Trucking group to appeal port ruling

The industry group that challenged Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s clean truck program at the Port of Los Angeles said Friday that it would appeal a federal court ruling that upheld the initiative in its entirety.

Thursday’s decision, issued by U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder in Los Angeles upheld the harbor department’s right to require concession agreements for each truck that carries cargo through the port. Those agreements are a cornerstone of the mayor’s clean-air initiative to replace older diesel trucks at the port with newer, cleaner-burning ones.

While an array of environmental and labor groups praised the decision, Curtis Whalen of the American Trucking Assn. said his group would seek to keep in place the injunction that prevented part of the truck plan from being implemented. He also predicted the fate of the program would ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“This has national significance,” said Whalen, who serves as executive director of the association’s Intermodal Motor Carriers Conference.

Snyder upheld one of the most controversial components of Villaraigosa’s clean-port initiative — the requirement that any truck driver carrying goods in and out of the harbor must be employed by a trucking company. That provision was aggressively sought by the Teamsters union and was viewed as a way of making it easier for truck drivers to organize.

Change to Win, a labor coalition that backed the provision, contributed $500,000 to a voter-approved telephone tax measure crafted by Villaraigosa in 2008. That contribution arrived less than three months before the concession agreements were approved by the mayor’s appointees on the harbor commission.

While the truck industry panned the ruling, organizers with Change to Win issued a statement saying the judge’s decision will provide legal ballast for port authorities in other parts of the country, some of which have already begun implementing their own clean-air plans.

Labor unions and clean-air groups have been pushing for a federal bill that would update the Federal Aviation Authorization Act by allowing local ports to regulate trucking operations, said Melissa Lin Perrella, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that intervened in the case.

The threat of appeal made by the trucking industry on Friday shows the need for a rewrite of the trucking law, Perrella said. “It could be years before we have a final decision in this case,” she said.

Throughout the litigation, the trucking group has argued that federal laws dealing with interstate commerce and transportation safety prohibit the port from imposing regulations that affect a truck’s price, route or services.

Snyder disagreed, saying the port was not preempted from imposing concession agreements because it was acting as a business and landlord, not a regulating agency. She wrote that the port was protecting its business interests by seeking to address the diesel emissions that have made it a target of clean-air lawsuits for years.

The judge also said the employer requirements would ensure that truck drivers work for companies that have enough money to maintain a new fleet of cleaner-fuel trucks. The harbor department has spent more than $57 million to develop and subsidize the purchase of such vehicles, city officials said.

david.zahniser@latimes.com