TRAA’s Monthly Zoom Meeting Will Happen June 12, Featuring Janet Gunter

The meeting will include information about current and new projects. San Pedro business owner and local activist Janet Gunter will be the guest. 

Here is her story.

I am an antique business owner in the Old Downtown District in San Pedro from the late 1980’s, and became part of the Revitalization Board to improve the depressed area.  After the Port of LA denied a donation to the Board, I started looking into how the Port of LA was impacting our area. Their growth had been rampant over the previous several years and it had negatively impacted the San Pedro and Wilmington communities with its massive industrial footprint. I was mostly familiar with the visual and aesthetic losses at the time.

In early 2000 Alfred Vvimmer, an architect and engineer from Austria who was looking at the port area with a development project in mind, came into my shop with a document, an Environmental Impact Report for the China Shipping terminal expansion. I had no idea what an EIR was.  In reading along with this man, I began to understand the serious deficiencies of this report and the enormous negative impacts that the local population would suffer with this major terminal expansion. All ignored losses without consideration or mitigation by the port. While the injustices of the previous port developments were not something we could appeal due to our delay ….. this project was currently in the review and public comment process.  It was then that the issue of toxic air emissions caught my attention. There was a flagrant omission of both the increased air pollution and the aesthetic consequences to be realized by the local public from this expansion.

I soon joined with two homeowner organizations in San Pedro to strengthen efforts to take legal action.  

We expanded our environmental activism to include the issue of the 25+ million gallon, Rancho / Plains All American Pipeline, butane and propane storage facility which has a strong connection to the Torrance Refinery Action Alliance.

Zoom Meeting

Time: 7 p.m., June 12

Details: RSVP with an email request for a Zoom link to TRAA President Steven Goldsmith at info@TRAA.website. Include your phone number to receive updates before the meeting. Look for the Zoom link and agenda in the morning, Wednesday, June 12.