L.A. Council Approves Port’s Clean Truck Plan
The Los Angeles City Council has approved to a plan requiring all truck drivers at the Port of Los Angeles to be employed by a trucking company within five years, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday. The plan is part of a larger initiative to replace as many as 17,000 older trucks, and would ban independent owner-operators from operating at the port by the end of 2013, port officials said last month.
Backers of the plan, including the Teamsters union, argued that truck drivers would not be capable of maintaining cleaner-burning trucks unless they earn more money and have the ability to join labor unions, the Times said.
American Trucking Associations has said it will file a lawsuit to block the plan, the Times said.
Curtis Whalen, executive director of ATA’s Intermodal Modal Carriers Conference, told the Times that ATA also planned to sue the Port of Long Beach over that port’s similar clean truck initiative.
Whalen said that ATA would not try to stop the part of the plan that allows the ports to subsidize part of the cost of buying new cleaner-fuel trucks, the Times reported.
