Port Plan Faces Last-Ditch Protest

Some exporters, truck drivers and homeowners are protesting a program that begins today to push cargo operations at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports to nights and Saturdays, arguing that it fails to consider their health and financial needs.

Proponents of the cargo effort, dubbed OffPeak, hope that longer hours at the ports’ 13 cargo terminals, combined with new fees on containers moved during peak hours, will prevent the snarls that nearly brought the ports to a standstill last summer.

If OffPeak succeeds, they say, pollution from idling trucks and daytime freeway congestion would be reduced and the ports would operate more efficiently, thereby preserving jobs.

But efforts to modify the program or stop it outright are mounting and include lastminute appeals to state and local politicians, port administrators and the commissioners who oversee operations at the harbor.

Drivers complain that the shift will force them to work nights without additional pay or benefits. Exporters say that the choice between a hefty peak-time fee and the additional costs of night and weekend staffing is a recipe for disaster. And at least one homeowner group fears the noise and pollution they suffer during the day will now fill up their nights as well.

“We want them to suspend the start of the program,” said Roger Holman, former president of the Coolidge Triangle Homeowners Assn. The association’s 550 homes sit near the junction of the 91 and 710 freeways, a busy corridor for port trucks.

Howard Wallace, president of the 47-year-old Los Angeles Grain Terminal in Long Beach, has another reason to oppose the program: its anticipated effect on his company’s bottom line. Like most port exporters -- those who work with agricultural commodities, scrap metal and waste paper -- his product moves in bulk sizes, but with a low profit margin.

“We could lose 50% of our business,” said Wallace, who fears that the Midwest grain producers who pay his company to load their goods into cargo containers will simply shift to competitors near Pacific Northwest ports. The fees, Wallace said, “will raise our costs, drive business from the area and reduce our ability to compete in international marketplaces.”

A rally was held Friday, with another planned for today, in support of the roughly 13,000 truck drivers who ply their trade at the ports and upon whom the success or failure of the off-peak hours program largely rests.

One of those drivers is Melnis Mouradian, 58, of Van Nuys, who was on the road Friday with a cargo of hazardous material and didn’t have time to go to the rally, which was sparsely attended.

“I am not going to drive in this program,” said Mouradian, who puts in as many as 1,000 miles a week in short hauls to Rancho Dominguez, Riverside and other locations in his white 1999 Freightliner big rig. Mouradian said that his wife was in poor health and needed his attention at night and that the couple lacked health insurance.

“If they were going to pay me more to drive at night, I might. If it’s going to be the same pay, it doesn’t make any sense to be out at night,” Mouradian said.

Truckers and their advocates say that some of the money raised to operate the extended hours ought to go into the drivers’ wallets as increased pay for working at night.

“Every party to the agreement -- the clerks and the dockworkers and the terminals -- is getting extra money from this program except one, the truck drivers who are going to have to haul all of the freight,” said Ron Carver, assistant director of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ Port Division, which conducted Friday’s rally.

Carver’s union has tried to organize port drivers, 80% of whom work for themselves and own their own trucks.

Officials at PierPass, the nonprofit group set up by port terminal operators to run the extended hours program, say that the program is essential to prevent a repeat of last summer’s traffic jam, when ships sat offshore for days while waiting to be unloaded. What’s more, the program will create 350 to 550 jobs as employees are hired by the marine terminals to work the new hours, the group said.

Imports, mostly from China, have fueled a nearly 40% increase in traffic at the ports since 2000. There has been so much traffic that the terminal operators said that they could no longer keep gates open from only 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays.

Now, the gates will remain open nearly around the clock on weekdays and from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturdays. A fee of $40 to $80 will be assessed on each container that moves between the peak weekday hours of 3 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Port officials say that it will take a year or more to judge the success of the program.

Most of the nation’s largest retailers have embraced the plan and say that they plan to move a considerable portion of their goods at night and on Saturdays. The importers account for the bulk of the cargo that travels through the nation’s largest port complex each year.

The exporters say they shouldn’t be penalized for daytime operations because their business at the ports has increased relatively little and therefore hasn’t contributed to the congestion at the ports.

“The big box importers know where the burden for this congestion comes from,” said Steve Young, president of Allan Co. of Baldwin Park, one of the largest independently owned recycling companies in the western United States.

Young said his profit, which averages about 2.4% on each $2,500 container of waste paper, would be severely hit by the peak surcharge or the cost of hiring more staff to work at night.

State Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach), one of the elected officials who has received eleventh hour appeals about the OffPeak program, said he is sympathetic.

“I would hope that there could be a different fee structure for those companies with a small profit margin,” Lowenthal said. “And sooner or later, the status of these truck drivers has to be elevated.”