Port of Long Beach Continues Investments Buoyed by Increased Traffic

There's evidence that port traffic is picking up again after a couple slow years. What does that mean for the managing director of environmental affairs and planning at the Port of Long Beach?

We're all delighted to see what we were cautiously hoping was a trend that would continue. The first couple months reflected the backlog of empty shelves and restocking, particularly in the consumer goods area. We're starting to see movement in all sectors. We're a multi-service port. We have the traditional things that come in containers, along with break bulk commodities, building materials, and the like that come in as well. We're seeing an uptick in those areas as well. All that is a positive part of the economy. For my area of responsibility, it means there's a little bit of direction, and there's still some long-term implications. We are responsible for keeping the nuts and bolts rolling. A lot of the things that are necessary for environmental planning, in particular, have to happen whether business is down or up. Much of that is compliance-related and regulatory-driven, so those things are going on in the background even if business is down to zero.

We continue that work, but there's a lot of planning and development that is now proceeding at the port. In the planning phase, we have environmental documents related to upcoming projects that are very, very close to fruition. We're poised for the Gerald Desmond Bridge, which is a large infrastructure project, long overdue for capacity, safety, and a lot of good reasons. That will be about a $1 billion project. That environmental document will be up to our board for certification of the EIR within the next month, and the hope is to move forward with construction. Getting the entitlements for that project is the biggest hurdle right now.

Waiting in the wings are two other very large infrastructure (in terms of terminal and operational capacity) projects. One is our on-dock rail support facility, which will allow us to move goods more efficiently using on-dock rail here at the port. Right now we have on-dock rail in most of our container terminals, however, those could operate more efficiently if we had some more areas to build trains, assemble them, and so on. We should be pretty close to releasing that project document before the end of the summer.

Likewise, there's a very large terminal project, which, takes many years to develop. Pier S is the area of our inner harbor. That would add about 160 acres of terminal capacity here at the port. Those are all very, very important because they don't happen overnight. The processing, the documentation, and all of the analyses has been going on and will continue. When they actually get board approval, whether it's the Gerald Desmond Bridge, the Pier S, or the on-dock rail support facility, there's other things that happen in our shop that lend support during the construction phase in terms of hazardous materials that are encountered that have to be cleaned up, disposal issues, recycling, and other things.

In many MIR interviews over the years with Jim Hankla, Mayor Foster, and others like you, it is clear that the Port of Long Beach has a mandate to grow green. Talk a little bit about how the San Pedro Bay Ports Clean Air Action Plan has changed the nature and dynamic of the work that you're doing at Long Beach and the two ports together.

You said the proper word, dynamic. The dynamics were horrible before we implemented that program. The two ports together recognized that we had a problem. I don't think that the ports were in denial, but there were those in the industry that were in denial that we had a problem.

The communities around here receive a separate, disproportionate impact from the wonderful trade that we bring into these ports. We had to bring that back into balance. The Clean Air Action Plan was a big step, but where the rubber meets the road for the communities is seeing the improvement in air quality, and we have had totally transparent quarterly reporting on the progress we're making in that area.

As a result we have cleaner air. That means that when we have an environmental document, like the ones I just mentioned earlier, we have the wherewithal to mitigate impacts or eliminate impacts that are identified from those projects. As they go forward, those projects will represent increased capacity at the port along with healthier air because it tackles all the sources: the ships, the cargo handling equipment, the trucks, in particular these last couple of years, the rail, the locomotives, and even the harbor craft. Those were all targeted with specific strategies. Those strategies have been put in to effect in many, many ways and will continue to be put in effect.

Our leases in Long Beach are what you call "green leases." They make measures identified in the Clean Air Action Plan a contractual requirement for the tenants that will operate facilities for Long Beach. If you want to have a terminal here in the port, then you have to agree to operate in this fashion. That allows us to leverage and to capture the benefits of the plan into realistic implementation during operations. That has been hugely helpful.

A similar plan has been rolled out over the last year, the Water Resources Action Plan (WRAP), which relates to controlling pollutants that might be entering the waters of the harbor from terminal operations, runoff, or sloppy handling. That's very important. A portion of that allows us to work with our regional partners on upstream sources, up the L.A. River and the Dominguez Channel, where it's not under our control, but we have a vested interest in cleaning them up. The implementation of those plans have helped us tremendously in getting approval for modernization and improvement of the port's infrastructure, and therefore, being able to accommodate the increase in cargo and accommodate it in a green fashion.

In a May MIR interview, Long Beach Mayor Foster shared that the port's Clean Trucks Program had already hit its target for 2012. Could you elaborate on the significance of that success?

Mayor Foster was right on the money. We had our second progressive ban come into effect in January of 2010. We had a five-year time horizon on the truck program to reach a goal of 80 percent reduction in pollution from trucks, which would have been 2012. We hit that goal-an 80 percent reduction in the pollution that was coming from drayage trucks serving the two ports-in January 2010. We are incredibly happy about that.

It wasn't all due to just the port efforts. Our industry partners really stepped up to the plate. We couldn't have predicted how quickly the industry would respond in a positive fashion, investing in new trucks that met the requirements. That, complemented the port's efforts to help drivers that couldn't get into the clean trucks where we helped subsidize those trucks by about 80 percent. That helped us reach the goal much, much earlier. That means that we're all breathing easier, and those improvements will continue going forward. It's a great story, and it's something to be really proud of. We're very, very proud of it. The mayor certainly deserves some kudos because he's been a very big supporter of that program. He is very focused on cleaning up the air and not getting lost on tangents that have been introduced by other parties.

The drayage folks are speaking loudly and forcibly, warning the public that unless something drastic is done, and soon, that Southern California's port complex may descend into the same kind of meltdown it did in the last couple years when it was faced with China imports, strikes, and the merger of the railroads. Is that a fair challenge?

Nothing is as a simple as it appears on the surface. There are two problems here that have been co-mingled. Some people have a different agenda on this. First of all, the ports are efficiently moving cargo within the terminals. We're getting turn times that are about 40-45 minutes within the terminals. A problem cited as the evidence of backed-up ports: the trucks that come early and line up at the gates without an appointment or to get there when our pier pass gates open for service. Early arrivals and congestion that is associated with that needs to be worked out. We're hoping to spread arrivals out a little bit. We have been letting the terminal operators, the trucking community, and labor work on ways to improve that. Obviously the ports don't control that, but we have a vested interest that it is sorted out. One of the things that they are working on is an appointment system. It has been tried in a couple terminals and worked successfully.

Labor is the other issue. There was a very small union that took a strike action. That's not good; it's not good for anybody. It allows those who want to take business from the San Pedro ports to say, "Hey look: L.A./Long Beach just doesn't have a dependable work force." We would hope that labor and management work out those issues. Obviously the port is not an operator, but we want to see that business continue to come here. We don't want to see it diverted somewhere else. We want to see them get to a negotiating table and work out a solution that's acceptable to all parties.

This is a bad time to start work actions. We're just coming out of a terrible period; we're at a delicate point. The last thing we need is to have bad press out there that says we can't depend on the labor here in the ports of L.A./Long Beach. That's not really true. We need all parties to work together to solve it. We've got great labor here-they are a dependable workforce and hard workers, and we have good management. They have issues they need to work out. Right now is a very delicate time in our recovery, and we don't need any distractions.

MIR covers issues about public-private partnerships in the way of funding infrastructure projects. Is P3 a fit for the Desmond Bridge?

Public-private partnerships are one option. It doesn't look like the right fit for the Gerald Desmond Bridge because a P3 works for projects where you have an income source that will help pay for a third party investor's upfront investment in the infrastructure. It might work if you were able to put tollbooths out or you were able to implement some other kind of fee-which we don't want to do because we've had enough fees that have chased away business.

We're looking at the legitimate sources of funding. This is a non revenue-producing asset. It will be a state asset. It only services about 25 percent of port traffic, the other 75 percent is commuter traffic. It' s a legitimate candidate for federal and state monies for bridge improvement, gas tax monies, and road tax monies. This is where that money should go-aging infrastructure that is a safety issue and a capacity issue. We have a commitment right now of close to $700 million in federal, state, and port funds. We need to close that gap, and we're looking additional funds from those same sources. It will probably be better handled with that type of funding than with anything else.

We're also looking at ways to reduce cost. One way to reduce cost is to have a design-build contract. We're looking very, very closely at that option because it can often produce a creative and more expeditious solution to construction. Although P3 is still being looked at in other respects, it's probably not as likely as something that's more along the lines of a design-build or perhaps a traditional design-bid-build. But design-build seems to be the one that has the strongest fit right now. We're ready for our outside experts to give final guidance on that.

How long does it take from conceptual invention to implementation for these major projects? How much patience is needed on behalf of the ports and the community to realize the benefits of these investments?

They take a long time. Just for example, the middle harbor project that was recently certified and now is moving forward into construction was a big EIR that took us close to eight years to get through the entire process. That's way too long to do an environmental document and get project approval. The Gerald Desmond Bridge has likewise taken several years. If you count the first time we began these environmental documents, we're close to five years. We've been working on the Pier S document for about four years. Ideally, a project should take no more than two years to get the entitlements processed.

That's all the public outreach, public input required for such a project approval. The fear of legal challenges in today's litigious world requires that we be extra, extra careful in preparing environmental documents. They take an extraordinary length of time. We have our basic team of experts that analyze and put together the EIR. Then we have a separate and distinct quality assurance team that has to review and do all of their editing before it then goes to our legal team, which does the same thing. Each one of those processes is usually iterative, so you go through it multiple times.

If you do that over a number of issues, pretty soon you've taken up a number of months or years preparing a document. We have tried hard to produce very, very strong documents. That's our goal so they will not get hung up in court. As a result it takes a long time.

After you finally get the approval of your document, you have construction. Gerald Desmond is about four years; a terminal project like the middle harbor is almost ten years. The actual project may not be done for a number of years and you could be talking anywhere from six to 15 years to get to the end-from concept and beginning of your environmental documentation to putting the final nail into the project.