Author: John R. McLaurin

If the state gave you a monopoly for a job which paid $400,000 a year for six months of work, were driven to and from jobs in a town car or limo, had all of your business expenses paid for by someone else, and were on your way to earning a public pension of a quarter million dollars per year to which you didn’t contribute a dime of your own money, would you be demanding a raise in this economy? You might if you were a state-licensed Bar Pilot.

Most people never heard of the San Francisco Bar Pilots until the Cosco Busan oil spill, when a ship under the control of a state-mandated pilot hit the Bay Bridge. After the accident in 2007, several changes in the state pilot system were enacted by the Legislature and the State Board of Pilot Commissioners was put under the jurisdiction of the Business, Transportation & Housing Agency (BT & H). Since then, BT & H has made significant improvements in much of the oversight of the state pilot monopoly.

Autism Awareness Month is coming to a close. Despite all of the “angels” that are out there in the world who are seeking answers to the why and how of autism or who educate children and adults with autism, I am left with a sense of foreboding. Perhaps it is a reflection of my own mortality viewed through the prism of my daughter who is autistic and who is now a young adult.

My daughter is part of the initial and growing wave of rapidly aging individuals diagnosed with autism. She lives in a state and a society which is completely unprepared, and perhaps incapable, of dealing with her needs. I wake up in the night, wondering what her life will be like when my wife and I are gone. It is at those moments that fear creeps in.

"Without the trust of the people, politics degenerates into
mere spectacle and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill
the void."  Those words were uttered by
Governor Jerry Brown in his inaugural address on January 3^rd.  And while his comments were probably
primarily directed at the legislative process in Sacramento, they would also
have application in Los Angeles, where a career politician is trying to force
her will on the Port of Los Angeles, to the detriment of a project that is
critical to the future success of the Port. 

The issue in Los Angeles involves LA City Councilwoman
Janice Hahn, who is trying to force the Port of Los Angeles to accept a
proposal from Gambol Industries for construction of a ship building and repair
facility at the expense and detriment of existing tenants at the Port.  The controversy centers around the disposal
of dredge material at the site of two former dry dock slips in the location
Gambol wants for its proposed shipyard. 
The disposal site was permitted as part of a previously approved Main
Channel Deepening Project – a US Army Corps of Engineers project (to deepen the
main ship channel to 53 feet) which is nearing its final years of
completion.  The dredging project is
vital to the Port’s ability to handle the latest generation of container ships
and to fend off competition of East and Gulf Coast ports, which will escalate with
the expansion of the Panama Canal in 2014. 

The Port of Long Beach is viewed by the international trade community as one of the better managed ports in the United States. It is blessed with an extremely talented and hard working management team and a harbor commission that takes its role and responsibilities seriously. In addition, under the City Charter, the Port has historically been at an arms length distance from the City, insulating it from the roller coaster of everyday City Hall politics. As a result, the Port of Long Beach has an enviable record of success.

Unfortunately for the Port and the community of Long Beach, all that may change on November 2nd.

With little debate and no analysis, the City Council rushed an amendment to the City Charter onto the November 2nd ballot. “Measure D” will take hundreds of millions of dollars away from the Port and give it to the City. Measure D was crafted by the Long Beach City Council without analysis or review even by their own harbor commissioners and professional port staff – let alone by the general public and other stakeholders. At the same time, the City Council blasted the Long Beach harbor commission for not agreeing to an earlier version of the measure.

With an approval rating of nine percent, the California Legislature is more unpopular than Richard Nixon during the depths of the Watergate scandal. Yet there is no scandal in Sacramento prompting such low numbers – rather it is a function of an ongoing political malaise that has settled upon the Capitol.

The institution’s dysfunction is well documented and acknowledged by all – including by the members of the Legislature itself. Frustration is found throughout the Capitol – yet this frustration is outweighed by the ongoing failure to implement any type of minor, but important, committee process changes that potentially could make both Legislative houses more deliberative, encourage more debate, and increase the focus on addressing some of the fundamental problems facing the state.

In years past, the Legislature successfully grappled with complex issues and problems – it was an institution that fostered opportunities for California residents. The work of the Legislature in crafting legislation involved a mixture of politics and policy. It was part art, science and process. It wasn’t always pretty, but the State was able to create the basic foundations for our society to function and flourish.

The Port of Los Angeles is not only swimming against the tide with regard to depressed cargo volumes and port revenues, it is also about to be penalized by the City of Los Angeles for its inability to balance its budget.

The Port dutifully followed the Mayor’s “Shared Sacrifice” initiative by leaving multiple staff positions unfilled and encouraging early retirement by dozens of employees – all in an effort to reduce costs. In return, the Port is about to become the dumping ground for dozens upon dozens of city employees, adding millions of unanticipated costs because of the LA City Council’s unwillingness to cut back 1,500 positions as part of an effort to reduce the City’s half a billion dollar budget deficit.

All of the Port’s good faith efforts over the past year to reduce its staffing levels and payroll expenses are for naught. The shifting of unwanted and surplus employees by the City to the Port increases the Port’s operating costs at a time when its revenue continues to decline. It penalizes the Port for exercising due diligence in following the Mayor’s policy directives to reduce costs, and it sacrifices the Port’s tideland trust responsibilities to the State because of the lack of political courage by the LA City Council.

To my wonderful, bright and beautiful daughters, I feel I owe you an apology. It is actually an apology from my generation to yours. Because we have lost the willingness to honestly look at the reality before us, my generation has created a California with very limited opportunities for you.

I want to be optimistic. I want you to have choices. I want you to be able to dream and reach for what could be. But instead my generation has accepted a governance process that takes pride in mediocrity. It is reflected in a state budget that only gets bleaker, a function of years of political deal-making that is anything but a “Profile in Courage.” As a result, opportunities enjoyed by my generation will be nothing more than unfulfilled dreams for your generation. We have created an accelerating downward spiral of limited educational and job opportunities.

There is a lot of talk and multiple proposals to change our political system, ranging from a constitutional convention to instituting a part time Legislature. Ironically, the dozens upon dozens of competing and conflicting ballot measures that propose to “fix” California’s problems are actually a continuation of the dysfunctional politics in the state. What is missing from all of these proposals is one key requirement for success – leadership.

Politics, like romance, involves interest, commitment, and an active pursuit. Unfortunately, for California, there seems to be no love for private sector jobs. If California intends to recover from its own economic and fiscal problems, problems that started before the national recession, then the California Legislature needs to show some interest and action to retain employers and encourage new employers to come to the state.

The advertising campaigns by other states are gaining a lot of attention and even generating responses from our elected officials. These states are clearly interested in luring California companies to relocate to their state. They use the national surveys of business leaders that rate California as one of the worst states for business. California leaders are responding to this perception problem by denying that quality jobs are leaving the state and claiming that once the national recession is over, California will once again become the magnet for companies that want to build and produce. However, the facts just do not support that contention.

It has to be tough to work in the marketing department of one of California’s container ports. While California’s container volumes continue to decline dramatically, new capacity continues to come on-line at Atlantic, Gulf coast, Canadian and Mexican ports. Combine the competitive pressures of these new facilities with the downturn in overall trade volumes, historic decline in freight rates and massive losses for ocean carriers and it’s clear why the competition to attract trade through West Coast gateways has become particularly intense. But the ports’ marketing departments have an additional challenge, perhaps their greatest one – the ports themselves.

Case in point, it was recently reported that the Port of Los Angeles is lobbying Congress to amend the federal act which preempts any local governmental regulation of the trucking industry with regard to the price, route or service of a motor carrier. As this federal preemption was the basis of a forceful ruling issued by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a successful action brought by the American Trucking Association against the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the attempt to get around the Ninth Circuit ruling is the Port of LA’s attempt to impose “employee mandates” on port trucking firms.