(CN) — A California appellate panel has handed environmental and community groups a legal victory in their decadeslong legal dispute with the Port of Los Angeles over its failure to enforce air pollution controls at China Shipping's container terminal.
The ruling by the Fourth Appellate District orders a San Diego Superior Court judge to take a tougher line with the Port of Los Angeles, and even suggests a few options, including shutting down the terminal until certain environmental requirements are met.
The Port of Los Angeles, which along with an adjacent port in Long Beach handles about 64% of all shipping on the West Coast, houses 23 cargo terminals along its 43 miles of waterfront leased to various shipping companies. It leases one 142-acre terminal to China Shipping Group, a state-owned shipping conglomerate. The company signed a 25-year lease agreement with Los Angeles in 2001 to develop and lease the terminal. Environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council and nearby homeowners sued the city to force it to put together an environmental impact report for the project.
In 2004, the groups and the city reached a settlement, in which the port agreed to certain pollution-cutting measures. Since most the measures, like using clean energy for trucks and equipment, fell on China Shipping, the city agreed to pay the company $17.7 million, plus up to $3 million a year.
But the city let China Shipping off the hook. As the Los Angeles Times reported in 2015, port officials quietly gave the shipping conglomerate the OK to ignore some of the emissions-reduction requirements.
"Geraldine Knatz, executive director of the port at the time, assured China Shipping that it would face no consequences for violating a major requirement: Instead of idling diesel-powered engines while docked, at least 70% of its ships would have to plug into shore-based electricity, known as Alternative Maritime Power," the Times reported.
The city promised to prepare a supplemental environmental impact report, which it then took four years on. The new report satisfied as many people as the last the one did, and so the Natural Resources Defense Council and many of the same groups sued the city again in 2020, writing in their complaint that the supplemental report "weakens, and in some cases eliminates, many of the common-sense, feasible mitigation measure that were required by the 2008 EIR — mitigation measures that China Shipping did not implement with the tacit endorsement and, in many cases, the explicit and unlawful approval, of the Port of Los Angeles."
In 2022, San Diego County Superior Court Judge Timothy Taylor determined the city had in fact violated the California Environmental Quality Act by making the pollution mitigation measures unenforceable. But Taylor threw the city a bone, supporting the port's decision to, in the words of the appellate court, "eliminate or modify some of the 2008 EIR mitigation measures because they are infeasible." And, perhaps more importantly, the court allowed the shipping terminal to continue operations while the city once again revised its environmental impact report.
The plaintiffs appealed, arguing that allowing the terminal to continue running was "insufficient" to address the "profound" regulatory violations the court had found.
The three-judge Fourth Appellate District panel agreed, writing in their 78-page ruling that the lower court had "mistakenly limited its options for fashioning a remedy that reinforces CEQA’s environmental protection purposes."
The panel remanded the case to Taylor, who must now come up with a stricter ruling. And the appellate court offered a few suggestions: "the setting of a strict timeline for the port’s adoption of a new SEIR... to ensure compliance with mitigation measures;" or "the court may order that shipping activities at the terminal be suspended in the interim, unless specific mitigation measures duly adopted in the 2019 SEIR... are implemented."
The justices added: "China Shipping is obligated by the lease’s terms to comply with the mitigation measures set forth in any duly-adopted environmental document."
Justice Terry O'Rourke wrote the opinion, which was joined by Presiding Justice Judith McConnell and Justice Julia Kelety. The panel issued the ruling on Dec. 29 but certified it for publication Monday.
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