Good Politics and Patience

To my mind, good politics is politics in which everyone wins. My hope is that we take advantage when opportunities to engage in good politics arise. About 11 years ago, I published a profile on Donald Galaz’s nonprofit, Project Street Legal, which basically aimed to do the work schools used to do, which was to prepare students for life after high school graduation, even if they didn’t go to a traditional four-year college.

He and I had many conversations about this work. In fact, I’ve had many conversations among many different people in town about this work over the years, from Howard Scott, founder of the City Lights Gateway Foundation in the Harbor Gateway to Joe Gatlin, founder of Gatlin Enterprises and vice president of the San Pedro/Wilmington Chapter of the NAACP.

For leaders like the ones I mentioned above, this battle was a lonely one, with steps forward seemingly always accompanied by a few steps back.

So, an interesting thing happened a couple of weeks ago. It’s probably best described as a partnership debut organized by Robert Bruch, a community home lending advisor with Chase Bank, and Gatlin, the founder of Gatlin Enterprises (one of a few different corporations interfacing with the Port of Los Angeles). The partnership includes the head of the local chapter of Job Corp Tom Fitzwater, Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka, Assemblyman Mike Gipson, and Lorenzo Gallo, NextWave Safety Solution. This effort is all to push the Biden-Harris Justice40 initiative, an initiative intended to confront decades of underinvestment in disadvantaged communities. The initiative aims to bring resources to communities most impacted by climate change, pollution, and environmental hazards. This debut took place on a boat tour of the harbor on Aug. 4 and on the Long Beach side on Aug. 11.

In the context of the gathering on the boat in the Port of Los Angeles harbor, this was a discussion about ensuring that skills-related jobs were accessible to our children and grandchildren and keeping open the path to the American Dream.

Since the start of the pandemic, Gene Seroka’s role as Port of Los Angeles executive director has grown to the point that its significance is comparable to the chief executive of a state or small nation as he addresses global supply issues and whose words on the performance of federal department heads have the potential of shifting global markets in one direction or the other.

So when Seroka opened his remarks by saying, “he didn’t know, what he doesn’t know, and that’s why he relies on people like Joe (Gatlin) and Robert (Bruch), Assemblymember Gipson and so many more so that the port can do what it can,” I was impressed.

That is why community members must stay engaged and continue to pressure the port to do more and better because it won’t happen if it doesn’t.
Emphasizing the hemispheric and global importance of the San Pedro Bay twin port complex, Seroka noted that for every four containers that are moved, one job is created.

“To keep building on this international trade business that creates jobs, prosperity, and opportunity for families here at the harbor enclave and throughout the Southland, and for our part, throughout the country,” he said.

Calling the twin ports’ responsibility of becoming a zero-emission port completed by the year 2030 is a tall mountain to climb and converting all of its heavy-duty trucks to be zero emission by the year 2035 an even taller mountain to climb before contrasting the cleanliness of air quality around the port complex in comparison to the major ports in the world, drawing on his experience of living abroad in a number of such ports.

This is the cleanest Port complex in the world,” he said. The unsaid part is that the ports are still the largest single source of pollution in all of Southern California.

Seroka effectively wrapped the business of industrial transition, economic growth, job creation, and equity in his comments. He then touched upon Assemblymember Mike Gipson’s working-class roots, saying:

The one who has served as a guiding light for me from the moment I walked out on this job nine years ago is our Assemblymember, Mike Gipson. Mike’s dad was a truck driver. He raised a great middle-class family by driving that truck and bought a new car for his family every seven years. My grandpa was a truck driver in New York City working for the American Can Company. He was a proud Teamster for 40 years. We got a lot in common, the bond that ties us is our love for this community.

After praising Seroka’s stewardship of the port through the pandemic, Gipson opened his comments by saying that being black and a child of Watts, he wasn’t supposed to be where he is right now based on statistics of where he was born even though I have my mother, my father, and my three sisters… but still I’m not supposed to be here.

He recalled a time when middle school students could take elective classes in wood and metal shops. A generation before, auto shop. Gipson cited a Loyola Marymount and UC Davis academic study that showed that when the trade electives were removed, the school-to-prison pipeline opened.  And those students who weren’t going to go to a two-year college weren’t prepared for the world that awaited them after leaving high school.

Gipson took the opportunity to plug the fact that he wrote the assembly bill that makes community college free for California students.

And Assembly Bill 1189, which mandates all schools in California, regardless if it’s a charter, private or public school in the state of California reintroduces technical career education to students. This comes with the price tag of somewhere around $400 million to make sure that we have the teachers and the credentialed individuals to go into our schools.

He also noted that he championed a budget allocation of $100 million in the 2022 state budget for the national training center that’s to be built in Wilmington — the same training center the port allocated more than $100 million around that same time period.

Gipson called the skills center a great partnership between the twin ports, the ILWU, and the maritime trades.

“We have bragging rights because no one else can talk about having a national training center that’s going to captivate young people to go and do these kinds of jobs that not only pay a livable wage but pay a wage that’s enough to buy a house.

Gipson equated having a piece of the American dream with home ownership, drawing the connection between that and building generational wealth.

The lesson I’ve gleaned from watching this conversation unfold over the past ten years is that patience doesn’t mean waiting passively. Every action toward a goal, even when it doesn’t immediately bear fruit, are important steps. Keep pushing, and keep building connections. The dream will manifest.