Long Beach Base Conversion Draws Protest

What started as a potential moneymaker has deteriorated into a public relations fiasco for the Port of Long Beach as a plan to tear down the city’s shuttered naval station and build a new cargo terminal for the port’s fastest-growing customer has come under scrutiny from residents and lawmakers.

Recent attacks on the port’s plan reached a crescendo Wednesday when hundreds of placard-waving, hissing residents piled into City Hall to decry the construction of the terminal for China’s steamship line at a court-ordered public hearing.

Many derided the port’s plan to bulldoze the taxpayer-funded office buildings and dormitories on the base. Some lamented the possible loss of a wildlife habitat on the property. Others worried that the Chinese government would use the terminal to smuggle heroin or nuclear warheads.

“I do believe the Navy base needs to be put to reuse in the port area. What I don’t support is who you’ve chosen to do your business with,” Jim Fleckenstein, an airline sales agent from Long Beach, told the city’s Harbor Commission. China’s “human rights record is terrible and we’re starting these sweet deals with them.”

Port officials sat silently through most of the hearing, but have in the past defended the project as a source of needed jobs in a city that has been ravaged by defense industry layoffs.

“Business is not a bad thing. God knows Long Beach needs the business,” said protester Steve Fuchs of Chatsworth. But he asked the port to examine China’s human rights troubles before making a decision. “America recognizes patience is a virtue. Fools rush in.”

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The terminal plan became a flash point for criticism from environmentalists, history buffs, park enthusiasts and even other city governments last year as word spread that it would mean the demolition of the Long Beach Naval Station, a grassy oasis surrounded by industrial docks and oil fields.

Local preservationists mounted a legal challenge to the port’s plan and a Los Angeles judge ruled Feb. 27 that the port’s approval of the plan had been unduly rushed. He ordered the port to hold more hearings.

The Harbor Commission must “reconsider the project free and clear of any pre-committed, pre-approval or predisposition” before deciding on the project, wrote Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert H. O’Brien.

At Wednesday’s public hearing, port officials vowed to rethink the plan.

“I think it’s crucial that we not have any preconceived ideas,” said Harbor Commission President George Murchison. But he conceded that erasing four years of project history is “a very difficult thing to do.”

Earlier this week, the panel withdrew its previous approval of the project. But it did not cancel the lease it had signed for the property, nor did it order another environmental review of the project. Port officials say such steps were not necessary to comply with O’Brien’s order.

But the port now finds itself defending itself on other fronts as well. KCET television host Huell Howser, a chronicler of California history, has taken up the banner for critics of the project, using air time to blast the port’s plans and filing his own lawsuit.

Environmental organizations are charging that the port’s proposal to store contaminated silt that must be dredged for the project is inadequate, although the State Coastal Commission has approved it.

In Washington, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer sent a letter to the Pentagon asking whether the expansion of Chinese Ocean Shipping Co., a Chinese state-owned enterprise, could have “national security implications.”

The letter came in the wake of recent news reports that quoted former CIA Director Robert Gates as saying that any time an American port leases land to a foreign company, the plan should be “vetted by national security agencies.”

The letter does not mention recent suggestions that the White House may have pushed the port’s plan to curry favor with Chinese campaign donors because no evidence has emerged to support that claim, a spokesman for Feinstein said.

The port faces additional pressure from its own lease with Chinese Ocean Shipping. If the port is unable to take legal control of the land by Oct. 1, the company is free to seek terminal space at a rival port. And if the Port of Long Beach acquires the land but fails to have the terminal ready by July 1998, it must pay millions in penalties.

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Chinese Ocean Shipping’s vessels ply trade lanes across the globe, carrying cargo to Oakland, Seattle, New York, Charleston, S.C., and other U.S. harbors. But the Long Beach port has been particularly aggressive in cultivating trade with China.

Within weeks of the normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations in 1979, Long Beach sent a trade mission across the Pacific to solicit business--the first American port to do so. In 1981, the Chinese government’s steamship line began leasing terminal space at the Long Beach port, where it operates on a jammed 80 acres.

As Pacific Rim trade blossomed in recent years, Chinese Ocean Shipping began looking for additional space. The company was courted assiduously by its current landlord, Long Beach, and the adjacent Port of Los Angeles. It signed a 10-year lease with Long Beach in October.

The financial stakes in the dispute over the terminal are particularly high. At the dawn of the Pacific Rim trade boom in the 1980s and early ‘90s, the Long Beach port spared no expense to acquire more land for expansion, including a still-undeveloped 725-acre swath purchased from the Union Pacific railroad for about $400 million in 1994.

And it siphoned millions more to city government for use in bolstering downtown development.

In just six years, the port has tripled its debt, which now exceeds $1.057 billion.

That makes the planned 145-acre terminal all the more vital to the financial health of the port and the city, city officials say.

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Under the terms of the lease, the port would build the terminal at an estimated cost of $200 million, and the company would pay at least $14.5 million a year to the port.

Keeping the company in Long Beach “would certainly be a plus in being able to help with our debt,” port finance director Michael J. Slavin said.

Officials at the company’s North American headquarters in Seacaucus, N.J., did not return phone calls Wednesday.