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Padilla, Tillis, Cárdenas, HHS Secretary Join FCC Commissioner to Announce Proposal for Improved Routing of Wireless Calls to the 9-8-8 Lifeline

Reporters Desk
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Padilla, Tillis, Cárdenas, HHS Secretary Join FCC Commissioner to Announce Proposal for Improved Routing of Wireless Calls to the 9-8-8 Lifeline

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Senators Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), co-founders of the bipartisan Senate Mental Health Caucus, other officials, and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra joined Federal Communications Commission or FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel March 21 to announce a critical step to improve the 9-8-8 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

The proposal contains provisions from the lawmakers’ Local 9-8-8 Response Act of 2023, which would expedite the process of connecting 9-8-8 Lifeline callers with their nearest call center so they can receive appropriate care and resources from mental health professionals and local public safety officials as quickly as possible, while protecting user privacy.

The bipartisan 9-8-8 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline has been critical for supporting Americans in crisis, but currently, calls to the hotline are routed by area code rather than by the caller’s location. As awareness of the hotline increases, it is crucial to ensure that operators can quickly connect callers to a range of mental health services and a full continuum of care.

“The FCC took a vital step today toward making it easier for Americans in crisis to efficiently access lifesaving support,” said Senator Padilla. “Senator Tillis and I made a promise that our bipartisan Senate Mental Health Caucus would work to address our nation’s mental health epidemic and make sure those in crisis know they are not suffering alone. We’re already seeing the impacts we can make by shining a spotlight on these issues and working together. Today’s proposal follows our legislative efforts to quickly and safely connect callers on the 9-8-8 hotline to the local mental health support services they need.”

The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking or NPRM announced today seeks to address the discrepancies and inefficiencies of the current system by proposing the adoption of a rule that would require a georouting solution to be implemented for all wireless calls to the 9-8-8 Lifeline while balancing the privacy needs of individuals in crisis. Georouting refers to technical solutions that enable calls to be directed based on the location of the caller without transmitting the caller’s precise location information. These solutions would permit wireless calls to the 9-8-8 Lifeline to be directed to nearby crisis centers based on factors such as the cell tower that originated the call rather than the area code of the wireless device used to place the call. This system would maintain any privacy requirements carriers may have about the nature of such sensitive calls.

Reliable, timely access to the 9-8-8 Lifeline is crucial to linking people experiencing a suicidal or mental health crisis with immediate support. The 9-8-8 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline offers 24/7 safe, confidential support free of charge to suffering individuals nationwide.

Details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faEduXrDwOk

Back to the Future: Controversy Over California’s Clean Transportation Plan

Paul Rosenberg
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Back to the Future: Controversy Over California’s Clean Transportation Plan

Public comments on proposed plan call for new (actually old) direction.

Almost 80% of California’s $4 billion clean transportation program went to subsidizing combustion fuels, rather than zero-emission vehicles and infrastructure last year — an imbalance that’s wildly out of step with the rest of California’s climate and environmental justice policy framework. In December, staff at the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which oversees the program, put out a proposed amendment to extend these practices decades into the future. It drew strong criticism in public comments from a wide range of organizations and experts, which has resulted in a delay in the CARB board’s vote on the staff proposal.

Perhaps most striking, Jim Duffy, a former staffer who oversaw the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) program for more than a year, decried its “transition from an innovative regulation into a swag bag for venture capitalists, big oil, big agriculture, and big gas, increasingly coming at the expense of low- and moderate-income Californians.”

“Throughout these comments, I urge the Board to adopt many of the recommendations from the Environmental NGO and Environmental Justice Communities,” Duffy wrote. “Industrial stakeholders will lead you to believe that these recommendations are a radical departure from the history and philosophy of the LCFS. The truth is that most of the LCFS provisions and credit-generating opportunities that the environmental community wants to eliminate, phase out, or amend were not allowed in the original regulation.”

Under the original provisions, Duffy noted, “Dairy projects did not receive avoided methane credit and would have been assessed approximately the same carbon intensity as landfill gas.” Also, “Soy biodiesel and renewable diesel were only marginally better than fossil diesel and included a very large land use change penalty that more accurately reflected the likelihood that using soy oil to produce fuel indirectly contributes to tropical deforestation.”

As for the recommendations Duffy referenced, one comment letter — signed by 39 groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, and the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment — warned that “the LCFS proposed by staff is misaligned with electrification goals, worsens environmental injustices, and will continue to flounder from a glut of lipid-based biofuels and livestock biogas that will undercut the credit price.”

Another joint comment — signed by 30 groups, including Earthjustice, SEIU, 350.org and Communities for a Better Environment — warned that “In contrast to California’s groundbreaking regulations designed to accelerate zero emissions transportation options, the LCFS continues to favor combustion-based biofuels and biogas that contribute to pollution,” and that as a result, “CARB staff’s proposal passes regressive costs onto drivers for dubious benefit.” Its recommendations included an end to special treatment for biogas: “Direct CARB staff to initiate a rulemaking to directly regulate methane emissions from manure management to achieve the methane reductions required by Senate Bill 1383,” as well as “Capping the unrestricted use of lipid-based biofuels.”

Separately, Earthjustice wrote, “Unless major modifications are made, the Staff Proposal would further entrench LCFS subsidies for combustion fuel pathways that exacerbate climate and environmental injustices. … Major changes are needed in this rulemaking to ensure the LCFS supports rather than thwarts attainment of California’s climate, air quality, and equity goals.”

While the LCFS is complex, and the weightiest comments are as well, the basic choice was potentially simplified last August, when CARB’s Environmental Justice Advisory Committee approved an alternative proposal, two key elements of which were “reasonable and consistent with CARB priorities,” resulting in “faster and greater support for CARB EV policies,” according to a Stanford University study headed by Michael Wara. The EJAC alternative more than doubled electric vehicle subsidies through 2030, from $15 billion up to $34 billion. The two key elements are: first, a cap on crop-based biofuels and second an end to “avoided methane” credits for methane captured at dairy farms. The over-supply of these two fuels has decimated the program’s credit market, depriving the program of funds needed for electric vehicles and infrastructure.

 

The Bio-Fuel Mirage

Crop-based biofuels have exploded most dramatically — particularly renewable diesel (RD), made from fats and oils to be identical to fossil diesel, unlike the earlier product, bio-diesel, an additive like ethanol that can only be used when blended. Bio-diesel and RD are collectively known as bio-based diesel, and they now account for 59% of diesel in California — but much less nationwide. U.S. RD production increased 400% between 2019 and 2022, and it is set to double again this year, according to Jeremy Martin, director of fuels policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. As with electric vehicles, California has led the way: bio-based diesel now accounts for almost 60% of diesel in the state. But there’s a difference: electric vehicle sales are booming across the U.S., but RD consumption — already low outside California — is actually decreasing nationwide outside California. It’s not a scalable long-term solution, but a mirage we could never get to.

To convert all U.S. diesel to RD in 2022 would have taken 10 times the total U.S. vegetable oil production or 80% of global production that year, Martin explains. And that says nothing about gasoline. In short, RD is a supplemental short-term energy source in the grand scheme of things.

Even in the short term, increasing supply puts pressure on food prices and agriculture, threatening deforestation that only makes the climate crisis worse. The models CARB uses to assess such systemic costs (known as ‘indirect land-use change’ — ILUC) are seriously out-of-date and produce outlier values, according to a recent survey by the Environmental Protection Agency, indicating that CARB’s ILUC estimates are “too low — and perhaps significantly too low,” Wara and his team wrote in their comments. What’s more, Wara’s team and others are still waiting for CARB staff to release data underlying CARB’s analysis. The uncertainty involved further supports the EJAC call for capping biofuel credits — at the very least until more trustworthy modeling data can be evaluated.

Dirty Dairy Gas

The situation with “avoided methane” credits for methane captured via digesters at large-scale dairy farms is even more at odds with California’s climate goals. At the same time, it gives favored treatment to the most polluting farms. Dairy digester methane is treated, unlike methane in any other sector. Instead of being directly regulated with a goal of reducing it to zero — which CARB is authorized to do this year, according to a 2016 law — the methane itself is treated as an inevitable product of milk production. So any methane captured by digesters is treated as a positive transportation good far exceeding that of wind- or solar-generated electricity.

By CARB’s metric of “carbon intensity” (CI), renewable electricity may have CI of zero, but digester methane is given a CI of a mind-boggling -245, the only fuel with a negative CI. As a result, Earthjustice noted in its comments, “Despite making up less than 1% of fuel energy used in the state, livestock methane is extremely negative, outlier CI scores has allowed it to receive almost 20% of the credits in the LCFS program to date. In other words, livestock methane significantly dilutes the supply of LCFS credits relative to the actual fossil fuel displaced.”

The lack of logic is staggering. “Nothing about livestock methane’s chemistry makes it better than landfill or wastewater methane at fighting climate change,” Earthjustice noted. “Instead, it receives extreme, outlier carbon intensity scores purely because CARB has neglected to treat agriculture the way it treats virtually every other major source of GHG emissions.”

The illogic is deepened by the fact that California has an alternative manure management program that provides financial assistance for implementing non-digester manure management practices, such as composting and conversion to or expansion of pasture-based systems.

“Transportation fuel regulations are not the right tool to reduce dairy methane pollution,” Martin argues in a mid-February article. “As a general rule, public policies are more effective when they directly address the problem they are trying to solve.” He goes on to illustrate the problems of the indirect LCFS approach, proposing “a Low Carbon Milk Standard that operated alongside the LCFS. This hypothetical Low Carbon Milk Standard [LCMS] would resemble the LCFS but focus on milk rather than gasoline and diesel. It would assign a carbon intensity score to milk sold in California and set a steadily decreasing standard for the industry.”

While opponents of directly regulating dairy methane argue that it would drive dairies out of California, Martin explains that an LCMS would apply to out-of-state milk as well as in-state milk — just as the LCFS applies to out-of-state energy. So there would be no escaping the regulatory requirements for those wishing to sell milk in California. And it would be equitable: It would not give special treatment to the largest farms, using the most environmentally damaging methods.

In its comments, Earthjustice noted that “virtually all” the CARB board members who spoke about livestock methane crediting raised concerns, and quoted from six of them, after which it stated, “The Board thus clearly indicated support for reducing avoided methane crediting practices relative to the initial proposal from September. Yet, Staff have swung wildly in the other direction in the Staff Proposal. To our knowledge, it is unprecedented for the Staff to advance a major policy change that runs directly counter to the stated concerns of many Board members.”

 

Other Problems And Opportunities

While capping crop-based biofuels and ending credits for dairy methane are the two most consequential changes advocated, there are other bad practices to eliminate. An example from the group comment by Earthjustice, SEIU, CBE and others is “Eliminating credits for Direct Air Capture (DAC).” It goes on to explain:

A DAC facility in Louisiana has no apparent bearing on the carbon intensity of California’s fuels, yet the CARB staff proposal would allow such projects to generate credits. Further, any project that aims to reduce atmospheric carbon by capturing carbon in the ambient air will fail to achieve net emissions reductions if those reductions are offset by further pollution from fossil fuels in California, the effective impact of including such projects in the LCFS.

That same comment also calls for prohibiting credit for projects that use enhanced oil recovery (injecting heat, water, chemicals, or gasses into the oil reservoir): “The Legislature and Governor have made clear with the passage of SB 1314 that enhanced oil recovery has no role to play in meeting California’s carbon neutrality goals. Accordingly, such projects should not generate LCFS credits.”

There are also positive changes to be made. The same letter cites two related to mass transit. First, “Adopt a credit multiplier for zero-emission mass transit vehicles, including school and transit buses.” The comment goes on to explain:

The Scoping Plan [adopted by CARB in 2022] calls for a massive reduction in vehicle miles traveled to meet State goals. The LCFS’ current methodology undervalues zero-emission mass transit vehicles’ contributions to reducing the carbon-intensity of California transportation fuels by ignoring their ability to help shift more Californians out of dirtier single-occupancy vehicles.

Second, the letter recommends, “Allow full credit-generation for fixed-guideway systems (e.g., light rail and trolley buses),” and explains:

Functioning, zero-emission transit agencies are vital for the mobility of low-income Californians and for reaching climate targets. Currently, the LCFS imposes a unique penalty on transit agencies by reducing their ability to generate credits for vehicles on fixed guideway systems installed before 2011.

There are many more technical points raised in different comment letters. But they all come down to one thing: whether to continue the current path with minor tweaks, as CARB staff proposes, or reorient and refocus on the LCFS’s original goal of a zero-emission future. In his letter, Duffy summed up:

At this point, the LCFS gravy train has gained so much momentum that the only recourse from the staff’s perspective is to quickly ramp up the targets, risking large costs to low-income gasoline consumers and public backlash. However, there is another option. Restoring many aspects of the original regulation would better focus the program on achieving California’s long-term zero-emission transportation goals and at a much lower cost to the California consumer.

CARB staff has promised a mid-April workshop “to discuss potential refinements to the proposed regulatory amendments.” But given the breadth and depth of comment letter criticism, a much more fundamental rethinking is called for.

 

Spicy Lentil Water ―The Ultimate Protein Drink

Ari LeVaux
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Spicy Lentil Water ―The Ultimate Protein Drink

 

If we needed more evidence that American society is in decline, consider how little respect we give lentils. Pound for pound, these legumes quietly deliver more nutrition to more people than anything else growing on earth. One serving of this lightweight bean contains twice the antioxidants of blueberries, about half your daily fiber needs, loads of folate, iron, and other minerals, and more protein than any plant that isn’t soy. Being legumes, they can grow on marginal soils, and improve the soils with each planting.

The trick to cooking lentils is to treat them more like pasta than rice. Don’t try to get them to absorb all the liquid. Instead, cook them in plenty of liquid and then strain them. But do save the liquid. It may be the most important part. More on that soon.

Indian farmers produce at least 50 varieties of lentil. It’s probably not a coincidence that India is also one of the few places I’ve visited where vegetarian options are usually more appealing than meat-based, thanks in part to that hot lentil action. If you are down with animal proteins but maybe don’t have a ton at your disposal, you can always add a ham hock or stew meat to the lentil soup.

In North America, most lentils are grown in the upper Columbia River basin. But production is migrating east, over the continental divide and onto the Northern Plains, where grain farmers are planting rotations of lentils, if not focusing exclusively on them. Being so good for the soil, the lentils themselves are almost a bonus, a byproduct of a healthy cropland system. And while lentil cheerleaders will sometimes gush about how easy it is to cook lentils, it’s not necessarily as easy to make them tasty. A thick, bland gruel that may also be too crunchy? No problem. But making lentils taste good with a palatable texture takes more finesse. And again, don’t forget that water. For some, like my friend Norman, that water is more important than the lentils themselves.

I met Norman years ago under a massive tamarind tree in Kona, Hawaii. I was there because a mutual friend had told me about Norman’s proprietary spice mix. Norman generously told me how to make his spice mix, and explained how he uses them to flavor a lentil-based dish called rasam (pronounced like awesome). In giving me this recipe, Norman taught me a lot about lentil cookery.

Norman is an Indologist, aka an expert on all things India, and the method by which rasam is prepared pertains to the reason India consumes half the world’s lentils. That reason was dahl, the simple yet satisfying Indian lentil soup. Rasam is made with the water used to pre-cook lentils before they are cooked into dahl. It’s flavored with Norman spices, tamarind and tomato.

It all comes together into a thin, reddish brown soup that is full of tang and spice, balanced against the savory undertones of that rich lentil water.

Rasam is so satisfying that the lentils themselves are basically a byproduct. It’s up to the chef to figure out what to do with them, and there are many options. You could use the lentils to make dahl of course. Or lentil hummus. Or add them to tabouli or a salad. Me having lentils reminds me of when my son had a hammer, and everything looked like a nail. When I have cooked lentils on my hands, I realize that I can add them to anything. The last time I made rasam, as it happens, I was also boiling some meaty soup bones for a stew. So I added the lentils to my stew, along with the usual carrots, onions and celery. As I had some of the Norman spices on my hands, I used them to flavor my meaty lentil stew.

Norman Spices

1 T cumin

1 T coriander

1 T mustard seeds

1 tsp black pepper

Just a few pieces of fenugreek

In a heavy-bottomed pan, toast the seeds on medium heat, stirring often until browned but not burned. In a mortar and pestle or spice grinder, grind the toasted spice seeds into a powder. Store in an airtight container.

Rasam

four servings

1 cup red or yellow lentils

8 cups water

2 tablespoons oil or butter

½ cup minced onions

2 tablespoons rasam

1 can diced tomatoes

1 tablespoon tamarind paste or Knorr brand tamarind soup

Boil the lentils until they are completely soft. Turn off the heat and allow to cool.

Meanwhile, sauté the onions in the oil until they are translucent. Add the rasam powder, tamarind and diced tomatoes, including all of the juice in the can, and allow it all to simmer together. Finally, pour the lentil water into the pan of onions, tomatoes and spices. Season with salt, and serve.

A Radical Kind of Love

Reporters Desk
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A Radical Kind of Love

Errata: The first version of this story read June Burlingame-Smith moved toLil Dixie, Missouri. It has been corrected to Lil Dixie, Illinois. And Burlingame-Smith wrote her research paper to support the the National Environmental Policy Act. We regret the error.

June Burlingame-Smith on life, love, and activism in San Pedro.

By Rosie Knight, Community Reporter

 

The storied history of environmental activism in San Pedro began, as so many radical movements do, with a moment of direct action. Decades ago, a group of Point Fermin residents chained themselves to the pine trees on Cabrillo Beach to protest the proposed construction of a marina that would have destroyed the open-water side of the beach. Since then, San Pedro has been a hub for environmental activism as local residents and community organizers have fought to make the Harbor Area a safer place for the people who live here. In this series, Random Lengths will be profiling some of the activists who have made those changes possible through their own organizing, the tradition of activism in San Pedro, and the future of the ports.

June Burlingame-Smith had lived many lives before she made it to San Pedro in the fall of ’68 alongside her husband, Greg. As a young girl she’d moved across the country from the bustling hubbub of New Jersey to the segregated sundown town of Lil Dixie, Missouri. She’d relocated along with her family again and again thanks to her father’s work as an engineer. Whilst in college she was part of the famed Allegheny Singers, who traveled the East Coast It was after transferring to Reed College to be closer to family that she would take on the role of dorm supervisor, which would shape her career for many years. While many San Pedro residents likely know her academic background, they probably aren’t aware that she also spent time as a buyer for Macy’s in San Francisco. Alongside her husband Greg, who she’d met in college before marrying 10 years later, she lived in a serene cottage looking over Lake Washington, where the pair kept pet ducks and lived a “very outdoorsy” life.

It was the opening of Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson that set June and Greg on their journey to San Pedro. With their new jobs at the college, the pair first settled in the beach cities area of Long Beach before ultimately moving to the Los Angeles Harbor Area, finding the home where Burlingame-Smith still lives now, in the Point Fermin neighborhood of San Pedro.

Almost immediately, Greg, an environmental geographer, became involved with local community activism. “He was very aware of how the environment influenced public policy — or how it should inform it — he was the great environment environmentalist in town. I was into the rights of children, women and the arts,” said Burlingame-Smith who was so invested in bringing music to public schools that she would take her guitar with her to her children’s classes and play for the younger kids each day, bringing her musical background into the classroom. Hailing from a musical family of singers, her passion for music and art has been ingrained in her as a lifelong mission and one that has shaped much of her work and life as an academic and activist.

So as the big environmentalist, was Greg involved with the Point Fermin residents who chained himself to the pine trees on the beach, sparking generations of activism in San Pedro? “I’m afraid he was,” Burlingame-Smith laughs. “I’m not sure he did it but he certainly knew.” And how about June, was she there on Cabrillo Beach that day? “Not me, I’m unchainable!”

Though Burlingame-Smith had been involved with the women’s rights movement in college and had been a dorm supervisor through the Vietnam War protests, she feels that her first true bit of environmental activism came when she began to get involved with the American Association of University Women (AAUW). “I started getting involved in local groups because I was interested in activism, and became president of AAUW. Then I was chair of a state committee redefining education.”

But it was when she got interested in whales and the emerging National Environmental Policy Act via working with the Cabrillo chapter of the American Cetacean Society that she really began to make waves. “I wrote a 50-page research paper in order to help the Cetacean Society, (to support the the National Environmental Policy Act) and eventually I ran for president because I wanted the AAUW to expand their purview outside of the sort of sorority life many of them were involved in. So I presented the paper to them, saying that we also need to be involved in the environment because it impacts women and children too.” Though Burlingame-Smith lost the election, she did change a few minds with some women becoming involved in the activism around the Environmental Protection Act too. It also allowed June to make contacts up and down the coast, as well as some lifelong friends.

June and Greg became a formidable team. The latter had already been working hard to make San Pedro more environmentally safe for its locals, fighting to get conifer trees planted along 39th Street, and at Angels Gate Park where they’d eventually name the grove after him. “We were just mutually supportive. He supported me and I supported him.” The pair shared a love of music, though Burlingame-Smith chuckles recalling that he wasn’t a singer, “so he didn’t try!”

Burlingame-Smith’s no-nonsense attitude means she’s found herself at the head of many committees and chairing a lot of meetings. “With my background, I’m not easily impressed by titles. Because I don’t have to be, there’s enough of that stuff in my family. And I know what it means and what it doesn’t mean. We’re here to focus on this problem, not the fact that you’re famous. I think that’s been my attitude. I don’t put up with any nonsense. And I make it very clear to people that I won’t tolerate personal attacks. I’ll stop you immediately.”

After getting a master’s at Dominguez Hills University, she began teaching part-time at El Camino and Harbor colleges, and while working at the Dominguez Hills’ dean’s office she helped set up the Performing Arts Center at South Shores. All while running a household with two young kids. When she became a full-time teacher at Harbor College in Wilmington, Burlingame-Smith suddenly found herself becoming more and more involved with organizing around the ports. “We were always involved in these environmental causes, but when we got involved with the San Pedro United Homeowners group, it was more central port-related issues, and covered a broader area because it brought in all the residents and homeowners associations to speak about the whole of San Pedro, rather than just Point Fermin.”

It was then that June became part of the Ports Community Advisory Committee, which gained increased importance after a group of local people worked to sue the ports over what would become the China Shipping Agreement. “So they needed a group to tell them how to spend the money, and I was part of that. So we’d go monthly to the ports and fight the ports,” she laughs. After the tragic death of Greg in 1997, June tirelessly continued their work, becoming chair of the neighborhood council and leading the Point Fermin Residents Association — that Greg founded decades before — until 2023. “I said, it’s time for younger people to get their hooks into all of this. It’s time to step aside and if they want some help, fine, and if they don’t, fine.”

People are already taking her up on that and it’s no surprise, as Burlingame-Smith has been a leading light in San Pedro and the Los Angeles Harbor Area for decades. But if you look at the official narrative around the ports and the changes that were heralded by June, Greg and other community members you won’t hear their names. “It’s because the port is business-oriented and it’s only about the bottom line,” she says. “It’s still a Republican economic system and until that culture changes, they aren’t interested in supporting the community, except for doing as little as they possibly can.”

Los Angeles Port Receives $3 Billion Boost for Clean Ports Initiative

Terelle Jerricks
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Los Angeles Port Receives $3 Billion Boost for Clean Ports Initiative

 

PORT Of LOS ANGELES – On March 14, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Councilmember Tim McOsker, Port of LA executive director Gene Seroka, and Rep. Nanette Barragán (CA-44) join U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan at the Port of Los Angeles to celebrate new federal investments in zero-emission port equipment and infrastructure, air quality planning projects, and enhanced efforts to protect the health of communities near U.S. ports.

The Congresswoman secured $3 billion for the Clean Ports program in the Inflation Reduction Act, which was based on her Climate Smart Ports Act. This investment is a key element of President Biden’s Investing in America Agenda to deliver environmental benefits for all, address the climate crisis and negative air pollution impacts, and create jobs and opportunities for communities across the country.

Administrator Regan and Rep. Barragán were joined by representatives of nearby port communities, including People’s Collective for Environmental Justice, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, and Wilmington residents to discuss the longstanding disproportionate air pollution burdens suffered by nearby residents and how the new investments will address this challenge.

Mayor Bass noted that she was able to vote on the Inflation Reduction Act for the EPA Clean Ports grant program while she was in Congress before she ran for Mayor.

“Thanks to historic legislation passed by Congress, legislation that I was able to vote for, Los Angeles continues to lock arms with the Biden-Harris Administration to deliver federal funding to transform our infrastructure, including here at the Port of Los Angeles,” Bass explained. “These investments are not only keeping our economy strong and creating good-paying jobs but also will reduce emissions to combat climate change and improve air quality in our most vulnerable communities. Thank you Administrator Regan for all of your support in Los Angeles.”

Regan applauded Mayor Bass for her leadership to build a greener Los Angeles, and Congresswoman Barragan for her tireless work to secure critical investments for cleaner ports across the country.

“It was a pleasure to be in Los Angeles today to see firsthand how the Port of Los Angeles is driving our economy forward using clean, sustainable technologies and solutions”, Regan said.

Councilmember McOsker noted the economic benefits and the environmental harm to residents living in the port’s shadow face.

“As the busiest container port in North America, I’m glad to see that the federal government is investing to help leverage the development and deployment of zero-emission port equipment and infrastructure,” McOsker said. “Fully and timely meeting the Port’s sustainability goals will improve the quality of life in these communities. We must at the same time make sure that we work to retain the good jobs we have and retrain and up-skill our workers with the new equipment. We can have both a clean environment and a strong economy.”

Seroka expressed pride in the advances the Port of Los Angeles has made in reducing environmental impacts of port operations, but noted there is still much work that still needs to be done.

“We greatly appreciate EPA Administrator Regan’s visit to get a first-hand look at some of the equipment we are testing, and we are excited about the opportunity to partner with the EPA as we chart a path to help decarbonize the maritime industry.”

On that same day, Mayor Bass signed a historic Letter of Intent (LOI) with the Minister for Foreign Trade and Development of Finland Ville Tavio that will promote climate cooperation and economic development between the City of Los Angeles and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland for the first time in history. The agreement is the result of more than two years of collaboration on shared goals for carbon neutrality and the clean energy transition and will further propel Los Angeles to achieve 100% clean energy by 2035.

The week prior, Mayor Bass announced that the City of Los Angeles captured 5 billion more gallons of stormwater in February 2024 than in February 2023 and secured federal funding to increase composting practices, reduce food waste, and continue building a greener Los Angeles. In addition, Los Angeles is leading the way in electrifying the city’s transportation system, with the most electric vehicles and electric vehicle chargers of any metro area in the United States.

Bodies of Water

Reporters Desk
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Bodies of Water

 

Cultivating a Water Ethic from the Ocean Sciences Meeting to AltaSea.

By Evelyn McDonnell

It’s been a hard month for the port and peninsula areas of Los Angeles. Palos Verdes’s Wayfarers Chapel shuttered due to shifting land exacerbated by rain. A scientific study says that radioactive material was likely dumped into the San Pedro Channel decades ago, to nestle alongside DDT and WWII munitions. Eight million gallons of sewage overflowed into the Dominguez Channel and out into the sea, closing beaches from Cabrillo to Seal Beach. Tide pool access remains barred at Point Fermin because of a slide that sent agave plants cascading down to the Spanish wall. It seems you can’t swim, surf, look for octopuses, or pray for a NON-rainy day at Lloyd Wright’s glass church. What’s a water baby to do?

Stories like these are being repeated up and down the Pacific Coast, as one atmospheric river after another overflows our sewage systems, harbors, and rivers, and turns clay into mud. It seems that California has jumped from the fire into the pot of water — reversed from drought to flood. Forget climate change; this is climate chaos.

Almost two thousand miles away in New Orleans – a city that knows well the murderous power of nature – 5,500 people gathered at the Ocean Sciences Meeting to figure out what is going on in the giant bodies of water that make planet Earth blue (as David Bowie sang in 1969). From February 18 to 23 oceanographers, marine biologists, NASA and NOAA executives, physicists, geologists, city planners, zoologists, artists, activists, and journalists from New Zealand to Spain to Denmark to Alaska presented research. I came as a concerned resident of a coastal community to see what the experts had to say about algae blooms, changing currents, microplastic pollutants, dwindling biodiversity, carbon recovery, oil spills, coral bleaching, rising seas, flooding coasts, disappearing deltas, and other perils of the Anthropocene era. Is there something we can do?

Those are some of the topics I, a layperson, understood at least. I have to admit that the plenary session on the evolution of eukaryote ecosystems lost me. Instead, I wandered out into the Louisiana sun and thought about the last time I had stood in front of the Ernest N. Memorial Convention Center, 18 years ago. It was just months after Hurricane Katrina displaced tens of thousands of people who took refuge in these giant halls, abandoned by their government and left to fend for – and die by – themselves. In 2006 this building was a shuttered, sodden symbol of nature’s fury and society’s failure. A gravesite.

We were warned.

The OSM was by no means a week of doom and gloom (though puppies were stocked in the exhibit hall so conference-goers could get some de-stressing play, and one large meeting space was dedicated to soothing relaxation, kind of like a chillout room at a rave). In fact, there was a pulse of energy to match the urgency, a sense that, in some quarters at least, material help is on the way. In the host city, $50 billion is being invested over 50 years to protect and preserve the Mississippi delta that has been decimated by oil drilling, rising seas, and hurricanes Katrina and Ida. That won’t be enough to save the most vulnerable areas south of New Orleans, but it’s an impressive mix of “gray and green” solutions: man-built barriers and environmental restoration. Mother nature has already lent a hand, leaving a miles-wide stretch of sediment at Neptune Pass where previously there had only been water. As artist Monique Verdin said, these disappearing soles of the Louisiana boot are the “in-between places, where salt and fresh water meet.” As a member of the Houma tribe who have inhabited the delta for centuries, she knows well what it means to be in an imperiled, liminal state. “It took 5000 years for earth to build the delta, 100 for man to ruin it,” she noted.

OSM sessions focused on not just the problems but the solutions, from technology to conservation to communication to repair. For instance, the NASA folks were giddy after the successful launch a fortnight earlier of the new Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem satellite, which will provide a hyperspectral view of the oceans. PACE will help scientists identify specific species of phytoplankton including those that can cause deadly algae blooms like the one in the Pacific last year, which sent hundreds of dead marine mammals washing up on Southern California beaches. “We’ll be able to detect toxins themselves,” said Clarissa Anderson, an executive director at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Thrilling as the prospect of a psychedelic light show beamed from the deep blue sea to satellites in space, then back to NASA headquarters may be, two other developments at the convention center excited this reporter more. One was the elevation of native ways of knowing and living. The final plenary featured the First People’s Conservation Council of New Orleans.A panel was devoted to indigenous science, and others included papers in which the researchers emphasized the importance of collaborating with local populations. As Ava Hamilton of the Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences said, “Science is colonizing.” From studies of the effects of spearfishing on Pacific atolls to a Songhees artist’s story of her time spent on a research vessel off the Vancouver coast, presenters urged scientists to be “two-eyed seeing” in their methods and epistemology. “Not all knowledge is found in one school,” said expedition leader Megan Cook, recounting the work done on the Nautilus Live vessel in cooperation with Hawai’i’s First Nations.

Equally significant to this moonlighting culture vulture was the emphasis on the need for scientists to creatively and effectively communicate their findings to the eukaryote-ignorant masses. The conference convened with a plenary session on storytelling. In between were panels and papers by artists and playwrights, about how to use music, movement, painting, sculpture, film, theater, social media, and yes, journalism to embody and explain discoveries, ideas, and solutions. Lawrence J. Pratt of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution bragged that more than 300 oceanographers showed up for opening night of the Boston Ballet’s La Mer, a piece created in collaboration with the storied Massachusetts research facility. New Orleans playwright Lisa D’Amour, author of Ocean Filibuster, talked about staging a “thermohaline rave.”

In my own life, I’m seeking to bridge what the scientific writer C.P. Snow described in 1959 as “the two cultures”: science and the humanities. I’ve spent most of my career writing about the arts, particularly music because it’s what I love. But I have always equally relished the natural world, and with the launch of this column in Random Lengths, I’m pivoting to cover what I see as the most important issue of our time: our earthly home. Specifically, water, and humans’ relationship to it.

Many writers define nature as that which is separate from human. Like so many binaries, this division blocks a more nuanced understanding of our world. Nature is part of us, and vice versa. Humans are bodies of water; H2O constitutes more than half of our makeup (the percentage varies based on gender). And yet in the 400 or so million years since animals crawled out of the sea and lost their gills, many homo sapiens have come to fear our aquatic origins and treat our lakes, rivers, and oceans as an old enemy – or a dump.

Here in the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles and the Harbor Cities, our lives are water-based. From Wilmington to Avalon and Seal Beach to Rat Beach, sailors, swimmers, fisherpeople, tugboat captains, lifeguards, artists, deckhands, surfers, windsurfers, kayakers, divers, chefs, and educators find their purpose, their livelihood, and their pleasure in the Pacific Ocean that surrounds us on three sides. We are “peninsula people,” as a character in the comedy Beef repeatedly tells his Korean cousin. Water surrounds and defines us.

Writing about nature can, and should, be writing about culture. I’m interested in exploring the human relationship to water through profiles of individuals who have compelling and diverse connections to it. Water is the next, and perhaps final, frontier in the environmental push to save our planet. We are four years into what the United Nations has declared the Ocean Decade, a time of international engagement with, and investment in, our seas. We must explore our relationship to bodies of water in order to save them, and ourselves.

Decades ago, the naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote about the need to cultivate a “land ethic,” in which we think of the land as a living entity with human rights. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect,” the Midwesterner wrote, stating a principle that has become a core belief of environmentalists’ approach to wilderness. I am among those who seek to articulate a water ethic: We must see our oceans, rivers, wetlands, lakes, ponds, and streams as part of our community and treat them with love and respect. Many of us peninsula people know this; some of us don’t. By exploring these relationships, we can think about what constitute acts of love and respect, and how we can nurture and promote them.

In Bodies of Water, I will write about an array of individuals who can help us see the color and shape of water in different and enlightening ways. These will be ethnographic articles about people who are our neighbors, coworkers, friends.

I went to New Orleans to gain deeper knowledge from experts who have spent their careers studying the ocean from multiple vantage points. Frankly, I was worried I’d be the crazy rock chick in a sea of nerds. Instead, I found a diverse group of vibrant, engaged, smart, and often very young people. Granted, I got confused by some of the terms. When a presenter on a panel about audio and the ocean referenced the “shrimp band,” I pictured a combo of crustaceans playing swing on saxophones and trumpets ― clearly, my stay in the French Quarter had affected me. In fact, the shrimp band is the decibel level at which the snapping sounds of shrimps are detected by microphones in coral reefs. I got lost in the calculus equations of ocean currents, but when policymakers and oceanographers convened to talk about the crisis of coastal cities during rising seas, this San Pedran felt very much at home.

A strong sense of urgency united many of the OSM meetings. Town halls addressed the shortage of governmental funding for ocean research, the crisis of coastal cities, the need for increased racial and gender diversity in the sciences, and the imperative to tell the story of climate change. As a journalist, I am acutely aware that we live in a time when the basic facts of life have been called into question by ideologues and politicians who exploit fear, bias, and uncertainty. In New Orleans, I saw scientists also engaged in the battle to protect and advance knowledge.

Back home in San Pedro, I woke up the morning after my return from New Orleans and rode my bike over to the warehouse housing AltaSea, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the local emergent “blue economy.” At a panel about “surf sustainability,” five representatives of various environmental activist organizations and enterprises spoke with great passion about “the global commons” and “coral resilience.” “The ocean as a body needs to have rights,” said Bodhi Patil, the 21-year-old climate solutionist, articulating the water ethic. “She deserves it.” It was as “stoked” a discussion as anything I witnessed at OSM, and it was a bike ride away. These are the types of bodies I hope to highlight over the next months, the peninsula people who define the life aquatic here in our own backyard.

Evelyn McDonnell is the author or editor of eight books, a nationally recognized award-winning journalist, and a professor at Loyola Marymount University. This is the first in her new series Bodies of Water for Random Lengths.

Dancing Waters Is Gone. Who Benefits?

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Dancing Waters Is Gone. Who Benefits?

By Emma Rault, Columnist

For a brief moment, on Saturday, March 9th, the candy-pink facade of Dancing Waters teetered perilously, held up only by cables attached to a pair of excavators. Then, almost a century’s worth of San Pedro history came crashing down onto a lot filled with rubble, the two excavators sitting before it with bowed heads as if paying their last respects.

The demolition of this legendary venue on the 1300 block of South Pacific Ave and the adjacent structures — the former Enigma Bar, and the brick building longtime locals know as LaRue’s Pharmacy — is almost finished. What’s planned for the site is a four-story, 102-unit apartment building in a joint venture between Root Real Estate/Square One Homes and Ketter Construction. The same developer is behind another project on the 2100 block of South Pacific Ave, which will replace a vacant lot and longtime neighborhood bar, The Spot.

Dancing Waters after the front facade fell on March 8. Photo by Emma Rault

Froylan Alvarez, whose Thousand Oaks-based company handled the demolition, has torn down about a hundred buildings all over LA. It doesn’t usually get to him. “But this one,” he says, “is special for the city of San Pedro.”

Over the past month and a half, “a lot, a lot of people” have stopped by and shared memories from when Dancing Waters was a thriving music venue drawing big names like Black Flag, Blue Oyster Cult and the Cramps.

The plans for the site have met with widespread opposition from locals. In 2020, a community group called Citizens Protecting San Pedro appealed the project to the city council, with the support of all three of San Pedro’s neighborhood councils.

A different community group called Residents for an Equitable San Pedro Today (RSPCT) echoed the concerns in a letter with more than 60 signatories. “Why is more market-rate housing being built in a community that can’t afford it?” the letter asks.

According to 2022 data, 55% of San Pedrans are “rent burdened” — meaning they spend more than 30% of their household income on rent. Another 29% are severely rent-burdened, spending over half of their income on rent. Current market rates are beyond reach for many. Yet the project at 1331 S. Pacific Ave will include only 12 very-low-income units, alongside 90 market-rate rentals — and nothing in between.

“Buildings like this make the housing crisis worse,” San Pedran Army Linderborg wrote in a March 2020 letter of her own to the City Planning Commission. “Livable apartments sit empty while people sleep on sidewalks.”

James Campeau, one of the appellants, laments the lack of ground-floor storefronts on what has traditionally been a commercial thoroughfare. “That pretty much closes [the building] off to the rest of the community,” he told Random Lengths — part of a trend often described as the privatization of public space.

But in June 2021, the community-led appeal was denied by the Los Angeles City Council, paving the way for the plans to move forward.

The planned project isn’t just a hallmark of change coming to San Pedro — it’s a new kind of change, part of a model sometimes called the “financialization of housing.”

Square One Homes is funded by Fundrise, a crowdsourced online real estate investment platform (or “eREIT”). By its own account, Fundrise likes to “buy low, sell high.”

This model steers developers toward the construction of dense, predominantly market-rate housing. To satisfy their investors, the property value must be pushed up. And how do you increase the value of a parcel? By building more and charging more.

In this scenario, housing is no longer just a way for individual homeowners or mom-and-pop landlords to build wealth — and for some of that wealth to flow back into the community through spending and property taxes.

Instead, the profit is being extracted by “corporations that are dispersing it to shareholders around the world,” explains Leslie Kern, a Canadian urban scholar who is the author of the 2022 book Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies.

“Some people call it a predatory process,” Kern says. “Developers and the investors behind them are always looking for the next place, but not really having an interest in the place itself or its history.”

Anya Hanson, co-owner of The Winthrop Gallery of Art and Curiosities in downtown San Pedro, grew up in Venice and watched it change beyond recognition in a way she feels is a cautionary tale.

“In the early 2000s, you started to see generational families being offered a million dollars for their house by developers who would buy it, demolish it and build apartments,” she recalls. Rents skyrocketed as developers courted wealthier newcomers and almost everyone of her generation ended up being displaced.

It dramatically changed the fabric of what had been a diverse, mixed-income community. Before, Hanson says, “Everybody hung out and went to bars together. There was a commingling. Now everyone is either tech companies and hot yoga, or they’re homeless.”

Often the housing-as-investment-vehicle approach leads to what Kern calls “cookie-cutter models,” with developers giving little thought to how they fit into the community aesthetically or practically.

Hanson fears the wave of development sweeping over San Pedro will be the same. “Because they’re not doing it right. They’re spending the least possible amount of money, they’re overcharging, and they’re making it uninteresting. There’s no soul in it.”

Sometimes, the developer’s involvement goes no further than getting all the necessary approvals, or “entitlements,” for housing. If they can get land “up-zoned” — have the zoning changed for greater density, for example from single-story commercial to multi-story residential — this alone increases the value, allowing them to sell at a profit to another company without having so much as broken ground. This is known as “land flipping” (analogous to “house flipping,” where a house is quickly upgraded and sold on) and drives prices up for everyone.

Square One Homes already tried to flip this land twice. They bought Dancing Waters in March 2020 for $2 million and the other two buildings in December 2020 for $1.1 million each, for a total of $4.2 million. A 2022 offering memorandum lists the combined parcel, with entitlements (planning approvals), at $6.1 million. According to Zillow, it was briefly listed the previous year for $6.375 million. (The developer could not be reached for comment; the realtor who prepared the offering memorandum told RLn the parcel is not currently on the market.)

Rendering of the apartment complex to be built in place of the historic San Pedro venue.


The memorandum describes a “102-Unit Development Opportunity” on what they categorize as “Vacant Land.” But before the demolition crew began work some six weeks ago, it was not vacant. The Dancing Waters building began in 1940 as a bowling alley. Its varied life since then reflects the diversity and brilliance of San Pedro: It served as a gay club, a punk venue and, most recently, a norteño club called La Zona Rosa, before shuttering around 2014.

The then-owners, based in Fullerton, had bought it from longtime owner-operator Helio “Al” Cordeiro in 2005 for $1.1 million and allowed it to fall into disrepair before selling to Root Real Estate, an affiliate of Square One Homes, in 2020.

Right until the end, a small community of homeless people has been clinging to what is left of the building. First, the stage and backstage area in the rear of the lot, which were finally razed this week. Now, a tent is perched on a stack of salvaged bricks. In the ultimate irony, as a commercial building makes way for housing, these people are being displaced from their makeshift home.

So what would a more ethical, sustainable approach to development look like? “Actually responding to local housing needs rather than … building for newcomers,” Kern says. “Is there a need for affordable housing for seniors? Is there a student community that’s in need of housing?”

According to Kern, pushing for more robust policymaking — like penalizing land flipping — is one way to hold developers accountable. Another possibility is communities becoming involved in housing development themselves. Communities all over the world are forming community land trusts, securing government funding and negotiating the right of first refusal on buildings to keep harmful speculators at bay. Successful examples can be seen in cities including Oakland and Montreal.

Kern’s book reminds us that neighborhoods can change without this resulting in longtime residents being priced out, and without it coming at the expense of their cultural heritage. While some look at Dancing Waters as a lost cause, many see it as just one battle in what they hope will be an increasingly effective war to protect San Pedro’s most precious assets — its community spaces.

Women’s History Month Profile Meet LA Harbor Commissioner Diane Middleton: A Champion for Civil Rights and Worker Advocacy

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Women’s History Month Profile Meet LA Harbor Commissioner Diane Middleton: A Champion for Civil Rights and Worker Advocacy

 

By Melani Morose Edelstein, Columnist

The indomitable spirit of San Pedro’s own civil rights activist Diane Middleton burns bright. A beacon of hope and resilience in the fight for social justice and worker empowerment, Middleton epitomizes what National Women’s History Month is all about. During a month dedicated to celebrating and recognizing the contributions and achievements of women throughout history, Middleton’s story emerges as a poignant narrative of courage, commitment and compassion.

Living in a seaside home atop a hillside overlooking Cabrillo Beach, Middleton says she feels honored to be called an activist, organizer and veteran soldier in the battle for peace and equality. At 80 years old she revels in opening her home and entertaining. Whether it’s hosting a large family gathering like a recent baby shower for 75 guests, or providing space for organizations close to her heart to gather, it’s what she is all about.

“It’s just a wonderful place for hosting events. And I like to think of it as kind of a community center. It’s my home, yes, but it’s such a gift and I feel so grateful. I feel like I’m just the luckiest person,” Middleton says candidly.

Her illustrious career as a dedicated attorney spanned over four decades, tirelessly advocating for the rights of injured waterfront workers. Her legacy transcends the courtroom, as she stands as one of the esteemed founders of the Harry Bridges Institute, paying homage to the legendary leader of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Additionally, she established the Diane Middleton Foundation, a testament to her unwavering commitment to uplifting marginalized communities.

Her journey from the corridors of law to her current position as vice president of the Los Angeles Harbor Commission is not just a testament to her individual achievements but also a ray of optimism for workers striving for justice.

Middleton’s ascent to prominence within the Los Angeles Harbor Commission is a culmination of decades-long dedication to social justice causes. She was appointed by former Mayor Eric Garcetti and confirmed by the Los Angeles City Council in 2019. Middleton’s appointment coincided with a pivotal moment in the port’s history, a period marked by debates over port automation and its implications for workers’ livelihoods. Her pragmatic approach and commitment to fact-based decision-making underscored her dedication to ensuring equitable outcomes for all stakeholders involved.

In the words of Middleton herself, “I’m a fact-based person, I want to know what the numbers are. I ask a lot of questions and I expect answers.”

Middleton’s election as vice president of the Harbor Commission in 2023, at 80 years old, underscores her profound impact and unwavering resolve in championing the rights of workers and marginalized communities. She may have retired from practicing law but she will never stop fighting for equality.

“The most pressing issue facing us is income inequality, it is the root of everything, the root of all evil. There is also something very wrong with the system in this country with income inequality. The third thing that I strongly believe is you can’t get anywhere without an organization. Nobody gets there alone and that’s what the trade unions are for. For all their imperfections, the trade unions are a basic defense organization of the working class,” Middleton says passionately.

“What am I still fighting for at 80 years old? I would say jobs, peace and equality. It’s very simple,” she states with clear conviction. An attorney with a deep-seated commitment to labor and civil rights issues, Middleton was born in Detroit and credits a friendly librarian with changing her life.

“My parents worked afternoons, so I would walk down to the library, and I met this amazing woman named Clara Jones. She told me everything, discussing book choices and so much more. When I was 10 years old, she said to me, ‘Well, of course, you’re going to college.’ It was something I had never thought about, and no one in my family had ever mentioned it, but she was the one who told me, ‘You’re really smart. You’re going to go to college. What do you want to be? What do you want to do? You can do whatever you want.’ She introduced me to ideas beyond what I had seen in my neighborhood. I lived in the factory part of town. She lived on the other side of town, in the nicer part, and she invited me to her home. There, she introduced me to her daughter, who was several years older than me, and to her husband, who had a Ph.D. and worked for the postal service because that was the only job an African American man could get in 1953,” Middleton explains.

“She was the smartest person I ever met, and she greatly influenced me. This librarian, this remarkable woman, opened my eyes to a whole different world than the one I saw with the auto workers in my family. She went on to become the first African American woman to lead a major library, becoming the director of The Detroit Public Library. She was not just an amazing woman, but a very dear friend who truly shaped me and my thinking. Because she was a Black woman and the smartest person I knew, smarter than anybody in my family, I developed a deep respect and admiration for her from an early age,” Middleton says.

Married at 19 during a time when young girls were expected to marry young and move from their parents’ home to their husband’s home, Middleton had never lived independently.

“We married too young, he was a wonderful husband but it wasn’t long before I realized I was part of a larger world. Everyone around me belonged to the UAW. I went to Wayne State University and started asking which side are you on. I realized the world is about class warfare. It came down to which side do you want to be on? The side of the working people, the side of jobs and peace and equality or with the one percent on the side of greed and desire for profit. So in the early 1960s I separated from my husband, entered law school and the National Lawyers Guild and started fighting for civil rights.”

One of only four females in her law school graduating class, Middleton says her gender was never an issue. Beginning her legal journey in San Francisco, Middleton represented injured workers, including labor union activists, in a myriad of industries, from auto to steel. It was her unwavering advocacy that propelled her to the forefront of the legal battle, notably as the first to file a class-action asbestos lawsuit on behalf of shipyard workers, a pivotal moment that set the stage for her future endeavors.

In 1979, Middleton embarked on a new chapter by establishing her own law practice in San Pedro, specializing in maritime law and representing thousands of injured longshoremen and shipyard workers. Her tireless efforts not only secured justice for her clients but also shed light on the perils faced by workers in hazardous environments.

Through her leadership roles on various boards and organizations, including the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners and the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, Middleton emerged as a formidable force for change, advocating for the marginalized and underserved.

This commitment to truth and justice encapsulates Middleton’s ethos, a steadfast belief in the power of knowledge and advocacy to effect meaningful change. Middleton’s journey is not merely a narrative of individual success but a testament to the power of resilience, determination and advocacy in shaping a more just and equitable society. Middleton’s legacy serves as a poignant reminder of the indelible impact of women leaders in the fight for social justice and equality.

Her dedication to civil rights and worker empowerment reverberates through the corridors of history, inspiring generations to come to continue the pursuit of a more equitable and just world.

Remembering the Wobblies and the Klan 100 Years Later

Terelle Jerricks
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Remembering the Wobblies and the Klan 100 Years Later

Earlier this month, the San Pedro Neighbors for Peace and Justice and Code Pink commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Industrial Workers of the World and their activism on behalf of labor in the face of attacks by the press, the police, the Ku Klux Klan and commercial titans operating the shipping lines at the Port of Los Angeles.

SPNPJ and Code Pink’s demonstration acknowledged a single day in which more than 1,200 members of the Ku Klux Klan staged a March 1 demonstration (which fell on a Saturday back then and was reported on the following Monday, March 3) that started from a short distance from the steep mound from which Upton Sinclair was arrested for reading the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, United States Constitution the year before on 4th and Harbor Blvd. The Klansmen marched to 6th and Pacific, then from 6th and Pacific to 12th Street, and then from there to Centre Street, attracting supporters and curious onlookers along the way. These Klansmen marched without their hoods and circled the block four times where the Wobblies’ union still stands as the La Sirienta corner market.

The Wobblies had forewarning of the march and promptly called the LAPD from downtown Los Angeles (instead of the Harbor Division which was run by an anti-communist commander). The newly installed Chief August Vollmer, a reformer, showed up and had his officers serve as a barrier to potential violence, as happened before between the Wobblies and the American Legions, resulting in casualties on both sides and a lynching no one was ever charged for.

That night, every 15 feet, two policemen marched beside the Klan members, including local members from San Pedro’s Klan Local 51 and from surrounding areas such as Long Beach, Riverside, and Bakersfield.

Later in the month, however, when police conducted their March 17 raid on Wobbly Hall, K.K.K. members in full regalia, this time riding in automobiles, again circled the block where the hall was located.

Inside the hall, 200 Wobblies kept up each others’ morale by singing Solidarity, “The Red Flag,” and “Forever,” and giving the Wobbly cheer. Fearing “a California Centralia,” the Wobblies had taken what they cautiously described as “vigorous precautionary measures.”

It should be remembered that the March 1 attack and the attack on the union hall two weeks later were but two blips in a sustained multiyear effort by the mainstream press, the San Pedro police department, the San Pedro Chamber, the shipping terminal operators, and the Klan. The Wobblies saw their newspaper boys being arrested and sent to juvenile hall, their meetings infiltrated by the San Pedro Police, and the Klan holding demonstrations like the one on March 1, 1924, or engaging in more violent expressions of their opposition, which ultimately forced the Wobblies out of San Pedro.

On June 14, 1924, the Wobblies Hall was directly attacked by plains-clothes policemen and sailors. Though none were in Klan garb, it was widely believed Klan members participated in the raid in which the union hall’s windows and furniture were destroyed, several Wobblies were kidnapped and transported to the Santa Ana mountains where they were tarred and feathered, and two children were scalded with boiling water from a coffee pot.

By the 1920s and 30s, the reemergent Klan got the art of gaslighting down to a science, preening in the spotlight when a community target is threatened with violence, following the modus operandi of Klan locals elsewhere in Southern California and the rest of the country.

Examples of such gaslighting include the Braxtons, an African American family who ran a bed-and-breakfast hotel in San Pedro from the 1920s through the 1940s. In 1922, they purchased a lot and had a house built on it in the vicinity of 15th and Grand. When the family was close to moving in, their new home was vandalized with threatening messages scrawled on their property: “You’d better get out,” and, “Our property is at stake,” were the more tame of the graffitied inscriptions.

According to contemporaneous reporting, both the police and the residents joined the hunt for those responsible for the vandalism. The home had just been completed and was ready for occupancy, when the Braxtons found the home spattered with filth, windows smashed, and threats written on the sides of the domicile.

After the Braxtons purchased the lot and began building, neighbors started a petition directed at the family asking them to change their plans and build a home elsewhere. Braxton declined the invitation, with the result that a committee of neighbors called upon Fred’s wife, Marie, to change his mind and build elsewhere. She refused.

Several months later, a Japanese company attempted to purchase 10 acres of land at White Point. It was a huge enough deal that California Senator Hiram Johnson (he had served as California’s governor from 1911 to 1917) presented the issue to the United States Secretary of War to investigate. A district attorney formed a grand jury to investigate.

The commander of the Fort MacArthur army base claimed that ownership of the land at White Point by the Japanese would be a menace.

It was reported at the time that the owner of the land, Ramon Sepulveda, received a letter warning that if the lease was consummated, his dead body would be found floating in the ocean.

The San Pedro’s Ku Klux Klan, Local 51 denied any connection to the letter and the San Pedro Police captain denied there was a connection, citing as proof that the letter wasn’t signed using the organization’s official seal.

The granddaughter of Art Almeida, Shannen Maas, Joe Gatlin, the vice president of the San Pedro/Wilmington chapter of the NAACP and CD 15 Councilman Tim McOsker spoke on the 100th anniversary of the Klan march on the IWW meeting hall in San Pedro.

Maas, a member of IWW and granddaughter of this town’s most noted authority on the Wobblies and historian, spoke briefly about her ties to this labor struggle.

She was followed by Gatlin, who recounted his family’s migration from Arkansas to San Pedro starting in 1916, chased by the resurgent Ku Klux Klan.

McOsker in his commentary was perhaps the most thorough in covering the good, the bad, and the ugly, noting that the past is always present.

“These conversations are not 100 years old,” the councilman said. “They are every day. And I have had conversations with offshore companies who come in here and have multi-billion dollar interest in the terminals and they’re doing automation and we have to make it very clear to them that our interests are different.

“We are a community where we stick up for the people that are working,” McOsker said. “We make sure that human beings are moving that cargo, making sure that they’re treated with respect and also have safe living environments and that’s not the offshore companies’ interests, their interest is to move a piece of cargo at the highest profit possible.

“They don’t care if it’s one container as long as it makes every bit of profit that they need to pass on to their shareholders. What we want to do is we want to move cargo and we want it moved by human beings. It’s the same sort of thing that the Wobblies were going through. They were fighting against folks who would crush them for a dollar.“

A Long Way from Zero

James Preston Allen
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A Long Way from Zero

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, fresh from her trip to Paris, France to check out the preparations for the 2024 Olympics, came to Wilmington to introduce the EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan and the Biden Administration’s Clean Ports Program that, “Will invest three billion dollars to implement zero-emission port equipment and infrastructure, as well as funding to support climate and air quality planning at ports across our nation,” she exclaimed. As was explained later in the program the goal is to have zero emissions on the port terminals by 2030 and off terminals meaning trucks and trains by 2035. When asked how much of this $3 billion can go to the Port of LA the answer was $500 million max. And what will it cost to reach the zero emissions goal? Seroka’s answer was “$58 billion”! Wow!

So, it’s a grand gesture from the federal government to seed the start of something but “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” as the First World War British marching song goes. And the first deadline is just six years away. It seems highly unlikely that they will meet that goal, but this “seed money” is a step in the right direction.

It’s been 23 years since the historic China Shipping lawsuit was filed by the NRDC on behalf of the San Pedro Homeowners Association against the POLA. It changed the direction of diesel air pollution in the ports of LA with a $65 million judgment that is still funding mitigation measures but is now back in the courts after POLA filed a Supplemental Environmental Impact Report. Curiously the port only issued that SEIR after this reporter asked the question, “Has anyone ever audited the China Shipping settlement funds?” Chris Cannon, the now mysteriously absent director of environmental affairs, answered, “We have. We audit everything.” And then some seven months later they had to release a SEIR. That’s what got them sued again by the original plaintiffs.

Now Seroka claims that our ports are leading the way in green technology. And by the estimate he offered at this press conference, they’re $57.5 billion short, but there’s more to come if only Joe Biden gets reelected that is. The former ex-president of the USA basically gutted the EPA, fired hundreds of scientists, and rolled back regulations. Right now, everyone is charging ahead with spending the Biden infrastructure plans before the next election.

For those wondering how we got here, a curious narrative written by Kat Janowicz entitled: Chasing Zero, attempts to explain the “story of how the busiest US ports cut pollution.” As far as she goes this book does document most of what has happened since 2001 and the China Shipping lawsuit but not much of what came before, which predicated and influenced that legal battle. In fact, decades of community activism preceded this lawsuit which was born out of frustration and what the former president of the Board of Harbor Commissioners, John Wentworth, once called “the hundred years war.”

If it wasn’t for Wentworth leaking to this reporter back before all this happened that the POLA was secretly moving forward with the acquisition and demolition of Knoll Hill, the community might never have been able to alter the plans. Nor would people like Janet Gunther, Noel Park, Andy Mardesich, and Jesse Marquez ever have started to organize their respective communities. They and many others who followed, like Richard Havernick, June Smith, and Frank Anderson, became highly aware and involved in the port pollution issues that are now finally being addressed but nowhere near ZERO. Many of the community environmental justice heroes have been recognized by articles in this newspaper with stories by Paul Rosenberg, Terelle Jerricks, and most recently Emma Rault and it is to the credit of these EJ heroes that the true credit for the march to zero-emission should go. It was never certain in the beginning that anything would change the industrial pollution of the largest port complex in the nation.

They can take the credit for ultimately making the policy changes over the last 20 years, after several mayors and port administrations, but it came at the point of lawsuits public outrage, and a great deal of newspaper ink to get that change. Many believe the port is still dragging its feet and yes they have retaliated against this newspaper in both obvious and subtle ways to undermine our reporting. They have even used neighborhood council surrogates to attack me personally or question my “ethics” in both sitting on a neighborhood council and publishing this newspaper– like after four decades of publishing I don’t know a thing or two about ethics. What I find unethical are the attempts to quash free speech, the buying of loyalty with grants to favored community groups, and the manipulation of small-town politics and small-town civic leaders’ desire to curry favor with the port and its power structure. Readers will note the lack of advertising from the Port of LA while we regularly have support from a much friendlier Port of Long Beach. It’s actually a bias in contracting that the Board of Harbor Commissioners needs to investigate.

Yet here we are, more than four decades after the disastrous GATX explosion at 22nd Street and Harbor Blvd. The land still hasn’t been fully remediated and remains unusable and fenced. There are many more toxic soil sights on port property and we are just beginning to get a handle on PM 2.5’s, the fine diesel particulate matter that you find on your window sills or wash off your cars weekly. It’s one of the main causes of many of the health issues like asthma, lung, and heart disease in the harbor area, particularly affecting the young and old.

It is a good start that the EPA is giving out $3 billion in grants, but the deadline of 2030 will arrive sooner rather than later. Zero emissions would go a long way in protecting the health and the quality of life for everyone in the San Pedro Bay region of Los Angeles.

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Real people. Real news. Random Lengths is the Los Angeles harbor area's remaining independently owned progressive news magazine. We cover news in Carson, Wilmington, Long Beach, Lomita, Torrance, Rancho Palos Verdes and San Pedro.

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