Ruling May Block Long Beach Port Project

A judge’s ruling issued Tuesday may block the Port of Long Beach’s plan to build and lease a vast new terminal to perhaps its most promising--and most controversial--customer, a Chinese government-owned shipping line.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert H. O’Brien appeared to sink construction of the cargo terminal for China Ocean Shipping Co., known as Cosco, ruling that the city’s port was predisposed to approve the project before studying its potential impact on the environment.

Port officials had planned to raze Long Beach’s closed Naval Station and erect a 145-acre terminal on the waterfront in its place. Now facing the prospect that O’Brien could eventually erase five years of planning on how to use the abandoned military site, city officials were stunned.

“It is unfortunate that a small group of special interests have sought to further delay the city’s economic recovery, threatened thousands of jobs and jeopardized millions of dollars of funding for historic preservation,” Long Beach Mayor Beverly O’Neill said Tuesday.

Port of Long Beach officials believed that they had scored an international trade coup when they beat out their rivals at the Port of Los Angeles and signed Cosco to a lease last fall. Cosco had operated on about 80 acres of terminal space at the Long Beach port since 1981 but had been looking to expand to accommodate greater cargo volume.

Now, without a new terminal to occupy in Long Beach and few signs of a slowdown in cargo volume, the company may be forced to look elsewhere, shipping industry officials said. Senior Cosco officials were in a conference call Tuesday afternoon and unavailable to comment.

Port of Los Angeles representatives also declined to comment Tuesday. They have traveled to Beijing at least twice in the last year to lobby Cosco to consider moving if the Long Beach terminal plan collapsed.

Port officials in Long Beach said Tuesday they were puzzled by O’Brien’s ruling because it does not explicitly advise them how to proceed.

But Jan Chatten-Brown, a lawyer for Long Beach Heritage, a preservationist organization that led the effort to stop the terminal project, said she would ask the judge to order Long Beach to restart the cumbersome process of deciding what to do with the historic Naval Station land. O’Brien’s final ruling is expected within a few weeks.

Chatten-Brown said she is sure that officials in Long Beach “perceive us as obstructionists, but I hope they see this as an opportunity to do something creative with some of the most valuable land in the city.”

In his ruling, O’Brien said that votes by the Long Beach Harbor Commission to approve the project in September were “foregone conclusions” and that the required environmental impact study was viewed as “simply something to get through.”

When the City Council voted to offer the land to the city’s quasi-independent port in 1995, O’Neill and other leaders hailed the move as a way to heal the economic havoc wreaked by the loss of about 50,000 jobs in aerospace and at the closed naval base. The terminal was expected to create 300 to 600 permanent jobs and provide about $1 million a year in city tax revenue.

But even as city officials praised the terminal project, opposition mushroomed across the country. First, the California Coastal Commission temporarily withheld its approval of the plan because it questioned the port’s plan to dredge tons of contaminated silt from the ocean and use it to replace a habitat for the California least tern. After receiving assurances from the port that the contaminated material would be safely sealed, the panel later granted its approval.

And in Washington, two conservative members of Congress launched an effort to stop any plan to lease land to Cosco because they said the company posed a national security threat. After reviewing intelligence data and the company’s safety record, Pentagon officials said the company posed no such threat.

The project has also been entangled in the fringes of questionable Democratic Party fund-raising, with critics suggesting that the terminal was advanced by President Clinton in exchange for campaign contributions from Asian donors.

The terminal may face another lawsuit from television host Huell Howser, who visited the Naval Station to produce a show and decided that its buildings should be spared.

Commissioned in 1942 as Roosevelt Base, the station was a regular stop for the Navy’s Pacific fleet during at least three wars. It operated as a miniature city itself, with a market, a 32-lane bowling alley and dormitory-style barracks for sailors. But its glory days had long since passed by the early 1990s when the Pentagon began searching for ways to save money.

The federal Base Realignment and Closure Commission voted to shutter the naval station in 1991, forcing the city to take a first step away from its ties with the military. It was a bittersweet moment because it destroyed what had been a major source of jobs, revenue and pride for the city and because it offered the city a chance to redefine itself and to find a new use for a piece of prime real estate.

O’Neill and others view the years since the base closure commission’s vote as a period of deep soul-searching for a city that had known itself as a Navy town for as long as anyone could remember. After a series of public hearings--which preservationists say were poorly publicized--and consideration of a range of ideas that included turning the land into a commercial airport, the City Council in 1995 voted to turn the site over to the port, the busiest in the nation.

But months later, as word spread that the heart of the naval station--a grassy oasis with staid buildings designed in the International style--was eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, preservationists raised questions about the use of the property. Although it was surrounded by port activity and industrial traffic, they said, the land could serve some purpose that would spare the buildings. Port officials countered that it would be impossible to leave the buildings in the middle of an industrial cargo terminal but pledged $4.5 million for a video commemorating the site and other preservation projects.

That offer made little difference in court. On Tuesday, O’Brien said actions by port staff, including signing a letter of intent to lease the land to Cosco before the commission voted on the project, demonstrated a “pre-commitment” to build the terminal. He said the commission “takes responsibility” for the actions of its staff.

But city officials said the ruling trapped them in a series of Catch-22s.

“Planning and definition of any project is necessary before an environmental assessment of that project can be made,” said Deputy City Atty. Richard L. Landes. If O’Brien’s decision is allowed to stand, he said, “no public agency, at least in Los Angeles County, could ever again approve and develop a public project which had been proposed by staff.”