Las Urbanistas

A hub in the Antelope Valley that would use rail lines could relieve freeway congestion as the ports continue to handle more cargo.

By Rong-Gong Lin II, Times Staff Writer; July 12, 2007

 

L.A. County officials on Wednesday unveiled plans for an “inland port” in the Antelope Valley — a would-be hub more than 70 miles north of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach that is aimed at reducing heavy truck congestion throughout the region’s freeways.

The proposal comes as officials project a 400% increase in goods movement through the ports over the next 30 years, with transportation experts predicting that all those extra big rigs would further clog freeways.

Much of the cargo now is shipped by trucks on Southland freeways to warehouses and distribution facilities in the Inland Empire before it is distributed across the nation.

But L.A. County officials want a piece of that action and see the Antelope Valley, with large amounts of vacant land and potential rail access, as an ideal site.

The idea would be to transport cargo from the ports to Palmdale and Lancaster by rail, reducing reliance on big rigs.

“The inland port is a necessity if we’re not going to choke in congestion in the Los Angeles Basin,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich, who convened Wednesday’s meeting in downtown L.A. with officials representing transit agencies, the ports, railroads and businesses. “The congestion is here and it’s only going to get worse. We need to act now to resolve the problem.”

But many challenges face planners.

The fast-growing Antelope Valley suffers from what officials agree is a lack of transportation infrastructure. The existing rail lines are already near capacity, meaning new lines would have to be built to serve the inland port. Moreover, only one freeway — the clogged 14 Freeway — connects the valley to the L.A. Basin.

The inland port idea gained attention in recent months after voters in 2006 passed a $19.9-billion statewide transportation bond measure, $3.2 billion of which was allocated for projects to improve the movement of goods through ports and on highways and rail. L.A. County officials are angling for a cut of the money.

The interest also comes as officials have been promoting the development of Palmdale Regional Airport, which could serve as a facility to ship air freight, and as officials have been studying construction of a new freeway or toll road that would connect Lancaster and Palmdale west to the 5 Freeway and east to the 15 Freeway in San Bernardino County.

Inland ports are not a new concept. With land near seaports costly and scarce, other ports around the country have looked inland to develop space for warehouse and distribution facilities and a hub to transport goods by truck, rail car or airplane.

Hasan Ikhrata, director of planning and policy for the Southern California Assn. of Governments, said that developing an inland port would be critical to the region’s future.

“There is no land to expand the port facilities,” Ikhrata said. “You need at least 500 acres for a decent inland port facility, and that kind of land is not available in the urban core.”

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach handle one-third of all waterborne freight-container traffic in the U.S., and 50% to 70% of that cargo is headed for delivery outside of Southern California, according to the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

How the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach deal with the projected rise in commerce traffic will play a key role in how Southern California deals with increased freeway congestion. Trucks now use 30% to 40% of freeway capacity.

The region’s major freeways, such as the 5,10, 60 and 710, are often congested with trucks, creating a hazard for motorists.

“Goods movement is really a challenge to us, both because of the congestion it causes, and then the health issues: We have the worst air quality in the country,” said Roger Snoble, chief executive of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Planning for the inland port concept is still in early stages; officials haven’t projected how much it would cost or who would pay to build it.

One idea involves a public-private partnership similar to the authority that built the 20-mile Alameda Corridor, a $2.5-billion below-ground express rail line opened in 2002 that runs mostly in a trench from the ports to downtown L.A.

Such a partnership could, for example, have railroad companies invest in upgrading or building new lines, and shipping companies building warehouses in the inland port.

But it’s clear that the inland port would require significant changes:

• Roads. Local officials say they desperately need more funds to upgrade their roads, and have discussed ideas such as drilling a tunnel through the San Gabriel Mountains to build a second route. “What we need out of Los Angeles is support — financial support,” said Palmdale Mayor James C. Ledford Jr. “If you expect the high desert to accept the growth, you’ve got to give us more tools to accommodate the growth.”

• Rail lines: Railroad companies have struggled to compete with truckers for short-haul routes. Trains have the additional costs of loading and unloading cars, as well as paying a truck to haul cargo from the train depot to a final warehouse destination.

• Logistics: Officials would need a plan to avoid backtracking. A significant amount of cargo coming in through the two ports stays in Southern California, and officials fear unnecessary congestion if cargo is transported to the inland port on trains, only to be redistributed to trucks that would need to ship it back to the Los Angeles area.

An inland port could also increase pollution levels and congestion in the Antelope Valley, which the U.S. Census reaffirmed last month as one of the fastest-growing communities in the country.

Lancaster Mayor Henry W. Hearns acknowledged those concerns, but added that growth in the Antelope Valley is inevitable, and the region stands to benefit from the inland port idea.

“It’s going to raise our economic status; it’s going to bring jobs,” Hearns said.

Several officials, however, stressed the importance of further study before going forward with the plan.

“It’s very important to look at the transportation infrastructure and make sure the site will work,” said Thad Brundrett, a land development expert who spoke at Wednesday’s meeting. “You can’t just go out and build the facility, and hope someone will show up.”

Gwendolyn Marie Allen lives in a FEMA trailer near Baton Rouge with her son, who has schizophrenia, and her severely retarded brother, right.

By SHAILA DEWAN Published: July 12, 2007

CONVENT, La. — This was not how Cindy Cole pictured her life at 26: living in a mobile home park called Sugar Hill, wedged amid the refineries and cane fields of tiny St. James Parish, 18 miles from the nearest supermarket. Sustaining three small children on nothing but food stamps, with no playground, no security guards and nowhere to go.

No, Ms. Cole was supposed to be paying $275 a month for a two-bedroom house in the Lower Ninth Ward — next door to her mother, across the street from her aunt, with a child care network that extended the length and breadth of her large New Orleans family. With her house destroyed and no job or savings, however, her chances of recreating that old reality are slim.

 

For thousands of evacuees like Ms. Cole, going home to New Orleans has become a vague and receding dream. Living in bleak circumstances, they cannot afford to go back, or have nothing to go back to. Over the two years since Hurricane Katrina hit, the shock of evacuation has hardened into the grim limbo of exile.

“We in storage,” said Ann Picard, 49, cocking her arm toward the blind white cracker box of a house she shares with Ms. Cole, her niece, and Ms. Cole’s three children. “We just in storage.”

Their options whittled away by government inaction, they represent a sharp contrast to the promise made by President Bush in Jackson Square on Sept. 15, 2005.

“Americans want the Gulf Coast not just to survive, but to thrive; not just to cope, but to overcome,” Mr. Bush said. “We want evacuees to come home, for the best of reasons — because they have a real chance at a better life in a place they love.”

As of late May, however, there were still more than 30,000 families displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita spread across the country in apartments paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and another 13,000 families, down from a peak of nearly 18,000, marooned in trailer or mobile home parks, where hunger is so prevalent that lines form when the truck from the food bank appears.

Thousands of families have moved off disaster aid. It is not clear how many evacuees have permanently settled into their new communities, but postal delivery data suggest that more than 56,000 people have returned to New Orleans in the last year.

Those still in trailers and FEMA apartments are the least equipped to start over. In Houston, according to a city-sponsored survey in February, a third of the people in those apartments were elderly or disabled, a third were employed in mostly low-wage jobs, and a third were still looking for work.

Hardly any of the 77,000 rental units destroyed in New Orleans have been rebuilt, in fact, and the local and federal governments have done almost nothing to make it possible for low-income renters like Ms. Cole, who has a ninth-grade education, to return. Because she was never a homeowner, she is not eligible for a federally financed Road Home grant to rebuild her house, destroyed in the hurricane’s floodwaters like the rest of her neighborhood.

With rents double or triple what they were before the storm, she could barely afford a studio apartment, much less anything like the little shotgun house she had, serenaded by brass band parades, on a street traditionally used by Mardi Gras Indians on carnival day.

Despite their longing, some evacuees are afraid to return; they must choose between formaldehyde-laced trailers and a city they view as contaminated, poorly protected from floods and more violent than ever before.

For those who do not plan to go back, or just want to sustain themselves until they can, government solutions like the trailer parks have turned out to be obstacles, especially for the many evacuees like Ms. Cole, who has no car and lost her job at Jack in the Box when she could no longer get a ride to work. At Sugar Hill, 18 miles from the nearest supermarket, the public bus stops only four times a week.

Into the Garbage Can

JoAnn Anderson needs a job.

She has filled out applications and taken drug tests. She has asked people who are already employed for help. A hotel housekeeper for 22 years in New Orleans, she has called every hotel and motel in the hotel and motel section of the Memphis Yellow Pages. They are not interested.

“I keep calling them back,” Ms. Anderson said. “Once I get started working, I know they would like me because I know I do my best and I do my job. I want to work. I don’t want to just sit around getting my bones all old and everything.”

Ms. Anderson, 53, and her longtime companion, Jeffery Evans, 52, are in the category of people for whom recovery is furthest from reach. Near the end of their working lives, unappealing to employers, yet financially unable to retire, many are on the brink of ruin — or will be when their federal disaster assistance runs out.

“I was born poor; I’m probably going to die poor; and before the storm came through I was doing pretty good,” Ms. Anderson said. She and Mr. Evans paid $325 a month for half a duplex in the Uptown section of New Orleans, with “a little porch watching the laundrymat,” she said, “and a backyard.” The streetcar took her right to her job at the Columns, an elegant 1883 hotel in the Garden District. Mr. Evans built cabinets and countertops.

Now they live in a monochrome apartment complex. An empty swimming pool bakes in the Memphis heat, and frayed ropes dangle where the swings should be. FEMA pays the rent. Their social life consists of church on Sundays. For the first time in their lives, they are on food stamps, and to make them stretch, Ms. Anderson shuns the nearby Kroger in favor of a distant Save-a-Lot. Without a car, she trudges home from the bus stop with frozen turkey legs in a canvas bag over one shoulder.

For months, they searched the unfamiliar city for work — she at hotels, he at temporary agencies and, when that failed, at fast-food restaurants. But being an evacuee seemed to be enough to tip the scales against them, perhaps, the couple said, because the evacuees who took jobs right after the storm were not in their right minds.

“I didn’t really ever think that I was going to get hired, for the simple reason that I have to show my Louisiana ID,” Mr. Evans said. “It was like, I give them an application, and from their hands to the garbage can.” At one business, he said, hurricane evacuees were required to take anger management tests.

Ms. Anderson said she applied at one hotel that never responded but, weeks later, was advertising for housekeepers again. She filled out another application.

In May, Mr. Evans finally found a warehouse job near downtown. The bus ride takes so long that he leaves the house at 5 a.m. to get there by 7. He earns $6 an hour.

But Mr. Evans is not complaining. “I’ve been trying to get a job forever,” he said, “so I’m very, very satisfied that I got a job like that.”

Closed Doors for Renters

What makes this couple’s situation all the more bitter is that New Orleans is desperate for workers like them. Luxury hotels are trying to recruit temporary employees from South America. Homeowners are desperate for craftsmen and builders.

But Ms. Anderson says the city is doing nothing to bring them back, pointing out that Charity Hospital, where the poor received heavily subsidized medical care, has not reopened.

“The places where poor people, poor black people lived at, they wasn’t trying to fix up any housing,” she said. “Everything was closed down.”

Only 21 percent of the 77,000 rental units in the five parishes in the New Orleans metropolitan area are slated to be rebuilt through government grants and tax credits, according to a recent study by PolicyLink, a nonprofit research institute, with a disproportionate number for families on teacher or police officer salaries, rather than much lower-paid home health aides or hotel clerks. Rents on the remaining units have doubled or even tripled.

Despite pitched opposition, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development is going forward with plans to demolish and redevelop the city’s four largest housing projects, knocking out 3,000 apartments that were occupied by low-income families before the storm and adding middle-income families to the mix. So far, there is money in place to rebuild only about 1,000 units affordable enough for previous residents.

At the state level, officials have allocated $6.3 billion for the Road Home’s assistance program for homeowners, dwarfing the $869 million allocated to the Small Rental Property Program, which housing advocates say is the most likely to replace affordable units quickly.

And when the homeowner program faced a shortfall, one proposed solution was to transfer as much as $667 million from the rental program to cover it, said Broderick Bagert, an organizer with the Jeremiah Group, which advocates for renters. That idea died, but the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which controls the money, recently voted to transfer 5 percent of the budget for renters to the fund for homeowners.

Walter J. Leger Jr., the chairman of the authority, said the 5 percent transfer was temporary to satisfy Congressional demands. Washington will be asked to replace the money down the road, he said.

Mr. Leger said the state’s focus had been on homeowners in part because landlords were more likely to be insured, but he acknowledged the need to do more to replenish the city’s work force. “We’d like to get more money for the rental program, if Washington will help,” he said.

Poor renters, though, are not the only ones who need a hand. Terry Coggins, the coordinator of a consortium of aid groups in Memphis, said many middle-class people were only now asking for help.

“They’ve exhausted their savings,” Mr. Coggins said. “They’ve exhausted their insurance money. They’ve exhausted their ability to drive back and forth and check on their property.”

Barriers for Trailers

In many ways, evacuees have become the region’s new pariahs, shunned by towns and parishes who have erected a number of legal barriers to keep them out.

At least five jurisdictions in Louisiana and Mississippi — St. Bernard, St. John the Baptist, and Jefferson parishes in Louisiana and Pascagoula and Ocean Springs in Mississippi — have begun revoking permits for trailers or allowing their zoning exemptions to expire. Those moves affect families still living in 7,400 trailers across the Gulf Coast, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a group based in Washington that has sued to stop the evictions.

Joseph D. Rich, project director for fair housing and community development with the committee, said some jurisdictions have complained about crime in the trailer parks, prompting FEMA to provide extra security. Mr. Rich said he believed there was another motivation for banning trailers.

“There are severe racial overtones to these actions,” he said. “Because there’s all this concern that black and low-income people will be coming into your neighborhood.”

Some local jurisdictions are also fighting to prevent the construction or repair of rental units. In Jefferson Parish, the suburb just west of New Orleans, officials blocked a 200-unit complex for the elderly in Terrytown, citing concerns that it would increase crime, and they are fighting a second complex for the elderly in Marrero. Westwego, also in Jefferson Parish, has placed a moratorium on multifamily buildings.

“You have some people that just lack any degree of civilization,” said Chris Roberts, a Jefferson Parish councilman who has fought to remove FEMA trailers and block subsidized housing developments. “I think low-income housing which is not properly run invites those people.”

Mr. Roberts complained that such residents were often idle, but many evacuees have burdens that prevent them from working.

Gwendolyn Marie Allen, 55, formerly of the Uptown section of New Orleans, now lives in Renaissance Village, a large FEMA trailer park near the Baton Rouge airport. Ms. Allen is the sole caretaker for a son, 20, who was given a diagnosis of schizophrenia after a violent episode in the park, and a severely retarded brother, who huddled on the bottom bunk of a bed in their travel trailer, clad only in adult diapers. In an interview, Ms. Allen periodically shushed his wordless moans by waving a green flyswatter in his direction.

“I want to get out of here, baby, this is not no house,” she said. “I want something where he can move around.”

As proof of her resourcefulness, Ms. Allen opened the freezer of the trailer’s compact refrigerator where, to make room for bargain packs of meat from the supermarket, she had removed the shelves.

“The renters aren’t asking that much, just give us a start,” she said. “Put us there, and we could do what we have to do to survive. We could catch it from there.”

BEACH HAVEN TERRACE, N.J., July 10 — Tired of paying as much as $340 per month for gas and electricity at the Cape Cod home here where he has lived for 18 months, Michael Mercurio erected a 35-foot windmill in his backyard last fall that helped reduce his bill to about $114 — a year.

“It just makes sense,” said Mr. Mercurio, who is 61 and runs a company selling and installing windmills. “This is a clean, renewable source of energy.”

Some of his neighbors say it is also annoying. They say it is too big. They say it is too noisy. And some residents in this middle-class borough on Long Beach Island have gone to court to try to make him take it down, while the township has stilled it since winter.

It is a collision between the ideals of alternative energy and the suburban reality of New Jersey’s notorious not-in-my-backyard culture, casting Mr. Mercurio in the role of a latter-day environmental knight errant and his neighbor and principal adversary as the ecological equivalent of Cruella De Vil.

What started as one man’s attempts to find a cheap, clean energy source has become a frequent topic of coffee conversation among the small community of year-round residents in this town, where Mr. Mercurio has lived since he was 4, and has galvanized some segments of the state’s environmental community. And, oh, how the Don Quixote jokes have flowed.

“I hear it all the time,” Mr. Mercurio said, standing in the shadow of his still windmill Tuesday afternoon. “I tell them, ‘You’ve got it all wrong: I’m not fighting against the windmills, I’m fighting for the windmills.’ “

The clash began in February when two of Mr. Mercurio’s neighbors filed a lawsuit in State Superior Court in Ocean County, charging that the township had acted improperly when it issued the permits that allowed him to build the weathered gray steel tower in his backyard.

The township has since agreed that it was in error. Its code prevents any structure from being built that exceeds 32 feet in height; with its 12-foot rotor blades, Mr. Mercurio’s windmill grazes 40 feet.

And this spring, the township’s council considered amending the code to keep windmills taller than 12 feet from being built. That proposal is pending.

But Mr. Mercurio said that he gave township officials the precise specifications for his windmill — which he called “just a tiny, little, itty-bitty thing” — months in advance of construction, and that he should not be held accountable for their mistake. “The town gave me a permit, and I built it,” he said.

“People have a right to use any resource on their property, just like oil, coal,” he added. “I don’t understand why they are against this. I really don’t.”

Maybe because, as Mr. Mercurio’s neighbors Patricia Caplicki and John Miller say in the lawsuit, in a 14-mile-per-hour wind, the three fiberglass blades produce noise greater than 50 decibels, the rough equivalent of light traffic or a noisy refrigerator.

The suit also says that the spinning blades throw “strobe-like shadows” on their property from noon to sunset.

“It’s not that we’re doing anything to stop the world from turning green,” said George M. Cafarelli, a lawyer for Ms. Caplicki and Mr. Miller who said he had asked them not to discuss the suit with a reporter. “We’re jousting at windmills which have been put up in inappropriate places.”

Richard J. Shackleton, the lawyer for the township, said that officials here were cognizant of environmental concerns and encouraged the use of alternative energy sources like solar panels. (Mr. Mercurio already has 56 solar panels on his home.)

But on a 21-mile-long barrier island that is home to about 9,000 people, Mr. Shackleton said, windmills present a safety hazard and disturb the aesthetics.

“If we had any areas on the island that are big enough to accommodate windmills, we would encourage their use, too,” Mr. Shackleton said.

Opinions about the windmill seem to hinge on how close one lives to it.

Mary Kopp, 81, Mr. Mercurio’s next-door neighbor, thinks that alternative energy “is something we have to look into,” but that his yard is “the wrong place for a windmill like this.”

Bill Kubarewicz, a contractor who frequently does work here but lives about 25 miles away in the Forked River area, said, “It doesn’t seem too bad.”

“I’ve heard it spinning,” Mr. Kubarewicz said. “It’s not like a helicopter or anything. But to live next to it? I don’t know.”

And Suzanne Leta Liou, a spokeswoman for the advocacy group Environment New Jersey, said simply, “We should be trying to maximize our wind potential instead of prohibiting it.”

Mr. Mercurio, who has one American flag flying from the windmill and another in his front yard — not far from a statue of a bald eagle — said that he was entitled to the same life, liberty and pursuit of wind currents as anyone else. “It’s like if my neighbor doesn’t like the color that I paint my house,” he said. “I have the right to paint my house red, white, blue, the whole Star-Spangled Banner if I want to.”

Mr. Mercurio, who used to work in construction and design, said that he first became interested in the possibilities of wind power about a dozen years ago, and four years ago started a company, Island Wind Inc., to help spread the gospel of clean, windblown energy. Also in his front yard is a handmade sign that reads, “Wind power makes America strong.”

Mr. Mercurio’s model, the Skystream 3.7, which is manufactured by Southwest Windpower, which is based in Arizona, can cost more than $15,000, fully loaded. The windmill, which generates about two kilowatts of power, can provide about a quarter of the energy Mr. Mercurio needs. The other 75 percent is generated by solar power.

The only fossil fuels that Mr. Mercurio uses are for the natural gas barbecue grill in his backyard and the stove in his home — hence, the utility bill that averages around $9.50 a month. But since the township shut it down in January, the windmill has not produced anything but controversy (Mr. Mercurio has been relying entirely on solar power), though its curved, clawlike blades, still whir in an occasional breeze.

On Friday, Judge Vincent J. Grasso of Superior Court suspended the suit against Mr. Mercurio and ordered him to seek a zoning variance from the township’s land use board. That board is expected to rule against Mr. Mercurio, probably sending the matter back to court.

As for Mr. Mercurio, he said the lawsuit was draining his retirement account and had him smoking Marlboros again.

“People always say, ‘Not in my backyard, not in my backyard,’ ” he said. “I want to flip it around. It should start in my backyard.”