Port spends $3.1 million to fight suit

The Port of Los Angeles has spent more than $3.1 million to fight a lawsuit by a Rancho Palos Verdes man who has had no lawyer to represent him in his case for a year and a half, according to data provided by City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to increase the hourly rate it pays attorneys from Howrey, Simon and White, one of the outside legal firms the city hired to respond to the lawsuit filed by Stanley Mosler, a longtime port critic.

Mosler filed his case in 2002, alleging that the port had misappropriated public funds by taking $1.2 billion earmarked for a fuel facility and using it to build a container terminal instead.

Delgadillo’s office defended its handling of the case, saying that it took Mosler’s demand for $3.6 billion in damages seriously.

“We put a lot of prep work in,” Delgadillo spokesman Frank Mateljan said. “Whether or not he has an attorney, he was still able to file [legal] motions, and we had to prepare as though we could go to trial.”

Wednesday’s vote boosted Howrey’s hourly rate on the case from $325 to $400.

The firm had been retained by the city to defend Larry Keller, who was executive director of the harbor department until 2004 and is, like the port, a defendant in the case.

Mosler voiced little surprise that the city had spent so much in a five-year period, saying that the city’s outside law firms behave as though they have a blank check.

Although he still has no lawyer, he argued that the city should take the case seriously.

“I’m a formidable adversary,” he said.

Mosler said he had no formal legal training, aside from a college business law class. His original attorney, Milford Dahl, dropped out of the case in 2005 on grounds that it was too expensive.

Since then, Mosler has struggled to find someone to represent him. He had an attorney for a few weeks in 2006 but has spent 18 of the last 20 months acting as his own counsel.

Mosler’s lawsuit focuses on Pier 400, a 484-acre terminal that opened in 2004 and was built with $108.6 million in federal grants and $1.1 billion in harbor revenue.

The port originally planned to put fuel facilities on the site, a landfill originally billed as Energy Island.

But by 1999, only 15 acres of the landfill were identified for fuel storage, with the remainder of the terminal set aside for Maersk, a Danish shipping line -- a decision that Mosler called a “bait and switch.”

Councilwoman Janice Hahn said she agreed with the premise of Mosler’s lawsuit, calling the switch to a massive cargo container facility “egregious.”

Residents of San Pedro and Wilmington backed the construction of Pier 400, Hahn said, because they thought that it would lead to the relocation of fuel terminals away from their neighborhoods. “It was a breach of faith between the port and the community to suddenly change the use and give it over to Maersk,” she said.

Hahn said she would like to settle the lawsuit by having the port relocate its remaining fuel facilities to Pier 400.

But Mosler said he still hoped to obtain damages that would be triple the cost of constructing the landfill.

“My action is strictly for monetary damages,” he said.

david.zahniser@latimes.com