A 75-year-old vehicle recycling plant near the Baylands Nature Preserve will shut down after East Palo Alto's Planning Commission voted 6-1 on Monday, July 13, to revoke the special use permit that kept Infinity Salvage running at 2091 Bay Road.
The commission rejected a proposed three-year wind-down plan that would have given owner Michael Baker time to clean up the site and close gradually. Commissioners said they had no confidence Baker would follow through.
"Given the prior performance, what is your confidence level that this wind down plan is going to be anything other than a Monday evening dream in July of 2026?" Commission Chair Robert Sherrard said during the meeting.
Commissioner Robert Allen Fisk cast the lone dissenting vote.
Decades of violations, then a fire
The salvage yard predates Baker's ownership. It has operated at the Bay Road site for more than 75 years, according to city records, making it the last remaining vehicle recycling plant in East Palo Alto. Baker purchased the business in 1974 and ran it under annual special use permits for decades.
Inspections by East Palo Alto, the Menlo Park Fire Protection District, and San Mateo County Environmental Health repeatedly found petroleum leaks, oil pooling, and hazardous car and battery storage, according to city documents.
On July 14, 2024, a fire broke out at the site, damaging three shipping containers stocked with auto parts, roughly 50 stacked vehicles, and the facility's drain station. Forklifts were charred. Office windows were boarded with plywood. Baker attributed the blaze to an attempted catalytic converter theft.
Local agencies allowed the business to keep operating on the condition that Baker repair the fire damage by Wednesday, April 30, 2025. More than a year past that deadline, violations persisted, including continuous oil spills, fire-damaged structures still unrepaired, and hazardous lead-acid battery storage, city documents show.
A contaminated corridor
The Infinity Salvage site sits at the eastern end of Bay Road, near the San Francisco Bay shoreline and the Baylands Nature Preserve. It falls within East Palo Alto's 207-acre Ravenswood Business District, which contains 17 open contaminated sites and eight closed sites with arsenic, lead, cadmium, volatile organic compounds, and oil in the soil and groundwater, according to California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment data reported by the Almanac in March 2025.
Lifelong East Palo Alto resident Luis Rosas told commissioners the business contributed to land degradation and disproportionately high asthma rates. East Palo Alto's asthma rates are about 40 percentage points higher than in neighboring Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Atherton, state health data shows.
What comes next
The commission plans to return with a formal resolution at its Monday, July 27, meeting.
Baker said he was ready to retire the business anyway and plans to keep the land, hoping to lease it to another business. City staff have identified the parcel for potential waterfront office development, consistent with a specific plan the City Council adopted in December 2024 that envisions the Bay Road corridor as the city's future downtown.
