Port Educates Council On Clean Trucks

By Harry Saltzgaver
Executive Editor

Members of the City Council’s Tidelands and Harbor Committee heard reports Tuesday about the Port of Long Beach’s Clean Trucks Program while much of the shipping industry waited for a lawsuit to be filed over the plan.

Passed as part of the Clean Air Action Plan by the Harbor Commission, the Clean Trucks Program would ban pre-1988 diesel trucks starting Oct. 1, with the ultimate goal of reaching a standard of 2007 emission levels for all trucks allowed into the port by Jan. 1, 2012. As part of that plan, the ports have a $35 per 20-foot container fee planned beginning Oct. 1 for all containers pulled by non-2007 level trucks, with the money going to help retrofit and replace polluting trucks.

“This is just to give the council and the community a chance to educate ourselves and respond to the clean truck plan,” said Second District Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal, who chairs the council committee and whose district includes part of the port. “I’m hoping this will lead to some sort of a study session with the council as a whole… I hope to hear a comparison of the two plans, the Port of Los Angeles’s and ours.”

The Port of Los Angeles has proposed a plan similar to Long Beach’s, but with the added caveat that all drivers must become employees of trucking companies by 2013. Long Beach’s plan has no employee requirement, meaning independent truckers still can contract with shipping companies as long as their trucks meet the port’s emission standards.

For the past several months, the American Trucking Association has threatened a lawsuit against the ports over the Clean Trucks Program, saying it amounts to a re-regulation of the trucking industry and is against federal trade regulations. Insiders expected a lawsuit to be filed last week, after the Los Angeles City Council approved the Clean Trucks Program, but nothing has happened so far.

Other potential litigants include the Independent Truckers Association, the Coalition for Responsible Transportation (a group of shipping lines seeking a private agreement with trucking companies to clean up trucks) and the Natural Resource Defense Council, which had filed a notice of intent to file a lawsuit early this year.

The NRDC has since withdrawn its threat. The apparent motivation to drop the potential lawsuit is a deal struck with the shipping lines to provide an incentive to use low-sulfur diesel fuel near the ports.

Port officials are preparing to implement the clean trucks program this fall. That’s necessary, according to Port of Long Beach Executive Director Richard Steinke, because the logistics are too complex to wait until the last minute.