The people who run the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are developing plans to work together to help themselves and the companies who do business at the harbor alleviate congestion around the waterfront.
That’s the word from Michael Christensen, appointed as the Port of Long Beach’s new senior executive for supply chain management in February. Christensen, who was the keynote speaker Tuesday during the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce’s World Trade Week Luncheon, said the twin ports plan to make a formal announcement soon revealing more specifics.
“My job is to facilitate, at the highest level, improvements to the supply chain,” Christensen said during his remarks.
Congestion around the ports evident by such local phenomena as the long lines of tractor trailers forming outside terminal gates — is a problem that goes deeper than this past winter’s slowdown following tense labor negotiations between the dockworkers and their employers, Christensen said.
Although the International Longshore and Warehouse Union announced Friday that its members have ratified a new contract with employers represented by the Pacific Maritime Association, the ports still face other congestion-inducing challenges, including shipping lines bringing bigger and bigger ships across the ocean.
Christensen noted that shipping companies’ moves to control their own costs, such as forming alliances between carriers, moving goods on bigger ships and divesting themselves of the trailers that truck drivers need to haul the containers, have exacerbated the congestion problem.
The Federal Maritime Commission’s members decided in February the leaders of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach should be allowed to collaborate on methods to improve the flow of goods in and out of the local harbor. That paved the way for the ports to begin to bring together the groups of experts to start tackling the logjam together.
Christensen also discussed previous steps Port of Long Beach officials have taken to deal with congestion. One idea is for the port to become an “honest broker” of data, letting firms like the Walmarts and Home Depots of the world have a clear picture of how long it takes to get a shipping container out of the port,
Port of Long Beach officials are also seeking bids from companies interested in operating a pool of chassis that could be leased when the trailers are not available from the “pool of pools” operated by three firms that control roughly 80 percent of the 100,000 chassis available in the harbor area.
“They will be a little higher cost, because we don’t want to compete with the ‘pool of pools,’” Christensen said.
The Port of Long Beach will will start out by making 1,000 additional chassis available for truckers who cannot otherwise find equipment, Christensen said. Then, the pool would later expand by an additional 2,000 chassis.
In a similar move, the Harbor Trucking Association announced last week has made arrangements to make another chassis pool available to trucking firms as early as June 1.
