Long Beach mayor lobbies for environmental container fee

Long Beach mayor lobbies for environmental container fee

Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster, in office for less than 10 months, has already distilled his messages regarding the area ports to three quick points.

   Foster ventured to Sacramento last week for the first time since his election and took the opportunity to espouse the messages again, this time in testimony to the State Senate about bond funding for highway infrastructure.

   A former chief executive officer of Southern California Edison, Foster told senators that the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach handle a great percentage of the state and nation’s cargo, and deserve most of the money from the November 2006 statewide voter-approved infrastructure bond; that any bond-supported port infrastructure project must be linked to a specific clean air/mitigation measure; and the mitigation measures should be funded by port users through a container fee or tariff.

   Foster said that a system that puts the health of his constituents after the desire for cheaper goods in the rest of the country is not sustainable. He offered a place to start to correct the problems.

   'Goods need to pay their own way, both for infrastructure and environmental cleanup,' Foster told the senators. 'The only way you can make sure this happens is through a container fee or a tariff levied on them.'

   Foster also told legislators that solutions to the traffic congestion around ports must come with reductions in environmental impacts, not unfettered construction.

   'We can not build our way out of this,' Foster testified. 'All this will do 10 years from now is give us twice as many trucks idling on twice as many freeways, with twice as many asthma cases, twice as many heart conditions, and twice as many cancer cases. This is simply not tolerable.'

   In keeping with his simple message, Foster offered a simple solution: 'You spend a dollar on infrastructure; you spend a dollar on the environment. It's that simple.'