Airing a pollution solution for the ports

Luis Ceja’s orange Freightliner is rumbling down Ferry Street near the Port of Los Angeles, spewing diesel fumes.

As a tiny, plastic hula girl shimmies on the dashboard, Ceja starts fuming too -- about how hard his job is, about how little he earns and about the fact that he and his fellow truckers can’t bear the burden of improving the air quality here.

“I hate that my truck pollutes,” he says. “But I don’t have the money to retrofit it or replace it. If they put the bill on us, it’s just not going to happen.”

In the coming weeks, you’re going to start hearing a lot more about folks such as Ceja, who move a good portion of the more than $300 billion (and growing like mad) worth of merchandise that passes through the ports of L.A. and Long Beach each year.

Sometime in March, port officials say, they will begin to make public the nitty-gritty of how they’d like to implement the truck portion of the Clean Air Action Plan, which was approved by both ports in November. The historic accord aims to approximately halve port-related emissions of diesel particulates, nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide over the next five years. Choking soot from the harbor complex is a major cause of illness and death, including from cancer, in the L.A. Basin.

The details to be put forth are “fairly dramatic,” says S. David Freeman, president of the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners and an ally of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

That could well be an understatement. If Freeman and his commission colleagues go as far as they should, it would mean a total transformation of the way truckers do business at the ports, turning them from outside contractors to company employees and requiring the firms that hire them to meet new environmental and labor standards.

Those who profit from the current system will, of course, cry foul. But nothing short of an 18-Wheel Revolution is needed to fix the problem.

The Clean Air Action Plan doesn’t take aim at dirty trucks alone. It will also tackle pollution from ships, trains, cargo-handling equipment and harbor craft. But the trucks, about 16,000 of them, are the trickiest to deal with because of the way the industry has been structured since it was deregulated in 1980. Perversely, the system makes those with the shallowest pockets responsible for absorbing most of the costs.

In all, the antipollution plan is expected to require up to $2 billion for the purchase of new, clean-burning trucks (as much as $120,000 a pop) or to retool existing ones (by adding, say, a $20,000 filter system).

The ports, along with the South Coast Air Quality Management District, have promised $200 million toward the effort. There’s also the possibility of obtaining state bond funds to help. And state Sen. Alan Lowenthal, a Long Beach Democrat, is expected today to introduce a bill -- similar to one the governor vetoed last year -- that would raise about $500 million annually by imposing a $30 fee on each container shipped through the ports. Half of that would go to mopping the air, the other half to upgrading infrastructure.

Yet that’s still not enough to completely clean up the trucking fleet. So who will pay for the rest? And once these vehicles are all in compliance, who will service them?

Right now, such expenses fall to guys like Ceja, who is technically an “independent contractor” but might as well wear the mantle of “minimum wage worker.”

The 49-year-old father of three drives for a Carson company called Southern Counties Express Inc., one of about 600 trucking outfits that operate at the ports. Because of his contractor status, Ceja must pay for his fuel, insurance, taxes, licensing and repairs. He figures that, when all is said and done, he nets about $8 an hour, typical of many port truckers.

In fact, study after study has found that many truckers work exceedingly long hours -- often 60, 70 or more a week -- to bring in a mere $25,000 to $30,000 a year. They have no pensions or health coverage.

“You’re a slave to the truck,” says Ceja, who began driving at the waterfront 25 years ago.

To try to change things, Ceja has become part of the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, which includes community and religious organizations, environmental groups and labor unions. It has been lobbying government officials to address “persistent structural problems” in the trucking industry, as it states in a filing. Achieving “meaningful, long-term solutions” for air quality, the alliance says, demands “a new business model.”

Here, in a nutshell, is how that might look: The ports would put out bids and establish direct contractual relationships with trucking companies, spelling out what’s expected of them. If they hoped to pick up loads at the harbor, the trucks they’d dispatch would have to be in compliance with environmental rules and their drivers would have to be full-fledged employees -- ending the shadowy arrangements that have relegated truck cabs, in the words of a researcher, to “sweatshops on wheels.”

The advantages are numerous. Even if the drivers continued to own their own trucks, they’d be on sounder financial footing as employees because they’d not only collect rent on their rigs but draw regular salaries. That would make it easier to maintain their vehicles.

At the same time, the revenue generated from the contracts could provide additional funding to help cleanse the air. This setup would also spark new efficiencies and make it a lot easier to keep track of who is going in and out of the ports -- a much-needed security enhancement.

Not everybody is ready to swallow this strategy, and the fight is sure to be fierce. One trucking company owner I spoke with contends that it’s all a backdoor attempt by the Teamsters to organize the drivers.

Matt Schrap, a regulatory specialist with the California Trucking Assn., says that any attempts by the ports to mandate a contracting relationship with the companies could trip over federal law. He also says it’s simplistic to assume that having more truckers become company employees would make for better conditions. Some, he says, are thrilled at being independent and setting their own hours.

With unending gridlock at the ports, Schrap adds, the companies aren’t raking in big bucks either. “It’s not these motor carriers lining their pockets with gold on the backs of immigrant labor,” he says. “Nobody is getting rich doing this.”

Plenty of the particulars still need to be sorted out, including finding ways to make the shipping firms and those that own the cargo (the Wal-Marts of the world) pay their fair share of the clean-air plan. Meanwhile, Freeman clearly isn’t fazed by the idea of a fundamental restructuring of the trucking sector.

It’s “one approach,” he says, “that seems to have a lot going for it.”

It may be the only way, really, to get this important environmental initiative out of first gear.

Rick Wartzman is an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He is reachable at rick.wartzman@latimes.com.