Tag Archives: clean ports

LA City Elections: Promise, Pitfalls, Potential

Today is Election Day in LA City, and given the turnouts we’ve seen in other off-year elections, as well as the fact that the mayoral race, the biggest ticket on the ballot, is basically a coronation, turnout is likely to be very small, save for the wide-open 5th District City Council race, which is really anybody’s to win (very unusual in LA politics).  The expectation is about 15%.  Despite the fact that Los Angeles actually has a fairly rich culture of political activism, from the Latino student sit-ins to recent Prop. 8 actions and hundreds more, the recent history is that city elections do not draw much of a crowd.  That’s a shame in a city that’s larger than the total populations of many states, and it reduces accountability on the elected officials.

I don’t live in Los Angeles, but I work here, and I have a conflicted view about the way the city runs.  I think if every resident were forced to watch The Garden, the Oscar-nominated documentary about South Los Angeles residents being forcibly evicted from a community garden, nobody would vote for anyone currently on the City Council, least of all Mayor Villaraigosa.  The film, almost a real-life version of The Wire, revealed a city government of backroom deals and power-brokers able to make their voices heard well beyond the needs of the community.  You can add to that the rare bit of journalism from the LA Weekly about the City Council, and you could be convinced that the lack of accountability from the electoral process has bred a toxic atmosphere at City Hall.  The likely consolidation of power that would result from Villaraigosa allies in the city attorney and city controller offices would lead you even closer to that conclusion.

Yet among the morass, there are some very earnest public servants trying to manage a very unwieldy city, with a host of unique problems and challenges that would vex any lawmaking body on Earth.  Set aside this year’s $1 billion dollar budget; the problems of immigration, gang violence, income inequality, traffic, health care, air pollution, education, and much, much more all converge in this city.  From 10,000 feet these problems look intractable, and yet there are gradual, slow steps toward mitigation, and even areas where Los Angeles is a national model.  The sales tax receipts from Measure R may finally bring sustainable transit infrastructure to fruition for more than a handful of the city’s residents.  The Green Trucks Program is an innovative, first-in-the-nation effort to bring labor and environmental groups together to reduce pollution, create living wage jobs and help save the planet.  And the city’s Green Jobs Training program is seen as so potentially game-changing that it was used as a model in a White House staff report from their Middle Class Task Force:

The City of Los Angeles has undertaken or is in the midst of undertaking several initiatives that, together, begin to constitute a model for how cities can maximize the benefits of “going green” for working families.  As is often the case, necessity was the mother of policy innovation.  A few years ago, the city faced a number of stark challenges including: a state renewable energy mandate (a statewide “portfolio standard” requiring 20% renewable energy by 2017) and a state cap on greenhouse gas emissions; an impending shortage of skilled construction workers; entrenched poverty and joblessness in many low-income neighborhoods; and toxic levels of diesel pollution that were imposing huge health costs and blocking the growth of the nation’s largest port complex.  

In the past year, Los Angeles has adopted a comprehensive approach to redevelopment which will ensure that city-subsidized development projects are built green and serve as vehicles for moving low-income residents into middle-class construction careers.  The Port of Los Angeles has also begun to implement a comprehensive solution to freight-related air pollution that will increase efficiency, enhance security, and improve work conditions and living standards for port truck drivers.  Most important is the fact that these initiatives are being undertaken on a large scale: the city’s construction policy is expected to impact 15,000 jobs over five years while the Clean Trucks Program (discussed below) could affect as many as 16,000 port truck drivers.

In 2008, the City of Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) adopted a landmark policy designed to protect the environment, safeguard the interests of taxpayers, and ensure that city-supported projects create good construction jobs and career pathways for city residents.  The Construction Careers and Project Stabilization Policy establishes minimum labor standards and a process for avoiding labor disruptions by means of a master agreement between the CRA and local building trades unions.  The policy requires participating contractors and unions to make construction job opportunities available to local residents, including individuals who face barriers to employment such as a criminal record or a limited education.

The policy is being implemented alongside a requirement that large subsidized projects meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards.  In this way, city leaders have begun to lay the foundations for building a green-collar construction workforce in Los Angeles.  The UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education projects that the policy will make at least 5,000 apprentice-level construction jobs available to residents of neighborhoods with high levels of unemployment over the next five years.  At least 1,500 jobs are expected to go to individuals who might otherwise remain homeless, unemployed, dependent on welfare programs, or caught up in the criminal justice system.  But the most important result of the Construction Careers policy will be to leverage public investments in economic development to turn short-term jobs into long-term careers in the construction industry.

I wish there was more structural accountability in Los Angeles, from the Mayor on down.  I wish the city wasn’t so dominated by big-city machine politics and red-letter projects that often fail to follow through on their promise.  And where criticism is warranted, I’m sure to be first in line.  But Los Angeles is a very complex and hard-to-pigeonhole place, and that is true of its politics as well.

Friday Open Thread

Here’s a little something so you can head into the weekend informed.

• The SEIU put together a rally of over 1,000 members in Sacramento today, demanding a budget solution.  More are expected in Sacramento, San Francisco and Fresno tomorrow.  Given the desperation, I see nothing wrong with taking it to the streets.  You can also contribute to their letter-writing campaign to the Governor here.

• Here are a couple of real victories for organized labor and working people.  First, UNITE-Here’s workers won a court decision that will expand the Living Wage ordinance in Southern California and gives 550 laundry workers a better chance to sue Cintas for back wages.  Speaking of back pay, TV networks settled two class-action lawsuits with reality-show workers for $4 million dollars.  These workers were made to falsify time cards and work up to 20-hour days without overtime or meal breaks.  I have some friends in the industry who were parties to these lawsuits and I’m very happy they reached a good conclusion.  The fight continues.

• The Senate GOP is slow-walking the confirmation of Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary, which is annoying.  She is more than qualified and her views on the Employee Free Choice Act, which is a legislative fight, are hardly germane as well as well-known.  She deserves a vote and not this nonsense.  America needs a friend to labor at the Labor Department again.

• I have no idea why Rocky Delgadillo is running for Attorney General again.  Rocky has been a real hero in fighting insurance industry malfeasance like rescission, but his recent troubles over his wife running his city-owned SUV into a pole (and she didn’t have a license) and paying for it with city money is a 30-second ad waiting to happen.  Maybe he should wait out a cycle?

• The FDA has approved a Menlo Park-based company for a human trial for a stem cell treatment, the first ever in the US.  This is not just a victory for science but could prove to make California a real leader in medical therapeutics.  We need some expansion in industry here, anyway.

Good article from Open Left about how cleaner ports can add lots of middle-class green job, as it has with the Clean Trucks program at the port of Los Angeles.

• Shorter Phil Bronstein: Leave Bush ALOOOOOONE!

An Evening With Some Community Organizers

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the 15th Anniversary Awards Dinner for LAANE (The Los Angeles Alliance For A New Economy), which brought 1,000 people to the Beverly Hilton (including Mayor Villaraigosa, Sean Penn, and more) and raised $500,000 for their cause.  I know I get depressed reading about endless budget fights and cutbacks to schools and health care, so it’s important to take comfort (and some valuable lessons) in those doing important work – and fighting some of the most powerful and entrenched interests in the city and the country – and winning.

LAANE is a group dedicated to fighting for economic and environmental justice by building coalitions and waging campaigns to improve the lives of people in underserved and at-risk communities.  Their success stories include some of the most astonishing victories of the last decade – the living-wage campaign in Los Angeles, the (eventually) successful grocery worker’s strike, the campaign to keep Wal-Mart out of Inglewood in 2004, the fight for justice for hotel workers near LAX.  More recently, they achieved success with a landmark blue-green alliance of nearly 40 environmental groups, community organizers and labor organizations like the Teamsters, to clean up the Port of Los Angeles, which resulted in a huge victory for clean air and clean water which will also provide good-paying sustainable jobs for truck drivers.  The Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports is a model for the nation, to combine economic security and respect for the environment at the ports, and Chuck Mack & Jim Santangelo from the Teamsters were honored last night (sporting leis flown in by a Teamster rep from Hawaii).

Another of their campaigns is the “Construction Career Policy,” dedicated to providing local residents in low-income communities the opportunity to get middle-class, union construction jobs on projects happening in their area.  This has resulted in thousands of jobs for at-risk and underserved communities of color, and the goal is for 15,000 jobs over the next 5 years.  Mayor Villaraigosa presented Cora Davis, a construction business owner and leading advocate for the program, with an award.

Finally, in the wake of the movie “Milk,” many are remembering the work of Cleve Jones, an activist in San Francisco during the era and the leader of the AIDS Quilt Project.  Today, Jones is a community organizer working for UNITE HERE, and he has worked with LAANE on their campaigns to create living-wage jobs and improve working conditions for the 3,500 hotel workers around LAX Airport.  Sean Penn, who became friendly with Jones over the last year working on “Milk,” presented him with an award for his service.  In his speech, Jones talked about these noble working-class people, many of them immigrants, “the ones who are serving you dinner tonight,” and he paid tribute to their struggle and dignity.  He also had a few words to say about the passage of Prop. 8, which left him heartbroken and drew eerie parallels to the Prop. 6 campaign he worked on with Harvey Milk in 1978.  But, Jones said, the real parallel moment is 1964, a time when civil rights for African-Americans in the Deep South appeared remote.  “Now is the time for Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to sign a new Civil Rights Act restoring fundamental rights for every American in this country.”  It’s not the tactic you hear from the leading gay rights organizations, but Cleve doesn’t hold much of a brief for them either:

The new (gay rights) activists have impressed some gay rights veterans.

“They’ve shown a clear ability to turn out large numbers of people,” said Cleve Jones, a longtime gay rights advocate and labor organizer. “It’s also clear that they are skeptical of the established L.G.B.T. organizations. And I would say they have reason to be.”

Overall, it was inspiring to see a community-based organization so dedicated to restoring fairness, justice, dignity and respect to a part of a population that frequently doesn’t have a voice in political affairs, and more important, to see them get results.  LAANE is doing some great work.

Great Developments in Emission Reduction

This happened a couple days ago, but as it’s crucial that the clean-truck program at two of the nation’s busiest ports go forward, I think it’s significant:

A federal court judge in Los Angeles on Monday tentatively denied a trucking association’s bid to block a landmark clean-truck program at the nation’s busiest port complex.

After a 40-minute hearing, U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder said she would probably allow the program to move forward, despite objections from truckers.

“The balance of hardships and the public interest tip decidedly in favor of denying the injunction,” she said in court.

Under the program, the adjacent ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach would upgrade their aging fleet of about 16,800 mostly dilapidated rigs that produce much of the diesel pollution in Southern California.

Though the American Trucking Association is opposing the bill and filed the attempted injunction, the clean-ports program was borne of a true blue-green alliance between labor and environmental groups, which is the next level of how we’re going to fight climate change in this country and build millions of new green-collar jobs.  The courts are now on the record as saying that reducing greenhouse gas emissions are in the public interest.  And the ATA is being a little coy here – a good number of the trucking firms are already upgrading, so their injunction effort was meant to satisfy a few big corporations.  It didn’t work.  

The second exciting development is SB 375, which for the first time links emissions to urban planning, and could easily become a model for the nation.  We have to make sure it’s signed into law, of course, but if and when it is, it will represent a great leap forward for the environment, live/work issues, quality of life, and traffic reduction.

The measure, known as SB375, aims to give existing and new high-density centers where people live, work and shop top priority in receiving local, state and federal transportation funds. The idea is that such developments check sprawl and ease commutes, in turn cutting the car pollution wafting through the Golden State.

Authored by Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), the bill reflects California’s push to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. Sponsors say the measure is part of a much-needed growth policy for a state whose population is expected to swell to 50 million from the current 38 million in two decades.

“Many places across the country have realized that if you just build spread-out developments, with the expectation that everyone will have to drive for everything, it should be no surprise when the result is excessive burning of gasoline,” said David Goldberg, spokesman for Smart Growth America, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit group that helps cities and towns plan more workable, environmentally friendly growth.

“SB375 breaks new ground, because it specifically links that pattern of development to excess driving and what we need to do to address climate change,” he said.

Instead of trying to capture more resources every time there’s an energy shortage, we can reorganize our lives to maximize existing resources while making our lifestyles far less stressful and more pleasant.  It’s the solution that works on all fronts.

The budget madness is super-depressing, but these developments are cause for optimism.