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Groups say LA, LB port Clean Truck Plan is ''quagmire waiting to happen''

LOS ANGELES – 09/27/07 – Two industry groups have called on the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) to review the “legal, logistical and anti-competitive impacts” of the proposed Clean Truck Plan (CTP) for the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach that they say “will cause immediate economic harm.”

The criticism of the CTP was laid out in a 14-page recently letter filed with the FMC by the National Industrial Transportation League (NITL) and the San Francisco-headquartered Pacific Merchant Shipping Association (PMSA).

The NITL and the PMSA want the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) to evaluate whether the ports’ agreement on file with the Commission authorizes the ports to implement a program that, they say, “would eliminate jobs, limits competition and sets barriers to entry that would impose substantial economic hardships.”

The Clean Truck Plan was proposed last November by both ports in an effort to clean up the air pollution caused in part by diesel trucks moving cargo in to and out of their terminals.

The plan offers “taxicab-style” concessions to trucking firms with the greenest fleets and seeks to replace or retrofit most of the estimated 16,000 trucks currently working at the ports.

It also calls for the phase-out of the oldest, dirtiest trucks beginning next January 1 with conditions that grow progressively stricter through 2012, when only 2007 model and newer trucks would be given access to waterfront terminals.

If successful, the ports claim the CTP would eliminate up to 80% of toxic diesel pollution in communities close to both harbors.

According to the NITL-PMSA letter, there are “several ramifications should the ports’ new regulatory proposal were to be implemented including the claims that the plan would put 30% of the motor carriers doing business at the ports will be put out of business and that the surviving truck lines would have to raise rates by at least 80%.”

Only those motor carriers “providing services at the ports that enter into ‘concession agreements’ will be able to serve the ports – with the elimination of all owner-operators being a key component of the concession agreement,” the letter stated, adding that “congestion will result from a lack of certified trucks and drivers necessary to serve the ports.”

The letter also asserted that the CTP filed with the FMC “says absolutely nothing about banning independent owner operators” and is an “unreasonable practice” under section the Shipping Act “because there is no logical relationship between that anti-competitive ban and the environmental objectives of the program.”

Finally, the letter charges that the CTP also violates the Shipping Act “because, according to the ports’ own economic analysis, it will substantially reduce competition for port drayage services and at the same time drastically increase prices and reduce service by driving drayage companies out of the market.”

The ports’ plan ''doesn’t solve our air quality problems, it just hands them to someone else,” said PMSA president John McLaurin.

“The California Air Resources Board’s proposed state-wide standards would clean up the air for everyone, cause far less economic disruption, and create a level playing field for all truckers throughout the state,” he said.

“Moreover, an industry coalition of port tenants, ocean carriers, railroads and major shippers and retailers have all agreed to support statewide rules for trucks that will clean-up more of California’s air quicker and with less disruption than the ports’ plan.”

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