The City Council is dark this week, so I thought I might take a look at the goings on over at the Harbor Department. In case no one out there knows, the city’s Harbor Department runs the Port of Long Beach–otherwise known as the city department that actually makes money.
A federal judge issued a tentative ruling this week declaring that certain aspects of the Southern California port’s so-called Clean Truck Program violate federal law and can be injuncted.
For anyone who has followed the case, this should have come as no surprise. Containers are deemed interstate commerce and despite what the ports’ lawyers have argued, federal law preempts local regulations when it comes to interstate commerce.
The $2 billion-plus truck plan, when initially approved by the adjacent ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles in late 2006 as part of their omnibus Clean Air Action Plan, was very simple: the ports would buy and scrap old polluting trucks while subsidizing the purchase of new cleaner-burning trucks.
The truck plan, to say the least, was very ambitious—in both its scope and its schedule. It projected cutting the pollution created by the more than 19,000 trucks servicing the two ports by up to 80 percent within five years.
Instead, the truck plan devolved into a textbook example of politics over substance. The sad fact is that despite the efforts of two ports’ dedicated and talented environmental staff, the plan has little to show for nearly 30 months of efforts.
So far, the only real winners in the whole affair have been the legal teams for the ports which have pocketed millions defending it and a handful of large trucking firms that have taken millions of dollars in “incentives” from the Los Angeles port to bring newer trucks to Southern California.
The ports on the other hand have touted at least one major success from the truck plan since it kicked off on Oct. 1, 2008. A ban instituted under the truck plan on more than 2,000 pre-1989 trucks, which generate exponentially more pollution than current models. This ban would seem on the surface to be a major boost to cleaning up the air around the ports. The ports have claimed that this one step has cut ports-generated truck pollution by nearly half (just as a side note, prior to the truck plan port trucks generated roughly ten percent of the diesel pollution in the Southern California Basin).
However, the dirty little secret about these 2,000-plus older trucks is that less than 1 percent were ever scrapped by the ports. The rest remain on the road, and by all accounts of experts within the industry, most likely within the Southern California Basin. While a small number were no doubt moved out of the area, the bottom line is that the ports simply do not know where these trucks went, except to say that they are no longer coming into the ports.
In addition, the ports have funded or recruited a small number of liquefied natural gas trucks to serve in the ports as part of the truck plan. In fact, the Port of Los Angeles has been a major proponent of making LNG trucks a major focus of the truck replacement portion of the truck plan, touting them as the green alternative to diesel trucks. Indeed the original truck plan back in 2006 called for 50 percent of the replaced trucks to be powered by LNG.
The problem is that independent academic research has repeatedly shown that when LNG trucks are put into heavy-duty service, like that of ports-servicing trucks, the engines actually produce more of nearly all smog-creating pollution categories than the latest model diesel trucks.
To make matters worse, in whatever form the truck plan moves forward—which based on the courts looks like it may be limited to the ports simply banning certain model year trucks at regular intervals—you and I are going to pay for it to some degree.
Despite the ports claiming that they are not funded by taxpayer monies, the two ports have sought hundreds of millions from the state and federal government to pay for subsidizing the replacement of the trucks. The plan originally called for up to $400 million to be sought from the government for the plan. Most recently, the Long Beach Harbor Department listed a $50 million request for federal stimulus money to help pay for truck replacement. As I have pointed out repeatedly, state and federal funds are not magic—they come from taxpayers like you and I.
So despite the ports charging a per-container fee on the shipping industry to generate the bulk of the funds for the truck plan—which by the way financial experts have said will likely be passed along to consumers anyway—taxpayers are still getting directly hit to pay for new trucks.
To be fair, the blame for this comedy of errors can be laid squarely at the feet of the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners, their City Hall overlords and the special interest groups that have used the issue of clean air to achieve unrelated gains. While the Long Beach Harbor Commission is equally culpable in the poor execution of the truck plan, for the most part the Long Beach port staff have worked hard to devise and implement a plan that results in cleaner air for us all.
The problem is, $2 billion-plus is a lot to pay for good intentions.