Tuesday’s Long Beach Harbor Commission approval of a five-year plan to clean up diesel truck pollution by 2012 will forever change the faces of the truckers hauling your food, flat-screen TVs and furniture.

The question, as the Port’s first deadline for potential polluters looms–Oct. 1, the date when pre-1989 rigs will become verboten–is how.

Oddly, some of the Port’s answers are similar to those of someone on the other side: James Ota of Rancho Dominguez, who owns Ota Trucking Inc., a tiny company with just five regular drivers.

Ota, whose firm is non-union, staffed by independent drivers who own their own trucks, lamented his plight at a January Long Beach City Council meeting.

He believes the Port’s plan to have everyone driving 2007 and newer trucks within five years–accomplished with an 80 percent subsidy on new trucks, partially funded by new container fees–sets the stage for the reconsolidation of an industry which exploded following deregulation in the 1980s.

“The Teamsters have been trying to make it–eliminate owner-operators and make them employees” of the Teamsters, Ota says. “Then they could target the larger [trucking] companies and make them unionized.”

Ota believes independent truckers like his drivers will be hard-pressed to purchase new rigs, even if the Port of Long Beach foots most of the bill. This, he says, will set the stage for the powerful Teamsters to step in and offer drivers a more secure–if potentially less lucrative and innovative–union job.

Less innovative?

“The Teamsters, they’re a flat hourly [wage], and there’s no incentive to go into the Harbor and get an [empty trailer] chassis, talk to friends and get an empty container when they have one,” says Ota, who believes unionization would actually slow down cargo flow.

“If you’re hourly, you could just wait. They’re getting paid,” says Ota, whose drivers typically truck cargoes of canned goods and furniture between the Port and the Inland Empire–rarely venturing outside California.

If the Port really wanted to clean up pollution, Ota says, why not do something about the long lines of truckers waiting to enter the Port–their motors idling and contributing to the region’s blanket of smog?

“If you eliminate the long waiting lines we have to go through, our volume on containers increases, our wages increase, and we can grow with the harbor,” Ota says.

Port of Long Beach spokesman Art Wong doesn’t dispute that the change-over will be difficult for independent truckers–and for the owners of small trucking firms.

But Wong says the natural (or unnatural) selection process may target truckers and CEOs who are bad businessmen to begin with.

“There’s a concern that this is going to weed out people who are not good businesspeople, but I don’t think there’s any other way to do this,” Wong says.

“I don’t know who the next generation of drivers is, but it’s going to be different,” Wong says. “Whoever acquires these new trucks, they’re going to have to acquire these new trucks.”

That means paying for them–and new trucks aren’t cheap.

Tags: air pollution, air quality, California, container fees, diesel particulate, dirty trucks, independent truckers, Long Beach, Los Angeles Basin, Port of Long Beach, PORT OF LOS ANGELES, Southern California, truckers