Construction on Middle Harbor Redevelopment to Start in 2010

In December the Long Beach Board of Harbor Commissioners unanimously approved a project labor agreement on a $150 million phase of the Middle Harbor redevelopment project. The project is one part of a larger $750-million plan to revitalize and modernize the Port of Long Beach and to make it one of the greenest ports in the world.

It will add on-dock rail capacity, shore power hookups and allow the new terminal to move twice the cargo with half the air pollution. It is the first capital improvement project by the port in seven years. The PLA will now move on the Long Beach City Council for final approval.

“During my tenure at Southern California Edison we built two power plants on the $650-$700 million range,” said Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster, who was one of several elected officials at the Board meeting who spoke in favor of the project labor agreement. “Both of those plants were built under PLAs and both of those plants came in on time and under budget.”

The EIR was completed in early 2009 and construction on the six-year project will start this year and include demolition of existing wharfs, sheet pile, dredging and excavation of harbor soils, and the creation of 1400 feet of new wharf and 33,000 tons of asphalt paving. This Middle Harbor redevelopment will benefit every craft and is expected to create an estimated 1,200 jobs.

Foster said the using a PLA on the project makes sense from both a financial and municipal stand point. “This is a large project and hopefully one of many more to come,” Foster stated. “This project is complicated; it is important for this port to become modernized. PLA’s provide uninterrupted work and for this city, which has a relatively high level of poverty, provides exactly a pipeline for our citizens to jobs that have a future.”

Craft unions representatives were in attendance and addressed much of the misinformation that has been spread about PLA’s by anti-union organizations such as the Associated Builders and Contractors.

“Project labor agreements don’t add costs to projects,” explained Richard Slawson, Executive-Secretary of the LA/OC Building Trades Council. “In fact they save money on projects. PLA’s have been successful on thousands of individual projects that we’ve negotiated throughout Los Angeles and Orange Counties. The best example has been the agreement with the Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest PLA in the country, which has been in effect for 10 years.”

IBEW Local 11 Political Director Kevin Norton placed into the record recent bid reports on an LAUSD project demonstrating that PLA’s neither reduce the number of bidders on a project nor discriminate against non-union contractors. The bid report showed that a half-dozen contractors bid on the LAUSD contract and was finally awarded to a non-union bidder.

The Long Beach project comes at an important time for the port. Increased competition from Mexico and Canada along with the economic downturn has led to declining cargo volumes the past two years making the modernization effort  important for the Long Beach Port to remain competitive. The crafts are confident that the PLA will be a success and will lead a broader project labor agreement on Port projects.

“Hopefully this is just one of many PLA’s to come,” said Ruben Magana, Business Manager for Plumbers and Steamfitters Local 494. “We’ve been piping the City of Long Beach for 105 years,” Magana added, “so we have a little bit of history in this community.”

Board Commission Vice President, Mario Cordero, suggested that the PLA be known as “The Larry Henderson Agreement” after now-retired IBEW 11 organizer Larry Henderson. Henderson attended virtually every Harbor Commission meeting and tirelessly pressed the Board for PLA’s on port projects. “His dream has come through,” Cordero said. “Some years ago words like’ PLA’ and ‘union’ caused a lot of controversy. With the action of the Board here tonight I suggest that controversy has ended.”