Across California, many business and economic development groups have proven themselves to be at the forefront of regional thinking and activities. In this interview with MIR, Wally Baker, Senior Vice President of Economic and Public Policy Consulting at the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, talks about LAEDC's efforts to bring the players together to solve the Southland's critical goods movement crisis while paying attention to environmental impacts.
Wally Baker
Wally, the LAEDC has been engaged for some time now in a collaborative regional working group focused on how to best deal with goods movement in and out of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Could you describe the nature of this effort, who is involved, and what its objectives are?
This discussion is not just about the Ports of L.A. and Long Beach, but about the whole system that supports the ports, including the Alameda Corridor. And our role, frankly, has been to try to get it organized as a system. It functions and "dysfunctions" in different ways, but nobody has really yet been able to pull together the five counties, the railroads, and Metrolink, so that is what we have focused on doing. Ultimately, many things that we do in Los Angeles will impact San Bernardino, and things that happen in San Bernardino impact us in Los Angeles. So, we have tried to pull everybody together.
How would you describe this region's goods movement challenge?
I would say that the problem is really two-fold. One part is our potential for job growth, and it comes back to our capacity for mobility and our congestion. If we don't change our current patterns, then we will not have the job potential that we could have. The other aspect, which gets a lot of press – deservedly, I think, because transportation people haven't focused on it as much as they could have – is the environmental and local impacts of goods transportation. If you don't address those upfront and equally, I don't think you'll get there, because these issues have been second and in the backseat for so long. We have got to deal with both of those together. People should recognize that we could try to mitigate every environmental impact, but we certainly couldn't afford that. Or, we could only try for total possible job growth. We at LAEDC want to balance those sides a little bit, but we definitely recognize environmental issues as having been the most neglected part of this discussion.
What specific role has the LAEDC assumed in resolving the goods movement inefficiencies out of our ports, and what value does LAEDC bring to the discussions of how best to mitigate the air and traffic pollution and congestion threatening to choke growth at the ports?
Interestingly, I think that we have pretty much proven ourselves to be not very "L.A.-centric" in the area of goods movement. We work with Orange County, Riverside, and San Bernardino and within L.A. County. People have a pretty high level of trust in us and in what we do. I think they realize that we don't have anything to spin. We are the staff – it isn't our agreement, it's their agreement. They have to get their heads together and agree. So, people in San Bernardino and Riverside have grown to trust that we are there to bring people together, and that we don't have an agenda except solving the problems of growth common to all of us in the region. Tons of people who work in L.A. County, live in Orange County, and vice versa, so we just can't be successful if we don't work together.
Who are the stakeholders that must be involved in planning, and who has LAEDC engaged in this policy and planning effort?
In individual engagements and now in a bigger effort, we have so far worked with institutions I call the "investor-owners" of the system. On the highway side, there is basically Caltrans – they own the highway side. On the rail side, there are about six owners. The two ports are owned by the state and run by the Cities of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority is a joint-powers authority governed by the two cities, the two ports, and the county. Then there are the rail companies in the private sector, Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe. But, they also lease their rail lines out to the public sector, which is Metrolink. And then, Metrolink leases its space to the private sector. So, the system is really complicated.
But guess what? This complicated system is the easiest to grow and the easiest to manage. Part of it comes because of the private-sector involvement. They really look hard at where they invest, what their real purposes are, and how their investments might resolve their congestion issues.
How is this LAEDC coordinated effort is proceeding, Wally? How do you find benchmarks of success?
I recently asked someone from one of the big transportation agencies, "What is different about this process?" And they responded, "We've never actually agreed on anything." That's what is really unique! We are actually finding agreement under this umbrella. When there is an issue to deal with, we look at from five perspectives, so that everyone sees goods movement as something that they need to do together. That's a pretty good benchmark. The private sector is equally interested in this process. The two railroads have put a lot of money into the effort, because they see all of the problems impacting them in a huge way.
Right now we are actually finding agreement – not about how to talk more. Instead, it is about what projects we are all absolutely going to get behind, the ones we need to get done in the next 10 years. We pretty much know what those are. What legislation needs to be changed? What are the specific funding approaches? Now what we're trying to do is get everybody to agree about five areas: legislation, projects, community outreach, environmental impact, and economic impact.
Lastly, regional leaders have begun realizing that the best way to address problems around the world is through regional approaches, whether economic, environmental or political. But, our government institutions were created around federal, state, and local entities that increasingly don't align with regional needs. What problems has the LAEDC run into as they tackle the regional problem of goods movement in Southern California?
One of the big problems that we see is that communities aren't shaping their priorities together. Officials in Washington are hearing many well-crafted but clashing messages, because everybody who comes to them has a different approach to a project that conflicts with the others. Also, term limits totally screw us up. If I'm an assemblymember, there is no motivation for me to work with the assembly district right next door, because I'm not even going to be in office long enough to make a difference. That's one of the things that we realized we have a responsibility to overcome.
The business community has been part of the problem too, because it has tried to compartmentalize itself. You know, the L.A. Chamber, the Orange County Chamber – they have followed these boundaries, too. I think that some of the really high-level business people are realizing: "Let's sell Southern California. Let's quit selling only L.A. County or Orange County. Let's sell the whole region." Because that is what people outside of our market understand. I can see us getting there slowly. But you know, SCAG has been doing this kind of thing for a long time, and it's very difficult to motivate regional political leaders to work together.
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