Clean Truck Challenge Headed for the Top

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit will hear arguments March 4 in the American Trucking Associations' challenge to the Los Angeles-Long Beach clean-trucks plan, but litigation involving the controversial program will continue on for years regardless of what happens in the Pasadena courthouse.

Litigation challenging the right of local and state bodies to regulate interstate commerce is complex and open to appeals. This case could be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States, said Charles T. Carroll, executive director of the National Association of Waterfront Employers.

"This has Supreme Court written all over it," Carroll told the annual Trans-Pacific Maritime Conference in Los Angeles. It is conceivable that litigation involving the precedent-setting clean-trucks plan could take five years to resolve, Carroll said.

In many respects, the effort by the nation's two largest container ports to reduce harmful emissions from trucks by 80 percent over the next five years has the support of environmentalists, labor unions and the trucking industry itself.

However, the ports intend to achieve their environmental goal by requiring that all motor carriers serving the harbor sign concession agreements, and this requirement has spawned a lawsuit in U.S. district and appellate courts in California and a challenge by the Federal Maritime Commission in the U.S. District Court in Washington.

ATA, NAWE, the FMC, the Department of Justice and various industry groups have joined one or both lawsuits. The trucking industry is fighting a requirement by the Port of Los Angeles that motor carriers must hire employee drivers, a provision supported by the Teamsters Union. The Teamsters are attempting to organize harbor truck drivers nationwide.

Curtis Whalen, executive director of the ATA's Intermodal Conference, said the ports are openly attempting to encourage large trucking companies to play a dominant role in the harbor because they would be easier to organize than a myriad of small firms.

The National Resources Defense Council, which is supporting the ports in the lawsuits, maintains that only large, well-financed motor carriers will have the pricing power and revenue needed to replace as many as 16,000 old trucks with new, low-emission trucks that cost about $100,000 each.

David Pettit, senior attorney and director of the NDC's Southern California Air Program, said a sustainable trucking industry is a prerequisite for a viable clean-trucks program. "If it doesn't make economic sense, it doesn't make environmental sense," he said.