By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
China Shipping is moving its operations to the Port of Long Beach, leaving the Port of Los Angeles which was the subject of a landmark lawsuit settled in 2003. The lawsuit forever altered how environmental reviews are done under the California Environmental Quality Act.
But the underlying lease agreement remains. POLA has just released a supplemental environmental impact report, or SEIR, to compensate for 11 mitigation measures that were never implemented from the original EIR approved in September 2009, along lines set out in the settlement.
These two announcements were made almost simultaneously by POLA Executive Director Gene Seroka at the port’s board meeting on June 15; the announcements left a familiar air of distrust and confusion in their wake.
“This project is a long-standing example of how the port undermines the trust of the community,” said Kathleen Woodfield, vice president of the San Pedro Peninsula Homeowner’s Coalition, a plaintiff in the original China Shipping lawsuit.
“Does POLA and C[hina] S[hipping] skate out of doing the mandatory court case settlement mitigation?” asked Jesse Marquez, founder of Coalition for Safe Environment, in an email, citing signals of what was to come. “[The Natural Resources Defense Council] took the position of being patient and wait for the POLA to come with a plan to fix things. Now, we may get nothing.”
Not so, NRDC senior attorney Melissa Lin Perella told Random Lengths News.
“The CEQA document attaches to the permit or the lease,” she said. “It doesn’t move with the tenant.”
Still, there are troubling unanswered questions. “What’s really going on with the move to begin with?” And “What are the consequences?”
“China Shipping, and its future companies, including COSCO line have made a strategic decision to move cargo away from our Berth 100 at the Port of Los Angeles to their terminal in Long Beach, because they have less stringent mitigation measures at that facility,” Seroka told the Harbor Commissioners.
“This is another example of businesses choosing the Port of Long Beach because of our outstanding customer service and unrivaled environmental record,” said Port of Long Beach Executive Director Mario Cordero, in contrast, via email.
“With China Shipping merged with COSCO, COSCO’s previously approved POLB Final EIR did not include China Shipping and therefore the significant extra environmental impacts are not being mitigated in Long Beach and Eastside Wilmington,” Marquez noted, earlier.
Things have been shifting for some time, POLA spokesman Phillip Sanfield told Random Lengths via email.
“China Shipping has moved about 60 percent of its cargo away from their terminal since July 2016,” he wrote. “Since then, independent liner service operators have been calling at the terminal under China Shipping’s existing permit. POLA, at that specific terminal, has seen a net loss of approximately 200,000 TEUs since last July.”
A spot check of daily records showed more Yang Ming ships than any other line but also Maersk, NYK and others.
Another question is who actually holds the lease at Berth 100. This past year, China Shipping merged with COSCO, China’s other mega-shipper, as part of an industry-wide wave of consolidation in the face of massive losses in the wake of the Great Recession. But the lease remains in China Shipping’s name, Sanfield said.
“If there is a change in the permit, it will go through the Harbor Commission and a public process,” he said.
Could this be yet another loophole for China Shipping to slip out of? It might seem farfetched, but after residents and environmentalists successfully sued the port for trying to build the terminal without an EIR, China Shipping turned around and successfully sued them for delaying the process. Then, China Shipping walked away from the 11 mitigation measures, which resulted in the latest SEIR. The port has a terrible record of failed relations with China Shipping. One more unexpected failure would surprise none of its critics in the community.
When Random Lengths sought further clarification, we ran into a brick wall.
“We are in the midst of the CEQA process for the SEIR,” Sanfield responded. “It’s not appropriate for the port to comment beyond what is in the document.”
Perella had not yet seen the SEIR, but explained that NRDC would be seeking to discover whether the port discloses “how much excess pollution was born by the community based on the full failure to implement certain mitigation measures for ships, trucks and equipment … [and ] if it discloses what the health and environmental consequences are from that failure — increased cancer risk, childhood asthma, premature deaths, all the normal great stuff. And then what the port is going to do about its failure.”
It will be interesting — but it starts off under decades-long cloud. None of the mess was created under the current leadership — from the mayor on down. In a sense, that’s exactly the problem. Even the best-intentioned individuals are only in place for a few years, while the projects they approve last for decades.
“The governing boards at the ports will change, several times at least, over the life of the lease, but the community and those that are harmed remain the same,” Perella said. “The community that was harmed back in the late 90s, when the port first violated CEQA is the same community that believed the port in 2008, that they were going to implement 52 mitigation measures. And, that’s the same community in 2017, that is grappling with the fact that the port broke its promise.”
“In my opinion, there was a concerted effort to keep the community in the dark, and that effort included terminating the PCAC, which was the strongest thread of consistent communication between the port and the community,” Woodfield said.
PCAC, the Port Community Advisory Committee, was created by Mayor James Hahn in 2001 and was given explicit oversight responsibilities in the 2003 China Shipping settlement. The port was obligated to monitor compliance at least annually in the Mitigation Monitoring and Reporting Program, the last of which was produced in 2011, according to a Public Records Act request filed by Random Lengths. PCAC was disbanded at exactly the same time. With outside oversight gone, internal compliance stopped, too.
PCAC’s co-chair at the time, June Smith, understands why its presence was resented. She knows how port staff tends to see them.
“When it comes to the citizens, we’re always attacking them, we’re never supporting them,” Smith said. “We always want something that’s going to cost them money, or pain, or whatever. And so, that’s an immediate hurdle, as soon as you will walk in and talk to them.”
Smith is still considering how to change that.
“We as citizens have to learn to talk better to them, in terms of money, in terms of ultimate benefit,” she said. “The problem is that they might see that 20 years down the line, but they [have] a bottom line this year.”
“This terminal has been an endless debacle, with mayors, port staff and harbor commissioners moving in and out of power, taking actions without accountability and leaving the community to live with the consequences,” Woodfield said.
Perella agreed.
“The port has a history, with respect to this terminal, of both mismanaging the CEQA process, and what seems to me the business relationship with China Shipping,” she said. “The port has a lot of excuses for why it hasn’t implemented the mitigation measures they say that they were going to back in 2008. But at the end of the day, everyone, including government agencies, are only as good as their word and now they have an even longer history of broken promises with respect to China shipping terminal, and both in terms of CEQA compliance and mitigation.”
Everyone would like to believe the port has changed: the port’s stated goals certainly have. But the port continues to deny its history and the role played by community activists, dragging it kicking and screaming into its newfound “enlightened” state. To make this new reality really work, we have to re-learn how we got here, how not to repeat mistakes.
The ongoing tensions Smith spoke of “aren’t going to be resolved in any easy way,” but they can be addressed much more diligently.
“That’s what PCAC did,” she said. “It provided the forum for us to come together in comity and reasonableness when we had … to work things out. Now that that is gone, we’re back to the old ways of paranoia on both sides.”
It would be good, she suggests, for Mayor Eric Garcetti to “consider reconstructing something that will provide a forum to allow us to continue to work both short-term and long-term interests for the community, for the immediate community as well as the greater LA community, and the nation.”
Stakeholder working groups, which Garcetti has already committed to with respect to global warming goals, are a good idea. But they leave out the biggest stakeholders of all — the community as a whole, both current and future.
“My son was in a baby stroller when I first got involved,” Woodfield said. “Now he is in college.”