L.A.’s PORT IN A STORM : Harbor Working to Combine Success, Good Neighbor Image

Gertrude Schwab, a lifetime Wilmington resident, is well acquainted with the problems of living in the shadow of the Port of Los Angeles.

“We are the only waterfront community where properties have little value,” Schwab told the Board of Harbor Commissioners at a recent meeting. “We have no access to the water, and we are glutted with trucks.”

Schwab and a handful of other Wilmington homeowners had come to the meeting to oppose a proposed cement importing plant that they fear would crowd residential streets in the community with up to 100 trucks a day.

The harbor commissioners, who oversee operations at the most profitable port in the United States, were caught in what has become an increasingly familiar quandary: How to nourish the thriving $128-million-a-year port while also attempting to be a good neighbor to residents of the Los Angeles communities of Wilmington and adjoining San Pedro, all the while catering to thousands of boaters and tourists who visit the harbor each year.

‘Come Up With a Balance’

“We are committed to bringing people into this port--and not just in ships,” Commissioner Ira Distenfield said in an interview. “Our job is to try to come up with a balance. The Port of Los Angeles is an industrial port, but on the other hand, we need to remind ourselves that one of our reasons for existence is to make sure the citizens of this city have a port that they can visit and enjoy. . . . You don’t make every decision with a slide rule and calculator.”

In recent years, the port has experienced extraordinary growth, with profits last year reaching a record $67.2 million, up nearly 16% from the year before. Capitalizing on a worldwide boom in Pacific Rim trade, the port has expanded its container cargo and automobile handling facilities and has joined the neighboring Port of Long Beach in drafting a massive expansion plan that would add 2,400 acres of landfill to San Pedro Bay during the next 35 years.

The port provides more than 20,000 jobs in the harbor, and it estimates that an additional 130,000 jobs and 20,000 businesses in Southern California are indirectly related to port activities.

With the growth, however, have come unprecedented demands from the surrounding communities. Increasingly vocal residents in Wilmington--a predominantly Latino working-class community of 60,000 with some of the poorest and most industrial neighborhoods in the harbor area--have called on port police to cite truckers who use residential streets. They also want police to force port tenants to stop storing large truck-sized shipping containers on previously vacant lots in residential neighborhoods.

Wilmington residents, saying the City of Los Angeles has neglected them for years, have demanded recreational and commercial access to their heavily industrial waterfront--which Schwab complained “is now fenced off”--and have even suggested that the port help pay to revitalize Wilmington’s depressed downtown.

In San Pedro, a one-time seedy fishing town that now boasts expensive harbor-view condominiums and a fleet of $100,000 yachts, the port and private developers are building a $100-million waterfront marina and recreational complex on the West Channel. Although the complex is a victory for community groups that demanded more public facilities, some residents and boat owners complain that the recreational area is being spoiled by pollution from nearby industrial facilities and the storage of oil and chemicals nearby.

‘Give Something Back’

“There are situations caused by the fast growth of the port that are not being mitigated by the port,” said Los Angeles Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who represents the harbor area. “The community tends to have the view that because they have to put up with most of the inconveniences of the port that the port should give something back.”

Indeed, some San Pedro residents, emboldened by their success in gaining public access to the port, have challenged the Los Angeles Harbor Department--the city agency that runs the port--in areas of planning and policy. Nothing better illustrates the conflict than the recent struggle over Kaiser International, the port’s largest exporter of bulk commodities.

Kaiser International operates the port’s $26-million bulk loader, a facility on the eastern bank of the West Channel that serves as an industrial backdrop to the area’s new recreational and commercial character. A group of San Pedro residents and boat owners, convinced that coal and petroleum coke from the bulk loader--which moves such commodities onto and off of ships--was turning their boats and front porches black, led an effort to force the operator to install new pollution equipment or cease operations.

The group late last year filed several complaints with the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which verified enough of them to declare the company a public nuisance. Based on the complaints, the AQMD staff last April refused to issue Kaiser International two crucial operating permits.

The AQMD action sent shock waves through the port, whose officials viewed the decision as a signal that its good-neighbor policy in San Pedro was beginning to backfire.

“We can’t live with having another administrative agency say that industrial facilities can’t be here because the recreational users complain,” Jonathan P. Nave, deputy Los Angeles city attorney for the port, said at the time. “It would allow the tail to wag the dog.”

Port officials warned that the AQMD action against Kaiser International, which pays the port about $2 million a year in rent, “would impact planning for all future facilities in the West Channel area of the port.” In a letter to the AQMD, Mayor Tom Bradley said closing the bulk loader “would have a devastating impact on the well-being of literally thousands of Americans.”

But the boat owners, residents and AQMD staff refused to back down.

Decision Overruled

It took a hearing before the district’s appeals panel to overrule the decision. Even then, the boat owners pledged to continue filing complaints against Kaiser International. Under pressure from Flores and the City Council, the port eventually promised to move the bulk loader away from the recreational part of the harbor by 1993.

Flores said the drawn-out battle over the bulker loader demonstrates how clumsy the port can be when confronted with issues important to the community.

“It is the responsibility of the (Harbor Department) staff to see a situation and not need to wait for complaints,” Flores said. “I would like to see more initiative on the part of the port. It shouldn’t have to come from the community, and it shouldn’t have to come from the political arena. How long have we been asking them to do something about Kaiser? It took an action of the City Council for them to do anything.”

Port officials attribute the battle over Kaiser International to “transitional problems” associated with converting the harbor’s West Channel into a recreational playground. At worst, they said, the port can be faulted for trying to be too good of a neighbor--that is, going ahead with the recreational development and raising public expectations before moving Kaiser International and other industrial facilities.

“By attempting to accelerate our recreational development, we have in fact put ourselves in this difficult situation,” said Ezunial Burts, the port’s executive director. “But this is transitional, and the long-term benefits to the community are worth it.”

The port’s emerging status as, in effect, a huge corporation with great financial and civic responsibilities has required port officials to attempt a difficult balancing act--one that is largely unfamiliar to many of its bureaucrats who for years concentrated on day-to-day operations with little notice of the surrounding communities.

Some Harbor Department officials say privately that it has been difficult to re-educate some staff members, with projects geared toward non-commercial aspects of the port often meeting bureaucratic resistance. But the port’s top executives say any such problems are temporary.

“Once in a while I hear people say that the staff is unresponsive to this or to that,” said Distenfield, who has been on the board less than one year but is already its vice president and one of its most outspoken members. “I do think that maybe out of habit our staff is always thinking, ‘commercial, commercial.’ But I do think they are trying to change. They will change.”

As an example of the port’s willingness to break away from exclusively business-oriented goals, Distenfield and the other board members approved the cement importing factory opposed by Gertrude Schwab and her Wilmington neighbors but required that the company to adhere to a route that keeps the trucks out of residential neighborhoods.

Peter Mendoza, president of the largest homeowners organization in Wilmington and an outspoken critic of the port, said any concession by the port is viewed as progress. For years, Mendoza said, Wilmington residents were unable to get the Harbor Department to take their concerns seriously.

“We are subsidizing the existence of the harbor with our city streets and the air we breathe,” Mendoza said. “Nobody is saying shut down the Harbor Department. We are saying, ‘Good. We are glad you are trying to make a profit and create jobs, but at the same time let’s not be so damned greedy.’ You just can’t go out and make big bucks off the back of the community.”

The Harbor Department is one of three so-called proprietary departments in the city, meaning it is not tax supported. Instead, it makes money by leasing its land to shipping lines, collecting tariffs on goods that go through the port, charging marina fees and through other operations. As a result, it in some ways resembles an independent agency, neither reliant on the city for funds nor required to give any of its profits to the city.

The department gained its unusual autonomy by virtue of its relationship with the state of California. Under the City Charter, the department is charged with operating the tidelands in San Pedro Bay granted to the city by the state in 1911. The tidelands trust requires that the land and revenues generated from the land be used “for the promotion and accommodation of commerce, navigation and fishery.”

Those restrictions, enforced by the State Lands Commission, bar the city from using money earned by the port on such non-harbor related items as low-income housing, services for the homeless or, some port officials argue, port police to control truck traffic in Wilmington. Although officials have found some ways to fund community projects--a maritime collection at the Wilmington library, for instance--most of the money goes for port expansion.

Port officials acknowledge that Wilmington--where the port owns more land than it does in San Pedro and where city zoning has allowed more intensive industrial development--presents special problems. Aside from several remote marinas leased to private operators there, the Harbor Department has placed all of its recreational and non-industrial commercial facilities in San Pedro, which is enjoying an economic boom of sorts as a result.

Cruise Ship Terminal

In San Pedro, a community of 75,000, the Harbor Department is expanding its cruise ship terminal--home to television’s “Love Boat”--and adding a hotel and shops. The port’s cruise business is second only to Miami’s. To the south, Ports O’ Call Village, a specialty shopping center, has been a tourist attraction on the harbor’s Main Channel since the 1960s. And nearby, the former ferry terminal at the foot of 6th Street has been converted to a maritime museum.

On the West Channel, at the southern end of San Pedro, Cabrillo Beach is being upgraded, the city has moved the Cabrillo Marine Museum into a modern building, and the port has set aside 370 acres of land and water for a $100-million marina and recreational complex that it is building. When completed in the next few years, the development will provide slips for more than 3,000 private boats and will include a hotel, a youth aquatics camp, restaurants, shops, offices, parks, a salt marsh and bicycle paths.

By contrast, Wilmington, which extends about 2 1/2 miles along the waterfront between San Pedro and Long Beach, does not even have a public beach. The Harbor Department has set aside about 40 acres of land and water along the Cerritos Channel where several private marinas operate, and it has promised that another 40 acres will be designated for recreational use once oil wells there have been depleted. But the marinas are far removed from residential areas, and port officials acknowledge that it could be decades before the oil wells run dry.

For several years, Wilmington residents have blamed many of the community’s problems--from unsightly oil wells to occasional spills of toxic materials--on the Harbor Department and city officials who they feel have clout with the department. Residents have accused Bradley, who proudly points to the port’s growth as one of his greatest accomplishments, and Flores, who lives in San Pedro, of forcing Wilmington to bear the brunt of the port’s success while shielding San Pedro.

Burts, the port’s executive director and a close associate of Bradley, denies that the Harbor Department has played favorites.

“There has never been, nor is there today, a conscious decision to develop one area versus another area,” Burts said. “What we have is a land-use problem that the port faces. We cannot build any kind of facility that we want anywhere in the port. Our basic business is commercial and industrial activities. We have set aside certain areas for recreational functions, but it has not been based on whether the area of the port is Wilmington, San Pedro or Terminal Island.”

Burts and other port officials say they are sensitive to the inequities--real and perceived--between San Pedro and Wilmington. (Terminal Island, the third city district in the harbor area, has no residential housing aside from that at the U.S. Coast Guard base and the federal prison.)

Study on Waterfront Access

Last year, in a significant departure from previous policy, the port agreed to help pay for a consultant to study ways to create waterfront access at the foot of Avalon Boulevard in Wilmington. Previously, the port maintained that hazardous cargo facilities and rail lines make the area unsuitable for recreational or commercial uses. The study, being conducted by Calvin Hamilton, former Los Angeles city planning chief, is expected to be released this month.

Residents in San Pedro, while recognizing that they have it better than those in Wilmington, say the port could be a better neighbor in their community, too.

“There are many fine individuals within the Harbor Department that have worked for the department and served on the commission, but as a matter of policy, the relationship between the port and the community is lacking,” said John Barbieri, a San Pedro business leader. “It is a misperception that they should operate like a private business. They are a public trust. They are located on public land. . . . Even a major corporation of that size would have a more direct and more focused effort to work with the community and contribute to the community.”

But even the port’s harshest critics say the port has made progress, and both port officials and local residents say they look forward to better relations.

“I think they now recognize the problems,” said Kim Burgher, a West Channel boat owner and businesswoman who was a leader in the battle against Kaiser International. “I think they see the need for buffer zones between industrial and residential or recreational areas. Now we just can’t let them forget.”

THE PORT: WHERE IT’S AT

1. Kaiser International Corp.: The largest exporter of coal and petroleum coke in the port, it operates the port’s $26-million bulk loader. Area residents and boaters have complained that the operation is the source of black dust that pollutes the air and damages their property.

2. West Channel/Cabrillo Beach Recreational Complex: Partially completed $100-million development that will include a 3,000-slip marina, youth aquatics camp and hotel.

3. Ports O’ Call Village: Fishing-village motif shopping and restaurant complex, built along the harbor’s Main Channel in the 1960s that attracts 1.1 million visitors a year.

4. Los Angeles World Cruise Center: Run by a consortium of seven cruise companies, it is undergoing $100-million expansion by the Harbor Department to handle five ships simultaneously and include a hotel, exhibition hall and shopping center.

5. Catalina Terminal: Beneath the Vincent Thomas Bridge, handles both sea and helicopter transportation to Santa Catalina Island.

6. Seaside Container Terminal Complex: The largest shipping container unloading facility in the port, which last year surpassed Long Beach as the West Coast leader in container shipping, placing it second nationally to the Port of New York/New Jersey.

7. Wilmington marina area: Separated from residential areas by a large Nissan automobile distribution center, contains the only recreational facilities in the Wilmington portion of the port.

8. Fish Harbor: Center of the port’s struggling fishing industry based at Terminal Island.