Legislation to provide more oversight of port trucking program is pulled

Leaders of a little known private company intended to lessen big rig traffic on local freeways has reluctantly agreed to look at reforms after a state legislator threatened to take over its duties.

Earlier this month, Assemblyman Patrick O’Doell, D-Long Beach, authored a bill that would have created a joint powers authority to regulate fees for the semis entering the Los Angles and Long Beach ports and develop congestion relief plans.

Now, those tasks are run by PierPass, but the bill, introduced late in the legislative session, never went far. This week O’Doell pulled the legislation after the company representing 13 marine terminal operators that run the program said they would sit down to discuss reforms.

“I wanted to raise some eyebrows here,” O’Doell said. “The (trucking) fees keep going up and some of the gates that PierPass funds, those terminals are shutting down earlier.”

For years, O’Doell said there had been complaints that PierPass is antiquated and needs to justify the fees it was charging haulers.

Created about a decade ago to battle freeway bottlenecks, PierPass charges truckers heading to and from the port during daytime hours, but allows those same truckers to enter the port for free during “off peak hours” in the evening.

The idea of the charges (about $140 for the average truck) was to encourage big rig drivers from hogging up freeway lanes in the daytime when most commuters are on the road.

PierPass then uses those fees – about $176 million last year – to pay for night dockworkers at the Port of Long Beach and Port of Los Angeles.

“You go into the ports today and they are not congested,” said John Cushing, the president of PierPass. “They are operating very efficiently. We have heard it from the port authority, we have heard it from the operators.”

But not everyone agrees.

“Because so many cargo owners don’t want to pay the onerous traffic mitigation fee, they have the truck drivers sit outside the terminal and create congestion as they wait for the fee to go away,” said Weston LaBar, executive director of the Harbor Trucking Association and Foreign Trade Association. “Cargo volumes are at an all time high and we need to be able to move trucks through gates in a more dynamic fashion and reduce congestion.”

O’Doell said PierPass officials should consider congestion pricing, like that used in toll lanes.

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Some, however, also have deep conces about the fees PierPass charged.

Federal Maritime Chairman Mario Cordero called on PierPass last year to hire an independent auditor to review its operations, although the commission does not have the authority to force one.

Cushing said he is willing to sit down with truckers, the ports and others to deal with congestion but expressed less willingness to allow for a third-party audit.

“We have put a lot of financial information out there,” he said. “We have had the Federal Maritime Commission review all of our financials and we continue to work with the Federal Maritime Commission on this issue.”

Cushing brushed aside the question of whether PierPass would open their books, saying that he would discuss the matter privately with the Federal Maritime Commission.

But John DeCrosta, a spokesman for Federal Maritime Chairman, said PierPass has agreed to an audit but has yet to submit to one.