2:20pm | File this under, “Where’s the love?”
The Federal Maritime Commission, the government body responsible for regulating international oceanborne transportation in the United States, announced last week that the Port of Los Angeles is the recipient of the agency’s inaugural FMC Chairman’s Earth Day Award for the port’s Clean Truck Program.
Kudos may be in order, but there is one small problem.
Our own Port of Long Beach was not mentioned in the award, despite the fact that Long Beach port staff essentially wrote and developed the entire truck program.
This snub has left staff at the Port of Long Beach, which uses the self-appointed moniker of “The Green Port,” feeling a little blue.
You see, they remember that the Clean Truck Program, which calculations have shown has reduced diesel truck emissions in the two neighboring ports by more than 70 percent in just under 20 months of implementation, was developed jointly by the two ports. However, in December 2007, after more than a year of development led almost exclusively by Port of Long Beach staff, the two ports split ways on details of the truck plan. The most obvious difference was that Los Angeles wanted to require all trucking firms servicing the ports to hire only per-hour employee drivers, while Long Beach did not want to include any restrictions on who could drive the trucks. This split led to two slightly differing plans being implemented by the two ports in October 2008.
However, legal challenges brought by the trucking industry resulted in numerous non-environmental aspects of the two plans being injuncted under order of a federal court judge. This court ruling essentially eliminated the differences between the two truck plans.
In other words, right now, the two ports are using and scoring what appears to be tremendous success, with the same truck program–the one originally developed almost entirely by Port of Long Beach staff.
Long Beach port officials eventually reached an agreement with the trucking industry that allowed the Long Beach plan to achieve all of its goals while removing it from the trucking industry litigation. Los Angeles officials, however, continue to fight the court case and have spent millions of dollars on legal fees to keep the case alive.
This is not to say that the Port of Los Angeles offered nothing to the development of the truck plan, but if the feds are going to recognize the truck plan, then it only seems fair to honor everyone that contributed to the development and success of the plan.