The Changing Face of San Pedro
Noel Park's Well Deserved Reputation
By Paul Rosenberg, Editor

There are those—particularly in higher echelons at the Port of Los Angeles (POLA)—who  see  Noel Park as an ogre, mercilessly attacking them.  But as Park likes to say, “The Port creates its own monsters.” 

As proof, Park can point to a letter he wrote to Bruce Seaton congratulating him on his appointment as Chief Operating Officer in January, 1999. Park, who knew Seaton from years of working for a Port contractor building docks, takes note of the longstanding adversarial relationship between POLA and the community, and speaks of “a wonderful opportunity to change that relationship.”  Park went on to praise Seaton for his “well deserved reputation for fair and evenhanded dealing, for creating partnerships instead of adversaries, for finding win-win solutions, and for using these talents to continually advance the best interests of the Port.”

Another prominent local activist kidded Park, asking him if he’d gone over and waxed Seaton’s car afterwards. To this day, the letter is known as “the car-wash letter.” Even today Park retains a kernel of that naive faith, as two of his co-plaintiffs in the China Shipping case—Janet Gunter and Andrew Mardesich—can attest.

 “He is far more generous and hopeful” than anyone else “of those who have been fighting them [the Port],” said Gunter.

“He’s too good of a person,” Mardesich added.

Camilla Townsend Kocol, chair of the Port Community Advisory Committee (P-CAC), on which Park serves, says, “Noel is a very reasonable man and he wants to have hope, he wants to believe that people are going to do their best.”

Although sorely tested, his faith in what’s possible—in the potential of people coming together to build a better future—has already had an enormous impact on San Pedro,

Kocol, calls him “an excellent writer,” who researches deeply. “He’s able to translate a lot of what he’s studied into words that people who aren’t as studied can deal with.” But these talents reflect something deeper—a mode of operating that finds, honors and brings together as many sources of insight and inspiration as he can possibly find. He is not just the opposite of the ogre Port officials imagine him to be, he is the opposite of the isolated individual as well.

Like many who have shaped San Pedro’s  history, Park was not born here.  “I went to Venice High, so I was used to living close to the ocean. I always wanted to live somewhere with a view,” he recalls, “When I got my first job, and my first paycheck, I found San Pedro.  It was the only place I could afford to live.”  The year was 1965.

But if necessity brought him here, he remained by choice. In the early 1970s he got involved in GOO Two (Get Oil Out Two) a local group opposed to offshore oil drilling, formed by people like fellow P-CAC member June Smith, her late husband Greg Smith, and Bill Samaris—people Park still cites today as inspirations.  “They wanted to put the drilling rigs outside the breakwater,” Smith recalls, “And we thought it would interfere with shipping lanes,” among other problems.  She remembers Noel then as “always interested... but he never was a leader.”

That came later—only after leaving construction and building his own business—J&D Corvette—around his avocation, his life-long love of cars. His move toward civic leadership started with his children’s education, when his son Chris was going to Dana Middle School in the early 1990s, and lasted several years after Chris went on to college.

This is where Kocol first encountered him. “He used to sit on the District K advisory boards,” she recalls.  She saw him in meetings for years, she recalls, “but I really got to know him as Harbor Commissioner.”

In the late 1990s, his involvements proliferated.  Through his neighborhood association, he became active in the San Pedro and Peninsula Homeowners Coalition (SPPHC), which he would eventually lead.  “In the late 1970s,” Park recalled in these pages (“A Long Time Coming,” RLN, May 2002),  “founding members of the Coalition, typified by the late Greg Smith and the late Goldie Otters, were testifying at Harbor Commission meetings and writing letters, expressing deep concern about the impacts of the Port’s expansion on the San Pedro and Wilmington communities.” 

He also began participating in downtown development issues spearheaded by the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), eventually joining the Pacific Corridor Community Advisory Committee (PC-CAC), the CRA’s local advisory body. It began at a large public meeting. He was deeply impressed with slide presentation by CRA planner Rafik Khan, which explained why San Pedro had become so blighted.

“He had rented a helicopter, and he had a whole mosaic of photos,” showing numerous places along the waterfront with no public access, and the streets all ending at Harbor Boulevard, also sharply limiting waterfront access, Park remembers. Khan’s message for successful development was simple: “reconnect the downtown to the waterfront.” It has become a mantra now, but Khan is the one who started it.

Originally, says Park, the CRA “drew up the boundaries of its redevelopment district to include the Port and the Port refused to do it. Here is this huge public agency that refuses to cooperate with its sister agency, and I was deeply offended.” Park calls this refusal, “a terrible blow from which it [the Pacific Corridor project] has yet to fully recover.” 

(Later, the Port and the CRA would sign a memorandum of understanding pledging close cooperation, but the Port refused repeated requests to realize its provisions—particularly to establish a community advisory committee for downtown/waterfront coordination. Most recently, Councilwoman Janice Hahn’s taskforce created to fill this gap has been stymied by the Port’s failure to participate.)

Stung by this experience, Park began attending Harbor Commission meetings, and saw them “disrespect Andy Mardesich,” then-President of the SPPHC. Most famously, Mardesich expressed the desire to establish two-way communication between the Port and the Community. “I don’t believe in two-way communications, Mr. Marde- sich,” was the reply of then-Harbor Commission President Ted Stein.

“During that period,” Mardesich recalls, “I handed some packages I received from the port to Noel.”

“I was just stunned,” Park says. “I couldn’t believe what was I reading. It was berth 48-52. What really upset me the most was the fact that they claimed there was no aesthetic impact and no impact of light and glare, which was a blatant lie. That and the fact that it was 60 percent built by the time they did the EIR [environmental impact report].”

Then, in 2000, came the China Shipping terminal proposal. Participating in the public comment process would give SPPHC standing for the lawsuit that would come. But at the time, they sought to avoid confrontation.

“We all start off this way, where if I go in and I’m rational, logical and kind in nature they will see my plight and that of the community,” Gunter explains. “When Noel came in I had already had a couple of years experience with the Port and the door slam experience.” Park was hopeful then. “He patted me on the back and said ‘you need to take a little different approach.’ But before long he started feeling the door slammed in his face as well.”

One proposal SPPHC put forth called for an Impact Mitigation Advisory Committee (IMAC), the concept that later became P-CAC. Vern Hall, a former Port Chief Engineer, had created a similar advisory committee in the 1980s to get the Cabrillo Marina built.  “At the time,” Hall recalls, “Cabrillo Marina had been on the books for probably thirty years.” Over that time, a wide range of groups had weighed in opposing or supporting different aspects of the proposal. Hall came up with the idea of an advisory committee to include all of them—which the Port established, with consulting support from EDAW.  The resulting recommendation was accepted by the Port and then built.

Hall dug up this model “when Noel and I and some others began to think about IMAC.” The original model was a one-shot affair.  IMAC was intended to permanent.  When the Port rejected it, SPPHC scaled back and suggested an IMAC just for China Shipping. In December 2000, that was also rejected.

Two other threads date from this era.  The Gurney’s consulting firm RRM had done a remarkable job of developing community consensus for the Venice Boardwalk, and was brought in to do similar work in San Pedro, drawing as many as 450 people to a single planning workshop.  “A lot of people came out,” as a part of that process, Park says. “They raised expectations. That’s a good thing.”

It also raised awareness, thanks partly to Park. Sometime in 2000, he attended a town hall meeting in Carson in 2000, where he asked about diesel exhaust. Barry Wallerstein, executive director of the Air Quality Management District (AQMD) responded. “He put up these maps from the MATES II study, and that was an epiphany for me,” one he quickly shared, says Park. “Whenever Gurney would have a meeting, I would stand up with 100 copies of these maps.”

In the end, Park says, “Port staff... thought they were being usurped” by RRM, which, “resulted in them being excluded from any port work after [then Port Commissioner John] Wentworth left.”  But the momentum for change was accelerating.

Alongside Port issues, Park was also involved in a coalition of airport activists. From this coalition, he borrowed the idea of challenging candidates to respond to their concerns in the LA City mayoral and city council elections of 2001—during the primaries, when the block of voters they represented could be decisive in determining who made the run-off. SPPHC even co-sponsored a council candidate forum at the Warner Grand Theatre with the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce. “We made our pitches crystal clear,” Park explains. The result was an unprecedented commitment to community participation and mitigation of Port impacts.

But this did not change the Port’s position on China Shipping terminal, which, despite its reliance on a four-year old EIR, had been approved in the spring of 2001. POLA’s new board, appointed by Mayor Hahn, could have reversed course, but did not, as the SPPHC and others sued to stop it.  Janet Gunter and Leo Buccellato took the lead in approaching the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which at first was hesitant to take the case.  But they made up their minds, as Noel recalls, “[a]fter a meeting with Port staff in which NRDC representatives got to experience their legendary arrogance first hand.”  They lost a lower court ruling, but won on appeals “The Port’s position is supported neither factually nor legally,” the court wrote, and the State Supreme Court denied the Port’s appeal.

Because they hadn’t commented on the China Shipping proposal, Wilmington activists lacked legal standing, and weren’t part of the lawsuit. But Jesse Marquez, of the Wilmington Coalition for a Safe Environment, provided valuable documentation, particularly photographs that were vital in granting the injunction that actually halted construction. They were also involved in strategizing the appeal, and bringing three generations of Wilmington residents to court proceedings, where the Port sought to portray Wilmington as happy with their plans.  In the end, the China Shipping settlement required half the aesthetic mitigation funds be spent in Wilmington.

“Noel provided us hope and inspiration that if we could unite together we could accomplish things we had been dreaming about for years,” Marquez explains.  “That’s why Wilmington has the utmost respect for Noel and the other San Pedro residents who demanded that we be included.”

In turn, Park credits Marquez for “far surpassing” his own paper trail of comments in recent EIR proceedings. “Jesse has just created the paper trial of the living world,” Park marvels. “ His efforts has just eclipsed everything that’ I’ve done.” What’s more, Margquez, in turn, has supported activists in Long Beach and Carson, teaching them to do more of the same.

Park sees a great deal that remains to be done—improving air quality, reducing traffic congestion, aesthetic mitigation, promoting balanced waterfront development for both Wilmington and San Pedro, and environmental justice.

“The port has never acknowledged any responsibility toward environmental justice,” he points out.  “Their expansion is the epitome of injustice. Their expansion disproportionately impacts minority communities.”

While all these issues have been addressed by Mayor Hahn and Councilwoman Hahn since their election in 2001, changes on the ground have lagged considerably.  Institutions as large and insular as the Port don’t change overnight.  It is community activism that generates political will, and that activism needs to continue, and build, for real change to come about.  That’s why, in one sense, Park’s greatest legacy is the activism of those inspired by his own belief in people “doing their best,” as Kocol put it.

Meanwhile, Park is still waiting for a reply to the car-wash letter.

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