California Democrat fervently believes an efficient transportation infrastructure improves the economy and environment.
Congressman Alan Lowenthal fervently believes that an efficient freight transportation infrastructure improves both the national economy and the environment. The Democratic lawmaker realized this years ago and drove many infrastructure policy changes related to freight transportation in California — sometimes in the face of stiff industry opposition — during his time in that state’s Legislature in the 1990s and early 2000s. Since coming to Congress in 2012, Lowenthal has continued to champion freight transportation infrastructure at the national level. He is now recognized by ports and terminal operators, ocean carriers and truckers, and exporters and importers across the country as a go-to lawmaker for driving freight transportation infrastructure improvements.
The Adam Smith Project recently caught up with the congressman to discuss his legislative endeavors.
Q: Unlike so many politicians who only pay attention to freight transportation infrastructure in times of emergency or when new budgets are being drafted, why did this topic become so important to you? What was that crystalizing event?
A: I’ve been representing the Port of Long Beach in one form or another, first on the Long Beach City Council starting in 1992 and then on the state Assembly in 1998, where I represented both the Port of Long Beach and the Port of L.A. And then in the state Senate in 2004, I represented just the Port of Long Beach, and right now in Congress since 2012. So I’ve been around these issues. I live not too far from the port. I was a community activist, professor at Cal State Long Beach and very much interested in lots of different issues.
When I first ran for city council in 1992 … I started to walk along Ocean Boulevard and along the coast, telling people why I was running for office. And they would all say, “Hey Alan, what’s this black soot in my window?” And everywhere I went, people would ask me about the black soot. I had the same black soot in my garden patio, in my furniture and in my windows. I never really thought about it, but I said, “If I’m elected, let’s form a task force and let’s understand where this black soot comes from?”
In 1992, after I was elected to the city council, I began to work with a small group of residents, maybe 10 or 12 of them, to understand this problem, which we knew very little about. It turned out that the black soot had to do with diesel particulates that were coming out. And then we saw that the South Coast Air Quality Management District had done some studies on air quality.
The particulate matter around the ports was extremely high in those days. We had long lines of dirty trucks in the early 1990s that would come in and out of our ports. And when I first started to work with the port, they said, “You can’t deal with this. We’ll deal with the environmental issues later on, but right now we’re in competition with L.A. and other ports. And if we start to deal with, right now as our highest priority, cleaning up the ports, we’re going to be at a competitive disadvantage.” And that started me thinking about the issue, and I began to realize that one can have both environmental protection and economic growth.
Q: As a California state senator, you were recognized for your work among shippers, carriers, terminal operators and freight transportation proponents nationwide. What were the most important freight transportation infrastructure regulations and policies that you instituted in California during your time in office there? Did they evolve to your satisfaction?
A: In the 1990s they all said I was crazy. And so then when I was elected to the state Legislature, I began to introduce lots of legislation about some of the first, the smallest impacts that I wanted to deal with. That was covering the petroleum coke piles that were left uncovered and not having trucks idling in the ports. And I became convinced at the time that one of the major steps would be to work with the industry even though they were not wild about me. They saw me at that time as very much a threat, to figure out how do we get trucks off the road during the daytime and move as much as possible towards the night?
And I began to talk to the terminal operators and others about what we could do. They said, well, they’ve been trying to deal with keeping the ports open. This was in the late 1990s, early 2000. And they said they’d been trying to deal with these issues for a long time, but were not really successful. They couldn’t get the terminal operators to share information, to run a system that would keep the ports open at night. And the distributors didn’t want to keep their distribution centers open at night and on and on.
I said, “Well, here’s the story. I’m going to introduce legislation in the state Legislature that will call for a state system. We would set up a state system under the California Department of Transportation to keep the ports open at night. But I will get rid of that bill before it gets to the governor if you [the industry] will come up with your own program and I’ll work with you, but I’ll give you one year to come up with something.” And that led to them coming up with PierPass, which was more of a market-based approach than a state-run approach. I had no problem with that. I just wanted to get trucks off the road and I knew we weren’t going to build a huge amount of new infrastructure and keeping the ports open at night. And with that, our relationship began to change. Once I began to work with the terminal operators in the maritime industry who had opposed everything that I had done up until then, they began to say, “Well, maybe we can work together on these issues.”
And so that led to many of the changes and from then on, some of the other bills that I worked on were successful, some weren’t, but it was always about how do we fund this? How do we clean the ports? How do we push ports to do things that they want to do anyway? And ultimately in the middle 2004, 2005, both the Ports of L.A. and Long Beach decided at that point we can have a clean port policy and still keep growing. And I was very, very proud of both of the ports and the industry for coming together and working on that and working on the truck replacement programs. They go around the world touting what they do and I think that’s wonderful. I think they should be complimented.
Q: Before coming to Capitol Hill, what frustrated you most about our national approach to freight transportation infrastructure development? How did you hope to effect change in this area as a congressman?
A: There is no national approach. While it was a huge priority for California to have [efficient and clean freight transportation] infrastructure in place, it did not seem to be that important at a national level.
Part of my job is just to educate people and be part of the PORTS Caucus to make it an important issue at a national level, that freight drives the country and strategic national freight policy can help us in many of our goals. One is to maintain our leadership status in terms of international trade, but also to make sure that we don’t leave any parts of the country out. And we really need a national strategy that really creates infrastructure because we just … you know, our goods go all over the country, just as other ports’ goods go all over the country. We’ve begun to really look at, over the last few years, our strategy, but nothing has been implemented and there’s no funding.
Q: Describe the formation of the PORTS caucus. In a political environment so splintered today, are the caucus members able to kind of set aside differences in the name of facilitating the flow of the nation’s commerce?
A: Before I arrived [in Washington], Congresswoman Janice Hahn represented our port complex here [in San Pedro Bay and was co-chairman of the caucus with Congressman Ted Poe of Texas]. I think that they work very well together. When Janice left, I took over her position as the Democratic co-chair and Ted continued on as the Republican co-chair.
We began to see that there are a lot of things that we can deal with on a national level. One of them is the whole issue about the harbor maintenance fee, how we can educate the rest of the members of the country that this is a fee that’s generated [and] that should be used for port upgrading, for port infrastructure, especially waterside infrastructure, but we weren’t spending the money. So first under the leadership of Ted and Janice and then later on I took it over and worked with Ted and began to figure out how do we get funding.
Right now, even though we haven’t been able to institute it this year in Congress, we are very close to working out a better relationship between the donor ports and the receiving ports about new additional funds. … I think that what unites us more than Republicans versus Democrats is the difference between the large ports and the small ports and how we can have a system that both funds large ports and small ports. Part of that is to make sure that we fully fund the harbor maintenance fee … and also to figure out how we can begin to work with a better distribution of the funding that comes out to benefit the ports. The American Association of Port Authorities continues to work with us to come up with a compromise that meets the needs of both small ports and large ports. So I think that we’re on the verge of doing that, but that will only happen if we can fully fund the harbor maintenance, the funding coming out of that, and we’re still not there yet.
Other things that really unite us all, Republicans and Democrats, are national security and cybersecurity issues. And we’ve used our caucus to educate members about some of the [recent] attacks. We have to keep commerce flowing, and we have to make sure that we work together.
Q: Last summer you introduced the bill, the National Multimodal and Sustainable Freight Infrastructure Act. You said the legislation would raise about $8 billion annually for freight-related infrastructure projects nationwide by creating a freight transportation infrastructure trust fund. The money for that would funded through a national 1 percent waybill fee. What is the status of this legislation?
A: We know that much of the funding that goes forward will be done, whatever we do, from user fees. I think that [the proposed legislation] would be on the table right now, but what’s ahead of it is how are we going to fund highway transportation infrastructure? Are we going to increase the federal excise tax on gasoline?
I think [Congressman Bill] Schuster and [Congressman Peter] DeFazio [of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee] agree on that. We’ve had discussions in the T&I Committee about that. I think the leadership of the Republicans and Democrats agreed that the Highway Trust Fund based upon the excise tax on gasoline and diesel fuel is the best thing that we have, and we haven’t raised it in many, many years. A waybill fee also would be part of the discussion for freight, and it really was discussed in the committee. But the problem is that once we leave the committee, once we go to the leadership, whether it’s [Congressman Paul] Ryan or now [Congressman Kevin] McCarthy, they do not want to raise any gas tax. Actually, Mr. McCarthy is running a campaign against California’s raising of the gas tax. If we don’t have some consensus on that, then we are not going to get a waybill fee to be part of a package.
So I think nothing about that is going to happen until after the [2018 midterm] elections. And I think after the elections, we’re going to have some serious discussions about that because I think Republicans also realize we have to, especially at the committee level. The president’s infrastructure bill had no basic funding, just a few hundred million from the federal government. Everybody else paid this year, except the government. That’s not going to work.
However, the nation is asking us for jobs and infrastructure. And you’re not going to create jobs and infrastructure unless you have a national strategic plan and a way to fund it. And right now, nobody in the majority party in Congress wants to take that chance to step up and talk about funding. But, you know, we can’t keep pushing this off forever, and I think they know that.
Q: Meanwhile, what can the industry do to strengthen that sense of urgency on Capitol Hill to improve our nation’s increasing outdated freight transportation infrastructure?
A: First, the industry has to be outspoken about the national need to build, if we’re talking about new jobs, if we’re talking about parts of the country that have been left behind, the way in which they can become part of the economic growth that the nation is incurring … if we have a strategy to build infrastructure and that it benefits them too. There’s money in it for them, those parts of the country, because right now they’re isolated. There are parts of the country that are difficult to reach, and we need to be able to have a plan that rebuilds that.
And I think that we just have to keep publicizing that, because if you can’t get goods to market, if it takes a long time, if there’s delay, we’re not going to maintain our worldwide leadership. You know, the rest of the world is investing in infrastructure, whether it’s rail infrastructure or highways. We are not, and you can just do that for so long. I think that is going to be our next major critical thing that the country does and hopefully in a bipartisan way. And I think freight leads the way, and the industry has to speak out for it. This is what will create the next generation of jobs.
We’re not going to go away. We’re going to build a coalition, and I think we’ve demonstrated that we can all work together on this and that we can listen to each other. I’m not saying that we have to do it through a waybill or anything else. I think this is one feasible way that works and pays for some of the infrastructure. But we have to get serious about the fact that we must repair and build new infrastructure, and we have to figure out a way to pay for it. And this is a rational way to at least start that discussion.
