospace and its brother in arms, eastern Kern’s defense sector, shed new light on challenges like housing, education and healthcare that need to be addressed if the industry is to live up to its full employment potential.

Moderator Justin Salters elicited insights from aerospace and defense panelists, some of whom took the opportunity to share what happens when recruits bring specialized skills from around the country, only to land in a region where imperative healthcare may be a two-hour drive away.

Simply finding housing can be a challenge, said Col. Christopher J. Carnduff, commander of the 412th Mission Support Group at Edwards Air Force Base. Forty-five minute drives to work don’t support the base’s mission, he said, adding that local partnerships with housing developers would help.

Housing, education and healthcare “are constraints to growth,” he said, adding that lack of infrastructure needs to be addressed if the region wants to attract additional high-paying jobs.

Executive Vice President Jennifer Santiago at aerospace manufacturing company Scaled Composites called housing and quality of life among the company’s “biggest challenges,” even as the severity of the problem varies person to person.

All that said, the panelists seemed to agree the region’s aerospace and defense industries offer great economic potential, partly because of the uniqueness of their assets.

Carnduff said that, beyond having a giant, dry lakebed and usually clear skies, eastern Kern offers ample space for testing.

Santiago, for her part, said that while other areas place limitations on experimentation and testing, the Mojave area offers a streamlined experimental process.

With the energy industry relegated to its own annual Kern County summit, the local farming industry was given its own panel to discuss the rollout of ag technology such as drones and precision irrigation. Participants said such systems bring benefits but also sticking points.

Led by Cal State Bakersfield economist and ag business specialist Aaron Hegde, panelists noted how rising costs related to everything from labor and water to fertilizers has prodded local farmers to invest in new technology.

Not every new system pans out, Sunridge Nurseries President Rick Burnes said. It takes time for the industry to “weed out” technology that isn’t ready for deployment, he said.

It’s also important to find partners who can help bear the cost of proving the technology, he said. Otherwise, it sits on the shelf.

“It’s got to be a team effort,” he said.

Senior Vice President Daniel Terry at local ag supplier and service-provider Holloway commented on other challenges. He listed difficulties that included exposing new tech to dust and dirt, the need to run machines hard for long periods and the way some technologies require growers to give up proprietary information they have kept secret for generations.

Burnes said it has become more important than before to do data analysis.

“The guys who are winning are the guys who are running the numbers and looking at it,” he said.

While previous economic summits tended to be forecast- and data-heavy, most of the numbers Thursday came from just two economists from Cal State Bakersfield. One of them, Richard Gearhart, presented projections that were encouraging in some senses but worrisome in others.

The national economy made great strides between 2020 and 2025 in raising the buying power of the least-paid workers. But last year and this year, he said, job growth has been relatively slow.

A chart he presented indicated inflation-adjusted median wages in the United States are positioned to rise more than 10% by 2030, assuming the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for only three months.

But if the global petroleum bottleneck closes for two quarters, Gearhart’s chart showed, real wages will register minimal growth during that time. And if the strait is shut for three quarters, according to the projection, there will be virtually no increase in real wages through 2030.

https://www.bakersfield.com/news/economic-summit-shines-spotlight-on-kerns-lower-profile-industries/article_b5b30072-4e4e-48ee-a7ae-7e73ad0c0f83.html

By Faughn Economy 0 Comments

Madera Economic Summit highlights growth potential, regulatory hurdles facing the county

The Madera Economic Development Commission brought together a group of leaders across the state Wednesday for its 2026 Economic Summit at San Joaquin Wine Co., where panelists discussed rapid growth, regulatory hurdles, and long-term economic risks shaping the future of Madera County.

The Business Journal’s Managing Editor Gabriel Dillard served as moderator.

Much of the discussion focused on how and why Madera County has emerged as a growth leader in California. Developer Timothy Jones, who developed the Riverstone community, said that projects like Riverstone have succeeded despite early skepticism, giving credit to local partners and demand for housing.

“I think that the state of California needs houses,”Jones said. “I think that you have the opportunity to deliver those houses. I think with those houses will come commercial, retail, industrial opportunities that generate tax dollars that are going to benefit the communities in this area tremendously, and the key is just going to be to have the vision and support and effectuate.”

Joshua Peterson, Trumark’s president for its Central California division, said that timing has played a role, pointing to northward expansion that started in Fresno and has worked its way up to Madera with Riverstone and Tesoro Viejo developments.

He highlighted the importance of long-term planning to convert “bedroom communities” into job centers.

Panelists agreed that regulation continues to be the most significant hurdle with development. Sarah Bohn, the vice president of the Economic Policy Center for the Public Policy Institute of California, cited research showing California businesses face thousands of regulatory constraints, contributing to slower job growth and reduced competitiveness.

“Uncertainty and the volatility in the crisis in trade policy and other issues that are really driving pessimism among Californians,” Bohn said. Overall, Californians are pretty pessimistic, including small businesses, only 15% think now is a good time to expand their business.”

From an industrial perspective, Michael Matter, vice president of Central Valley Industrial Real Estate for Jones Lang LaSalle, said that Madera County has an opportunity to position itself as a logistics hub but currently lacks shovel-ready sites that are large enough for distribution facilities like Amazon.

Matter pointed to the need for more entitled industrial land and infrastructure to attract major users.

“Madera has the potential to become a logistics hub,” he said. “In my opinion, the some of the bigger challenges are with a million square feet being kind of the soup du jour for large occupiers.”

Energy access also came up as a recurring issue, with Jones even noting that a company had backed out of the area after not wanting to be in an area that PG&E covers.

Despite some of the risks, the panelists expressed optimism in the county’s future. With continued housing development, improved planning and targeted industrial recruitment, Peterson said that region could become a “formidable force for economic growth compared to surrounding counties.”

 

https://thebusinessjournal.com/madera-economic-summit-highlights-growth-potential-regulatory-hurdles-facing-the-county/