Heather Crossner joined Bridge as SVP of Development in 2019. She oversees entitlements and agency approvals for all of Bridge’s California projects, and leads Bridge’s governmental affairs and public relations during project entitlement and development.

California is undoubtedly the most difficult state in the nation for securing entitlements, as projects are required to be reviewed under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which allows any member of the public to challenge and sue proposed developments. Despite these hurdles, Heather has successfully obtained entitlements for more than 4.3 million  square feet of industrial warehouses across ten development projects for Bridge. She is currently in the process of entitling an additional 1.3 million  square feet over seven buildings.

Heather has developed close working relationships with cities and counties across the state that have facilitated streamlined approvals, such as with City of Los Angeles and City of Commerce staff - who agreed to CEQA exemptions on multiple projects that avoided the delay and legal vulnerability. In two cities that passed industrial moratoriums (Rancho Cucamonga and City of Vernon), she was able to negotiate exceptions that allowed Bridge’s projects to proceed during the moratoriums while other industrial projects were put on hold.

Heather also leads the community outreach efforts for each entitlement project, which requires sensitive and thoughtful engagement with residents, environmental organizations, unions and others. She has overseen project support campaigns that included door-to-door and one-on-one resident engagement and has also negotiated multiple settlement agreements with project opponents to avoid and/or resolve CEQA litigation.

As a practicing CEQA attorney for 13 years prior to joining Bridge, Heather has also been responsible for overseeing the team of consultants required to prepare the CEQA documentation for each project. This involves managing multiple consultants, including land use attorneys, traffic consultants, air quality and environmental experts, architects and civil engineers, among many others. She ensures that all CEQA documents are as defensible as possible, which is critical when any project can be sued.

Making the entitlement process even more complex for Heather, most of Bridge’s projects are located on brownfield sites requiring extensive cleanup. For example, one project required removal of an asphalt refinery (Bridge Point Long Beach), a second was the site of an old GE transformer factory with heavily contaminated soils and groundwater (Bridge Point Oakland), and three others required re-abandonment of multiple oil wells (Bridge Point South Bay V, VI, and VII). These sites and others required her to obtain approvals from multiple environmental agencies in addition to  local city approvals, including from the U.S. EPA, the LARWQCB, the DTSC and CalGEM.