NRDC, Sierra Club back drayage concessions

NRDC, Sierra Club back drayage concessions    Two environmental groups are pressing for legislation to give ports wider latitude in regulating drayage business, even as a coalition of shippers and trucking companies urge Congress take the opposite tack.
   In a letter dated Aug. 21, National Resources Defense Council Executive Director Peter Lehner and Sierra Club President Allison Chin asked James Oberstar, D-Minn., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, to support an amendment to the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act to protect the clean trucks programs (CTP) at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
   On Monday, a coalition of industry groups including the National Retail Federation, National Industrial Transportation League and World Shipping Council, urged the ports of Los Angeles and Port of Seattle not to support modification of the longstanding federal law, the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA). Los Angeles supports the change, while the Port of Seattle has not taken a position, but is studying the issue. That coalition said Los Angeles, Oakland and the Port Authority of New York-New Jersey support modification of the FAAA.
   The American Trucking Associations, which has sued Los Angeles and Long Beach over their clean trucks program, said the change in the FAAA is being pursued to make it easier for ports to create concession programs that would shift work from owner-operators to companies with employees who could be unionized.
   In their letter, the NRDC and Sierra note that Oberstar, in a July 29 meeting, “raised a number of important questions related to the necessity of the concession agreement component of the CTP, including whether the ports' environmental goals could be achieved without the use of a concession model.
   “As environmental organizations that have spent nearly a decade working to reduce air pollution from port operations, we firmly believe that a concession model is essential to the long-term success of the CTP,' the letter said.
   It said the concessions could help ports better enforce the programs, lead to better maintained trucks because concessionaires will be well-heeled trucking companies rather than “underpaid drivers,” and create a more efficient industry, one where larger companies could match inbound and outbound deliveries that can be hauled in a single round-trip.
   A group of 32 organizations sent a letter to Oberstar on July 27 urging he not support modification of the FAAA.
   Lehner and Chin say the organizations' arguments were “premised on the belief that the prior drayage system worked — that it was efficient, competitive and equitable. We couldn't disagree more. The former port drayage model is precisely what led to a system of underpaid drivers, older polluting trucks, and inefficient trucking operations.”