SoCal ports’ truck plan to start Wednesday

SoCal ports’ truck plan to start Wednesday    Southern California ports will begin enforcement today of a truck re-regulation plan banning all pre-1989 model year trucks and requiring trucking firms to have ports-issued access licenses to enter the two ports’ container terminals.
   Designed to cut significant amounts of truck-generated pollution at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the plan seeks to modernize the local fleet of nearly 17,000 drayage trucks to 2007 or newer model year vehicles by 2012.
   “The Clean Trucks Program is a critical clean air program and we need to move forward with it as quickly as possible,” said J. Christopher Lytle, the Port of Long Beach’s deputy executive director, in a statement issued Friday on the start of the plan. “The port must address its environmental and community impacts now if we are to continue to move cargo, create jobs and provide economic benefits to the region.”
   Key components of the plan set to be launched Wednesday include:

• A ban on about 2,300 pre-1989 trucks that were identified in the local drayage fleet last year.
• A sticker program that identifies trucks as compliant with the plan.
• An access license component, requiring trucking firms to have obtained a ‘concession agreement’ from the ports.

   “We are proud to say that after months of intense preparation, the Port of Los Angeles Clean Truck Program will kick off as scheduled on Oct. 1 with the main elements in place,” said Geraldine Knatz, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, in a statement issued Sept. 25. “Our No. 1 goal is to keep commerce flowing while we implement the Clean Truck Program, and we are confident that we will meet this goal.”
   Additional aspects of the truck plan, including a $35-per-TEU fee to provide funds for replacing the older trucks through grants and subsidies from the ports, will be implemented as they are ready. According to the ports, the fee collection system, called PortCheck, should be operational within several weeks.
   Port officials also said port police officers will be stationed at container terminals on Wednesday to assist in enforcing the truck plan regulations. This includes turning away trucks that do not have the compliance stickers. The stickers, which began going out to more than 500 trucking firms last week, are a temporary measure until the PortCheck system is in place.
   As of Friday, Long Beach port officials reported more than 500 trucking firms representing 6,000 trucks had signed up for concession agreements. The neighboring Los Angeles port reported concession agreement applications from more than 500 trucking firms representing more than 20,000 trucks.
   While the two ports developed the plan jointly over the past 20 months by the two ports, each port adopted slightly different final versions of the plan, requiring trucking firms to receive separate concession agreements from each port they wish to enter. – Keith Higginbotham