The secretive, unilateral decision to shut down the Source Dominated Station on Terminal Island was called “embarrassing” and “obscene” by activists in an online meeting with Port of LA Director of Environmental Management Chris Cannon on August 2.
The situation was discovered by Andrea Hricko, a retired USC professor of environmental health, whose subsequent public records act requests have yielded no evidence of any scientifically-based decision-making, but only budgetary concerns, apparently driven under instructions from Deputy Executive Director Michael Dibernardo.
Shutting down the station saved $77,600 according to the records, which Joe Lyou, President of the Coalition for Clean Air, called “less than a rounding error” in POLA’s annual budget. Indeed, the decision was made almost simultaneously with an April 21 staff request for an additional $6,706,441 “to cover anticipated budgetary shortfalls within the Salaries and Benefits category” along with other expenses—a figure 86 times as large as the “savings” from shutting down the monitoring site..
After 80 minutes of beating around the bush, the truth came out, as a result of relentless questioning by Hricko. “Shut down one at least one of the monitors to save money. That’s what Mike [Dibernardo] told you?” she ultimately asked. “Yes,” Cannon admitted. “Thank you for being honest,” Hricko replied.
In the end, Cannon agreed that the station monitoring should be resumed, at least temporarily, while the situation was reviewed, with a public workshop in the next two weeks, and he promised to propose this to the Board on August 6. But it wasn’t clear why Board permission was needed, since staff shut it down without asking anyone in the first place.
More troubling are three other points. First, Hricko noted, “In 2006 there were months and months and months of meetings with PCAC, ARB, AQMD and the public about where to site the monitors and the source dominated monitor was sited for very specific reasons,” which have never been publicly questioned since. “So where does Mike get the unilateral authority at the port to ask you to shut down one or more of the monitors?” she asked.
“I don’t know that there is an authority question,” Cannon replied. “I think it’s just a matter of you [making] a decision.” Which is exactly the problem Hricko was pointing to.
Second, the shut-down was justified because of supposed “redundancy,” based on verbal communication from Joel Torcolini of Leidos, which runs the monitoring program for the Port. Hricko looked at the most recent period with overlapping data, and found little support for that. “ There are like 11 days of elevations of black carbon at the Source Dominated Site and I think none in San Pedro or in Wilmington,” she said. “They don’t compare at all.”
Torcolini was present in the meeting, and explained his reasoning in terms long-term trends, which showed the highest levels of elemental carbon at the Source Dominated Site from 2005 though 2015, but the two “community stations actually show higher concentrations than the Source Dominated Station over the past five years,” he said as he displayed the data in a chart.
But Lyou questioned the basic logic of Torcolini’s line of thought. “When you’re doing this type of analyses is to be careful about extrapolating your findings in the future. What you’re doing by shutting off that monitor is saying the way that we see it right now is way it’s always going to be,” he said. But since the past shows over time, it’s more likely the future will have them as well, he argued. “So, I’m really curious to see what the next 10 years of data look like, but if you’re not going to collect that we’re not going to know,” he concluded.
A third problem is ambiguous: either the port is still not coming clean, or they’re not thinking very clearly. Canon repeatedly said that the shut-down decision was temporary. “A decision was made, temporarily, to shut it down, see if you miss it,” he said at one point. But the budget reflected a permanent shut-down, there was no written record of anything being temporary, and there is no conceivable way that the lack of data in the future could provide more information to “see if you miss it.” So it’s a nonsensical argument with no evidence to support it.
These are at least three main problems that port staff must deal with in the coming weeks. But there are sure to be others as well.