Port, Long Beach City Council scrapping over rail line.

Critics: Plan will cause excessive noise, traffic delays

Long Beach Harbor Commissioners have scheduled a Feb. 10 vote on a controversial plan to build a rail yard on the waterfront, even though City Council members have strenuously objected.

The rail yard would be used by a large commercial container-loading operation, Maersk Pacific Inc. The Danish-owned outfit would gain a leg up on competitors in Long Beach and the rival Port of Los Angeles that have no railroad line and must rely on less-efficient trucks to haul their cargo containers to and from the ports.

Beyond Maersk's competitiveness, the rail yard's fate concerns the future of on-dock rail at the Port of Long Beach.

Several other container terminals are interested in on-dock rail yards, including Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha Ltd., according to Harbor Commissioner Roy Hearrean.

City Council members, nevertheless, have said peace and quiet are also at stake: The 1.7-mile-long cargo trains would snake through some residential neighborhoods and may use Union Pacific rail lines. They pass within 500 feet of an estimated 16,000 residents in several cities on their way to switching yards near downtown Los Angeles and on to their destinations.

They would create noise as loud as 103 decibels and also cause traffic delays longer than nine minutes at four street intersections in Long Beach, according to an environmental study.

Trains already run on these lines, but council members have protested the imposition of more train noise and delays expected from increased use of the line if the Maersk project goes through. The council voted 7-0 on Jan. 2 to ask harbor commissioners to kill Maersk's on-dock project unless changes were made. But the commissioners are not bound by council requests.

Harbor Commissioner Alex Bellehumeur said his colleagues will do "whatever we have to do" to ensure the port "remains dynamic." Still, he said, "We have to be sensitive to the people who live in our community, and that's quite a balancing act."

City Councilman Jeffrey Kellogg said he hoped for an amicable agreement. "We can either work together . . . or if the Harbor Department acts independently with no regard to the people of the city . . . harbor (officials) will pay the price at budget time." Kellogg, who is also vice mayor, said his reference to trimming harbor budget items was "not a threat" but simply part of civic "checks and balances."

At the January council meeting, one council member lamented the way residents sometimes suffer to benefit port tenants, many of which are giant Asian or European companies. The full council ultimately asked for a joint meeting of the two bodies to debate the issue further, but harbor commissioners have not given in. Instead, council members are being invited in small groups to thrash out their concerns with port officials behind the scenes.

"We've had a series of informal meetings to bring (council members) up to speed," confirmed port Executive Secretary A. Richard Ascheris last week.

The squabble could ultimately be solved under a grand plan, proposed by both ports, to reroute most trains along Southern Pacific rail lines that parallel Alameda Street, a much less-populated corridor. But the $1 billion Alameda Corridor plan has yet to receive all government permits, and there's no guarantee it will go forward.

Meanwhile, Harbor Commissioners are poised to approve the Maersk rail yard next month, said Commissioner Hearrean. Construction would begin in April, and Maersk expects the yard to operate at full capacity by 1994. By then, Maersk would relocate from its smaller rail-less site at the port. The Alameda Corridor would not likely be operating much before 2000, according to some estimates.

"It's very important to Maersk," noted port Director of Planning Geraldine Knatz. She said the rail yard would save the company money.

Maersk will foot the bill for the rail yard's construction, but an estimated cost for the project was not obtainable before the Business Journal's presstime.

The Maersk terminal would primarily serve its own worldwide fleet of cargo ships. The yard would feature 10 parallel tracks, each 3,000 feet long, to move about 100,000 containers a year by rail. The 20-foot-long boxes would be loaded by crane between ships and rail cars. There would be five round trips a week, two on Union Pacific and three on Santa Fe.

The terminal facility itself is still under construction on 107 acres Maersk leases from the port.

The council sent harbor commissioners a list of recommendations to mitigate the trains' disruptiveness. They include:

* No arrivals between 10:30 p.m. and 9:30 a.m. or between 4:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.

* No rush-hour service that would block street intersections and cause traffic delays.

* A "hazardous materials emergency response plan" be prepared to set up a procedure to handle rail-car spills or leaks of hazardous cargo.

The expanded Maersk operation would also require about 274 truck trips a day, according to a 1987 environmental study sponsored by the port. That could double without the rail yard, it said.