Heinrich steers Customs in new direction.

The U.S. Customs Service's Southern California district is going through a quiet revolution designed to streamline bureaucracy while stretching limited resources.

John Heinrich, a long-time presence on the local trade scene as Customs' district director, has been presiding over these sea changes, which include a significant redefinition of his own job.

For starters, he is no longer district director. That role was dropped as part of the restructuring. Customs eliminated its seven regions and 45 districts nationwide, allowing the port directors to report directly to headquarters in Washington.

Accordingly, Heinrich has become director of the South Pacific Customs Management Center. The center provides support services for most Customs facilities in Southern California.

"It was a cultural change," said Heinrich. "We removed the regions (and districts) as a layer of direct management."

In his role as Management Center director, Heinrich still meets with port directors, but his primary role is providing administrative support.

"(Port directors) are refocused on the things they need to spend time on, like narcotics interdiction and ensuring compliance with trade laws. If you've got to be worried about recruiting people and other administrative tasks, then you can't focus on the important things," said Heinrich.

By whatever structure, the district is in need of support.

Tax and fee collections from the L.A. district have doubled over the last 10 years, from about $2 billion to $4 billion, reflecting the recent explosion of trade between Southern California and the Pacific Rim.

While trade volume has exploded, importers and exporters complain that many Customs processes, especially appeals, are often cumbersome and time consuming.

Furthermore, the growth in foreign trade has far outpaced any similar growth in the U.S. Customs work force over the last 10 years.

"The process has been rather bogged down for many years. They're looking for ways to streamline the process, do what they can with the resources they have, while also protecting their revenue," said Leslie Cazas, corporate manager of customs administration for Nissan North America Inc.

In particular, Cazas said, importers and exporters are faced with too many levels of bureaucracy in making appeals when disagreements occur.

"If an issue happened at the port and needed to be elevated to Customs headquarters (in Washington), you had to go through a lot of procedures to get there," she said.

Under the reformed system, port directors can now go straight to Washington to answer questions and resolve disputes, bypassing district directors like Heinrich and regional directors above them.

"I find that I'm more at arm's length (with regard to involvement in day-to-day Customs work at the ports)," said Heinrich.

His shift in position is just the latest in a long series of moves within the government agency. Heinrich joined the Customs bureau in 1970, shortly after graduating from college.

"I took the civil service exam, and Customs was the first to call me. It wasn't a job I chose. It just happened," said Heinrich.

He began as a Customs inspector in Baltimore, where he got his feet wet by boarding and inspecting cargo on ships at Baltimore harbor.

Many of Heinrich's most memorable experiences came during those early days, when he was involved in searching for and seizing illegal substances brought into the country by ship and by air.

In one instance, he recalled catching a woman trying to smuggle cocaine in the U.S.

"I made several narcotics seizures. One involved cocaine, when one of our officers detected narcotics taped to the small of a woman's back. That was exciting, because you didn't make too many cocaine seizures back in 1970," Heinrich said.

After working the ports for four years, Heinrich decided to take a stab at management and applied to be a Customs supervisor. He got the job and worked six years in a supervisory position in Baltimore, followed by a year as chief inspector for the city.

Not one to stay put for too long, he went to Washington, D.C. in 1982, where Heinrich became a national program manager responsible for writing new policy governing international airport inspection.

He came to L.A. in 1986, where he assumed his role of director for the L.A. Customs district.

Most of those interviewed who have dealt with Heinrich during his 10-year tenure as district director praised him for his dynamic leadership as well as his approachability.

One international trader described him as a "competent bureaucrat," while another said he is "enormously accessible to the foreign trade community."

"He's a very good spokesman for Customs. He comes across very well and knows his material. He's very professional, and I've had nothing but good experiences with him," said Bruce Leeds, senior export/import advisor for Hughes Space & Communications Co.

One of the biggest changes during his 10 years as director of the district was the big push to automation that took place in the agency in the late 1980s and early '90s.

"In 1986, we probably had only five or six PCs (personal computers) for the entire port district. Now we have 450 PCs, four local area networks and virtually all our cargo transactions are transmitted electronically," said Heinrich.

"There was a time when import specialists had to touch almost every paper transaction at some point. Now they're manipulating millions of bits of data (electronically) so they can focus on their enforcement areas."

In fact, manpower at the L.A. Customs district has remained relatively constant over the last 10 years, even as the cargo volume handled by the district's ports has soared.

The value of goods passing in and out of the district's ports was worth more than $150 billion in fiscal 1996, and Customs revenue collections for the year exceeded $4 billion, said Heinrich. He estimated that those levels grew by an average of 5 percent to 10 percent annually during his tenure as district director.

"Without the leap in automation, we'd have international trade grinding to a halt," he observed.

As to his current role behind the scenes, Heinrich said it's been an adjustment from his former position, but it was probably time for him to move on when he did.

"I was ready for a change. You know when you can anticipate the questions being asked and you can formulate the answers before you even hear the questions that it's time to move on to something else," he said.