Activists Urge Council to Restore Port Oversight

By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor

Plaintiffs in the China Shipping lawsuit accused the Port of Los Angeles of breaking the law and called for new oversight structures to be put into place at a city council committee meeting on Dec. 15.

They spoke of reinstating the Port Community Advisory Committee, PCAC, or a similar independent entity to ensure the port’s future compliance with its legal obligations. The committee was investigating the port’s long-secret failure to enforce 11 mitigation provisions contained in the environmental impact report, which allowed the China Shipping terminal to expand. It met in closed session to discuss its options after hearing public comments and testimony.

The port’s failure to meet clean truck obligations alone “has put the port in the position where it’s looking at maybe $200, $250 million liability,” said David Pettit, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which represented those plaintiffs. “They’re looking at another may be $75 million liability to come up to snuff on the yard equipment,” he added, as well as other costs from unmet past obligations “that could be another $50 or $100 million.”

“What transpired is in fact criminal,” said Janet Gunter, one of three initial China Shipping plaintiffs. “It was [an] executive director of a public agency that willfully violated a court mandate.”

“There is no doubt in my mind that the PCAC [environmental impact report] and Air Quality subcommittees would have discovered the China Shipping failure to meet the EIR mitigation measures,” said Chuck Hart, president of San Pedro Peninsula Homeowners United, a China Shipping plaintiff. “Therefore it is reasonable to assume PCAC’s demise was necessary to pull off this conspiracy—and that’s exactly what it is. It’s a conspiracy, from the highest levels of the city government to the lowest. It cannot happen again.”

It was not just a conspiracy of silence, Andrea Hricko, a professor at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, pointed out.

“Officials from the Port of LA, including Geraldine Knatz and Chris Cannon, including the mayor of Los Angeles regularly made comments after 2009 implying or specifically stating that China Shipping was meeting all of its mitigation measures,” she said.

“Locals used to joke that the port only listened to San Pedro and Wilmington residents if we sued them,” said port activist Peter Warren. “Turns out the port doesn’t even abide by court-approved settlements and EIRs.”

“We are committed to seeing that something like this never happens again,” POLA’s Executive Director Gene Seroka told the committee, but said nothing about how to ensure that — particularly after his tenure ends.

“The noncompliance and withholding of information and violation of the court-approved settlement is so egregious that I would urge the plaintiffs to seek appointment of an overseer or receivership for the Port of Los Angeles with regard to compliance with all environmental laws and court approved settlements,” Warren said.

“This is not the first time the Port of LA has ignored laws,” Gunter pointed out. “Until this agency is properly reprimanded, the port will never feel the pressure to actually follow the laws set down for it.”

She urged the council members “to call for a criminal investigation by the federal government for this agency,” in order to demonstrate “your genuine concern about such a flagrant disregard of the law.”

“When you conspire to violate state law, that’s a crime,” Pettit said. “When Ms. Gunter says that crimes have been committed, I think that’s not a wild statement.”

What’s more, there was good reason to suspect a much larger problem, and the NRDC was beginning to examine other agreements.

Beyond that, “The solution I think we need is some kind of public oversight,” Pettit said. “Experience has now shown that the port frankly can’t be trusted to manage these mitigations it’s agreed to under [California Environmental Quality Act, the law governing environmental impact reports], and that we need to go outside the port, whether it’s PCAC reconstituted or some other outside body. I think to restore the credibility to the port and avoid what may be a storm of litigation for the city and the port, there needs to be some kind of outside oversight and transparency.”

“A knowledgeable community committee with financial support to hire experts such as the EIR committee under PCAC must monitor the future agreement at the very least,” Warren said. “These meetings need to be Brown Acted [subject to state open meetings law], and the port should provide all necessary monitoring information as well as financial support, as with PCAC, to hire experts.”

For a cost of less than $100,000 a year, when PCAC was dismantled, the port could have avoided liabilities more than a thousand times that today.