UPDATE 10:30am | District Court Judge Christina Snyder finalized her tentative ruling last yesterday afternoon. Just as in the tentative ruling issued earlier this week, Judge Snyder’s final ruling reinstates the injunction against the Port of Los Angeles trucking plan’s employee-only mandate.
Her ruling cites the possibility of “irreparable harm” to the trucking industry by both the employee-only mandate and the port requirement for trucking firms to have an off-street parking plan. However, the judge ruled that the injunction was only appropriate for the employee-only mandate. The American Trucking Associations is expected to file shortly with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
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9:45am | The on-again, off-again injunction against portions of a Port of Los Angeles trucking plan appears to be on again.
The federal judge who last month shot down a trucking industry suit against the Los Angeles port so-called Clean Trucks Program has agreed to reinstate an injunction against the most contentious portion of the truck program until a federal appeals court can hear the case.
District Court Judge Christina Snyder issued the tentative ruling on Monday and is expected to issue a formal ruling on the matter sometime this week.
The ruling will reinstate an injunction against a portion of the port trucking plan that requires trucking firms servicing the port to only hire per-hour employee drivers while the appeals case is under way.
The American Trucking Associations, who had sued the port over non-environmental portions of the truck plan in 2008, asked Judge Snyder on Sept. 24 to reinstate the injunction that had been in place during the trial while the group appealed to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The injunction, originally issued by Judge Snyder in 2009, blocked certain portions of the truck plan, including the employee-only mandate, from being implemented by the port.
The employee-only mandate and several other components of an access license scheme contained in the Los Angeles port’s truck program were cleared for full implementation when Judge Snyder ruled in favor of the port on Sept. 16. As part of the ruling, she also dissolved the original injunction.
Judge Snyder based her Sept. 16 ruling in favor of the port on several legal issues called “federal preemption” and “market participation.” While she found that portions of the port truck plan violated federal law, she also ruled that the port was exempt from the applicable federal law because the port was acting as a participant in the trucking industry, much like a private company.
In her tentative ruling reinstating the injunction, Judge Snyder said that while she was confident of her earlier ruling in favor of the truck program, she recognized that “the interpretation and the application of the market participant doctrine in this case presents substantial and novel legal questions.”
She also determined that the trucking industry was likely to suffer “irreparable harm” if the employee-only mandate was allowed to be implemented by the port and was later overturned.
However, Judge Snyder also concluded that such harm would not arise from another previously enjoined portion of the truck plan that calls for all trucking firms servicing the port to have an off-street parking plan for their vehicles. This portion of the trucking program will not be covered by the reinstated injunction.
The ATA plans to file with the Ninth Circuit as soon as Judge Snyder makes the tentative ruling on reinstating the injunction formal. As part of the tentative ruling both the ATA and the port have agreed to seek an expedited hearing before the appeals panel.
The ATA suit centers around a Los Angeles port truck scheme that took effect in October 2008 requiring port-servicing drayage firms to sign so-called concession agreements to gain access to port terminals. Firms without such an access license are barred from entering port facilities. The truck plan was originally conceived by the port (at the time including the Port of Long Beach) as a means to bar older polluting trucks and force port-servicing trucking firms to use newer and cleaner burning vehicles, thereby cutting port-generated diesel emissions.
However, Los Angeles port officials included non-environmental criteria in the concession agreements, such as financial, maintenance, insurance, safety, parking and labor criteria. The ATA contends these local port rules are preempted by federal interstate commerce law.
The Port of Long Beach, which was also a defendant in the original lawsuit, reached a court-approved settlement with the ATA in 2009 that allowed the Long Beach port to implement all of the environmental aspects of the truck plan, as well as most of the non-environmental aspects. The Long Beach version of the truck plan never called for an employee-only mandate.
The environmental portions of the truck program implemented by the two ports have been, by all accounts, a tremendous success. The ports estimate that more than 7,000 cleaner burning 2007-or-newer model year trucks have been brought into service, replacing more than 19,000 trucks of various ages that operated at the port prior to October 2008. The result of this more than $600 million investment by the trucking industry has resulted in an estimated 80 percent reduction in ports-generated diesel truck emissions as of Jan. 1, 2010, with even greater reductions expected by the end of this year.