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Inland Shift. Juan De Lara
Читать онлайн.Название Inland Shift
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isbn 9780520964181
Автор произведения Juan De Lara
Издательство Ingram
Each of the projects that I have outlined in this section assumed that logistics was a viable growth industry and that it provided social benefits for the region’s residents. Both of these claims were part of the ideological toolkit that regional leaders used to expand the geographic reach of logistics development.
NEW REGIONAL LOGICS
Port boosters used their publicly subsidized funds to modernize shipping facilities near the docks. Many of the initial projects focused on updating existing technologies to keep up with shifts in the logistics industry. This included building new facilities that accommodated bigger shipments. In fact, the ability to accommodate massive post-Panamax ships, which can carry more than eight thousand TEUs, made the San Pedro Bay a lucrative gateway choice for shippers looking to transport large quantities of containers from Asian markets to the continental United States; something other ports, like those in the Bay Area, were struggling to keep up with. Large ship capacity is just one of the factors that enabled the San Pedro Bay ports to capture 56 percent of containerized Asian imports by 2005.41 Port leaders also implemented strategies like the Pier Pass Program, which increased capacity by moving more traffic to off-peak hours.42 While these changes successfully increased capacity, policy makers were convinced that the existing trade infrastructure would not meet the region’s future needs.
Port expansion continued in the 2000s, but Southern California faced mounting competition from other regions, including Canada and the East Coast. Boosters cited the increased competition from other ports to further consolidate public support for regional logistics. Local leaders were especially concerned that the expansion of the Panama Canal, scheduled to be completed by 2015, would allow East Coast ports to siphon off future trade, away from Southern California.43 Concerns mounted in 2003 when the Panama Canal Authority forged a strategic marketing alliance that openly encouraged shippers to bypass West Coast ports. The alliance was meant to “spur investment, increase trade and promote the ‘All-Water-Route’ (the route from Asia to the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts via the Panama Canal).”44 Canal leaders signed memorandums of understanding with ten U.S. ports, including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Georgia Ports Authority, and the South Carolina State Ports Authority.45 The partnership was another example of how entrepreneurial state actors competed with other regions for capital investment by forming new distribution networks.
Southern California’s overland system of trucks and trains maintained its competitive advantages in the face of growing competition, especially among shippers who wanted an efficient JIT distribution system. West Coast distribution enabled shippers to reroute delivery trucks much more quickly than having to orchestrate the same task via ship, especially if market conditions changed while the goods were at sea. Instead, ships could deliver their goods to Southern California, where they could then be dispatched to the correct markets, all in a timelier manner than having to wait for ships to make their deliveries through the Panama Canal. A time advantage was especially enticing to shippers who managed high-value goods because it enabled them to avoid delivery interruptions. Overland distribution also provided greater protection from delays. If shipments for multiple markets are traveling on a single ship and that ship is delayed along the longer all-ocean route through the Panama Canal, then many more markets may be affected. Trucks, trains, and cross-dock facilities allow shippers to distribute the risk across different markets; fewer markets are affected if one truck is delayed than when an entire ship loaded with containers is delayed. Southern California ports capitalized on these flexible management techniques and gained a competitive advantage over other regions.
Nonetheless, Southern California’s port boosters used mounting port competition to seek federal support for logistics development. This was especially true when Canadian port leaders—including government actors—aggressively courted shippers by launching a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign aimed directly at Southern California. In 2009 Geraldine Knatz, then the executive director for the POLA, responded to the campaign by declaring, “We’re not going to sit around and let Canada steal our business.”46 Knatz’s unequivocal performance—of port official as entrepreneurial agent—allowed her to jump multiple geographical scales. By invoking a foreign threat, she linked her job as a local, quasi-public representative to the ports, the region, the state, and the nation. Knatz and other regional leaders pushed for a national freight movement infrastructure policy to act as a foil against the perceived intrusion from the north, an appeal that harkened back to the Alameda Corridor project of the 1980s.
Private sector members of the logistics regime, including the National Retail Federation, the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, and the Retail Industry Leaders Association, pursued their own federal policies because they believed that centralized strategic plans were needed to overcome fragmented, multijurisdictional planning. For example, in a plan presented at a National Freight Transportation hearing in 2008, industry leaders claimed, “Coordination within transportation corridors can only be achieved by eliminating the piecemeal action of local governments, port authorities, and regional planning organizations.”47 They argued for coordination along “an entire transportation corridor.” According to industry leaders who were present at the hearing, “This systemic perspective, which only the state can provide, must be applied to the prioritization, coordination, and oversight of infrastructure projects.”
Private sector calls for more centralized planning were a response to social movement organizations (SMOs) that successfully used their political capital to win concessions from local and regional state agencies. Business leaders warned that mounting labor unrest and environmental regulations were forcing shippers to route some of their goods away from the San Pedro Bay ports. Michael Jacob, vice president of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, argued, “We are actually on the front end of a long-term structural change of business models where people are building their supply chains around California.”48 This threat narrative was also used to warn policy makers that failure to build enough infrastructure to meet future import projections would result in the loss of tax dollars and jobs to competing cities.49 The underlying message was also clear: business leaders warned that efforts by unions, environmental groups, and liberal politicians to rein in logistics development would result in economic disaster. Such claims sounded like earlier probusiness warnings meant to throttle progressive forces by threatening that factories would move to less-regulated terrain.50 The threat of capital abandonment was meant to discipline both social movements and progressive members of the local state. The warning was obvious: stop your demands for environmental justice and living wages or we’ll take our business somewhere else.
GREENING THE PORTS
The logistics regime embraced a green growth doctrine as a political compromise that would allow the ports to grow while dealing with some of the environmental issues that were being raised by SMOs. Several SMOs established themselves as viable opponents to the logistics regime by arguing that dogged pursuit of a port-based development policy agenda without also accounting for economic and environmental justice was shortsighted and damaging to the public good. Unions and environmental organizations used their growing political clout to challenge dominant neoliberal development narratives, including the idea that logistics represented an upward mobility path for blue-collar workers and poor residents. Instead, SMOs reframed the spatial politics of Southern California’s logistics regime by casting goods movement as a dangerous and poverty-inducing industry. An example of how this occurred can be traced back to the early 2000s during policy debates about future port expansion, when some politicians began to question how logistics expansion would affect local communities, especially those located near the ports. The following exchange between Long Beach congresswoman Juanita Millender-McDonald and Executive Director for the Port of Los Angeles Larry Keller highlights how environmental concerns inserted themselves into the production of Southern California’s logistics landscape:
Congresswoman