Judge Blocks Port Plan, Cites Faulty Review : Development: Officials are ordered to suspend any activity that will physically alter six sites. The projects include expansion and improvement of cargo terminals.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge has declared invalid the Port of Long Beach’s 1990 master plan for development on the grounds that harbor officials failed to properly evaluate the environmental impact of six projects.

A 24-page ruling by Judge Ronald M. Sohigian orders the port to suspend any activity that will alter the physical environment at those six sites until port planners comply with California environmental law. The six projects include expansion and improvement of cargo terminals.

Port officials are sorting out the ruling, made available to lawyers last week, to determine its impact on expansion at the booming port and to consider an appeal.

“In the scope of the port’s activity, this isn’t going to stop much,” said Henry Workman, a Los Angeles attorney representing the port.

But the court’s order appears to halt for now the planned destruction of five businesses to make way for one of the six projects, an employee parking lot for the Hanjin shipping terminal.

The five businesses--among them an oil refinery, cement company and a boat repair yard--sued the port and the city of Long Beach to halt the master plan, which called for their demise by 1995. The businesses are among the last of a dwindling number of private owners at the port, which has for years been gobbling up land in search of room to grow.

“There are only three governments I know of who believe they can do things better than private enterprise--Vietnam, Cuba and the Port of Long Beach,” Los Angeles attorney Jerrold Fadem quipped during the nine-day trial that spanned three months.

The judge ruled that the plan--which sets out the port’s vision for growth between 1990 and 1995--was based on a faulty environmental impact report. That report neglected to consider alternatives to growth or its detrimental effects, including hazardous-waste disposal, air pollution, land subsidence and oil-well abandonment, the court held.

The six projects in question make up about 20 acres, a sliver of what has become the nation’s largest port in terms of cargo. But the parking lot project would have driven out the Al Larson Boat Shop Inc., L. G. Everist Inc., Mitsubishi Cement Corp. Inc., World Oil Company Inc. and Warland Investments Ltd.

Attorney Workman likened the court’s ruling to a thorn in the port’s side, saying that harbor officials were in no hurry to proceed on five of the six projects. Construction is already under way at the sixth, however--a new marine terminal at the site of the old Ford plant. A work stoppage there could be costly if the ruling is deemed to apply to that project, he said.

Harbor officials contend that they were within the law when they adopted the master plan and noted that the document was approved by the California Coastal Commission.

“Everything was hunky-dory with the commission,” Workman said.

As for acquiring the private businesses through the port’s powers of eminent domain, the lawsuit has only forestalled the inevitable, Workman said. “If the port needs that property, they’ll get it,” he said.