Plan for Dockside Rail Yard Yanked Amid Opposition

A shipping terminal’s withdrawal last week of a proposal that could have sent one train a night through northern Long Beach neighborhoods has not halted debate about how local officials should respond to growth pressures at the port.

Angry dockworkers, in fact, shut down the port for nine hours Monday to protest city opposition to the shipping terminal’s plan to expand a dockside rail yard, which would have created about 15 more jobs.

“To me that’s restraint of trade . . . and it means jobs for us,” said Jim North, president of foremen’s Local 94, one of three International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union locals that honored Monday’s boycott.

But Mayor Ernie Kell said that withdrawal of the on-dock proposal is a victory for thousands of west and north Long Beach residents who live along the Union Pacific Railroad tracks on which added trains would probably have run.

“We have to think about the residents this would have affected,” said Kell, who sent a letter to the Harbor Commission in August on behalf of the City Council strongly opposing the project.

Plan to Be Altered

Even as Kell and the council were savoring withdrawal of the on-dock rail proposal, however, its sponsor was saying an altered plan would be resubmitted within two months.

That new proposal by International Transportation Service Inc., which handles cargo for 15 shipping lines, would either reduce the number of trains or require use of a rail line that bypasses residential Long Beach, said attorney Terry J. Coniglio.

City and port officials say, however, that port jobs and train noise are but two of several intertwined issues that must be addressed if Long Beach Harbor, the busiest on the West Coast, is to get its share of cargo being moved from the Orient overland to this country’s Midwest and East.

To remain competitive for this overland trade, the Long Beach Port, and the adjacent Port of Los Angeles, face tremendous pressure to build dockside facilities similar to the one that had been proposed by Japanese-owned International Transportation Service.

Ports in Tacoma, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland and Seattle have all planned or built on-dock rail yards within the past two years, said James McJunkin, executive director of the Long Beach Port.

“(They) have proliferated like Cabbage Patch dolls,” McJunkin said in a memorandum to the Harbor Commission earlier this year.

Those ports can move 40-foot steel containers directly from ships to railroad cars instead of trucking them to a storage yard for loading, lowering costs by about $70 a container, he said. On a typical mile-long train with 200 double-stacked containers, that would mean savings of about $14,000.

Therefore, if there were no complicating factors, both local ports would be foolish not to consider on-dock loading at least for shipments with enough containers to fill an entire train, said McJunkin.

Both local ports are now studying how on-dock rail yards might fit into their master plans, said McJunkin and his counterpart in Los Angeles, Ezunial Burts.

Plan Rejected 6 Years Ago

The ports dismissed on-dock rail yards as infeasible six years ago because they thought that limited waterfront leaseholds could be better used. Probable traffic congestion in the ports was also a consideration.

As a result, the ports agreed to build, in conjunction with Southern Pacific Railroad, a $62-million, 150-acre rail yard four miles away, in Wilmington.

The first phase of that Intermodal Container Transfer Facility (ICTF) was completed last month, with Southern Pacific picking up all but about $5 million of the cost and indebtedness. It is expected to be complete by 1989 and have a capacity of seven trains a day.

Still, cargo must be hauled by truck to the ICTF and that one extra handling before placement on a train increases costs beyond those of dockside yards.

McJunkin maintains, however, that the Wilmington central

yard remains the better facility in most cases because many shipments do not have enough containers to fill an entire train and shipments can be combined if bound for the same destination. The ICTF could coexist with some on-dock facilities, he said.

But others say on-dock facilities would siphon too much cargo from the ports-sponsored central yard.

Over the years the Port of Los Angeles has received several requests for dockside facilities and has always turned them down as inconsistent with the two ports’ commitment to the Wilmington yard, Jack Wells, a Port of Los Angeles administrator, said in a letter to Long Beach Harbor Commissioner David Hauser last December.

“If the ITS project is actually developed, there will be an immediate demand at both ports for similar facilities for competitive reasons,” Wells wrote.

Burts, chief administrator of the Los Angeles Port, said this week that in the letter Wells was acting as chairman of the Joint Powers Authority that is directing development of the ICTF, and on behalf of the port.

Just weeks ago, indeed, the Port of Los Angeles hired a consultant to see if on-dock facilities are feasible as the ports double their acreage with landfill by the year 2020.

“We want to keep our options open on this,” Burts said. “Since the port has changed over the past four or five years, we’re looking at new opportunities.”

Interest in Facilities

Burts said there have been “indications that the shipping companies are interested” in on-dock facilities. Some members of the Long Beach Harbor Commission are also interested.

“We do realize it would be an ideal situation if we could have on-dock rail facilities at all our terminals,” Commissioner David L. Hauser said this week.

But port officials also say they recognize that arrangements have to be made to route new rail traffic away from residential Long Beach before it will be allowed by the City Council.

Just such a plan already exists under the auspices of the Southern California Assn. of Governments, a regional planning agency. The proposal would require funneling all port rail traffic onto Southern Pacific Railroad’s Alameda track, which parallels Alameda Street through Carson and Compton.

This route runs primarily through industrial areas and is farther away from homes than is Union Pacific Railroad’s branch through North Long Beach or Santa Fe Railroad’s South Bay line. All three railroads would share the Alameda track when carrying port cargo.

However, a $220-million plan to upgrade the Alameda line has been stymied by lack of funding. The association of governments recommends that the ports pay for 50% of the improvements, but the ports have not agreed.

Support for Wilmington Yard

Another stumbling block to dockside rail yards is the commitment the two ports made to strongly support the Wilmington central yard until it is fully operational in 1989, Hauser said.

In addition, no plan has been devised that can begin to resolve the traffic congestion that mile-long trains from on-dock facilities would create in Long Beach, said Hauser, who is current chairman of the Joint Powers Authority for the ICTF.

“This port looks like a giant funnel, with all the container terminals in the wide part of the funnel that leads to the very slender part that ties it to (freeways and main rail lines),” Hauser said.

Tourist and hotel traffic from existing hotels and restaurants near the Queen Mary, and proposed large-scale expansion in the same area, must also be considered in the traffic equation, said Commissioner James H. Gray. He said the traffic prospects are horrendous.

Sometime in the future, with a consolidated Alameda rail corridor reducing environmental effects, and with development of a second rail staging area within the port itself, on-dock facilities should make sense, Gray said. “But that involves a whole bunch of ifs,” he said.

The International Transportation Service proposal also ran into trouble, say city and port officials, because it was asking to be treated differently than other terminals.

“This was a kind of end run around the planning that the ports have done,” Councilman Warren Harwood said of the ITS plan. “To give one company an advantage over all other shippers in Long Beach harbor with a dockside yard is not sensible or fair.”

Option for One Shipper

Hauser said he thinks most of the five-member Harbor Commission would have opposed the ITS proposal on those grounds alone. And Gray said he could not give one terminal the dockside option without granting it to all.

ITS attorney Coniglio said, however, that ITS was simply trying to improve the efficiency of its operation by adding three new rail lines to an existing one when it ran into an unexpected storm of protest.

ITS already runs one train a week out of its existing facility and could run more without approval from the port, he noted. But it made more sense economically to improve the yard, he said.

“The last thing ITS wants is to get involved in a situation where the public is not happy with it,” he said. “One of the reasons they pulled their application was to get along with the city and the community.”

Coniglio also said that the improved rail facility would help the environment by reducing pollution that now comes from the hundreds of truck trips each week necessary to move containers added trains would handle.