The Jersey City Independent"

In August, we reported on the fight of truckers and activists to reform the port trucking industry on both the environmental and labor fronts. Today, the Coalition for Healthy Ports has released a study that claims “lax regulation in the national port trucking system has triggered a broad public health crisis” in North Jersey and Hudson County.

The report, “Hazardous to Our Health,” is based on a number of environmental and public health studies, and it reveals these alarming findings:

• Among counties, Hudson ranks Number 1 in the state when it comes to health risks associated with diesel soot — and Number 9 among counties nationwide.
• Among states, New Jersey ranks Number 2 in the country when it comes to cancer risk associated with diesel soot.
• Premature deaths attributed to diesel pollution in New York and New Jersey are predicted to reach more than 3,100 in 2010. That’s 5.5 times the number of homicides in the cities of Newark and New York City combined in 2008, and more than 2.5 times more than the murder rate across both states that same year.
• North Jersey’s asthma rates are disproportionately high, with 1 out of 4 children suffering from the illness — compared to 1 out of 12 in areas further removed from the polluting ports.

The report points out that port truck traffic along Routes 1 and 9 in Jersey City has detrimental effects on our residents’ health, which is made worse by the fact that many truckers drive this particular route to avoid paying tolls on other, larger roads out-of-pocket. That is just one way in which these advocates say the environmental issues at play in the port trucking industry intersect with the business and labor issues.

The report argues that deregulation of the port trucking industry has completely transformed what used to be a solid middle-class career into an often-dicey contracting situation, where truckers increasingly pay to own, operate and maintain their trucks.

The deregulation has had the same effect in port trucking that is had had in countless other industries nationwide: it has driven wages down. Thus, the only rigs that many local drivers can now afford are “decaying, diesel-spewing trucks built before 1998 that expose them and residents throughout the region to deadly toxins,” the report says.

So what now? As we mentioned in our August report, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns and operates the area ports, is moving forward with programs to replace the oldest trucks that service the ports as part of a broader clean air plan.

The stumbling block between the environmental and labor advocates, the Port Authority, and the trucking industry essentially comes down to two all-important words: Who pays?

The companies want the truckers to pay, but the advocates argue that as independent contractors, the truckers cannot afford to do so. And the Port Authority sits in the middle. Advocates are pushing for the agency to essentially require that the companies invest in new trucks, as the Port of Los Angeles has done. But as a Port Authority spokesman told us this summer, the agency has “no intention of doing something similar here.” Instead, it is thus far relying on a combination of government grants and low-interest loans to create programs that help bring down the costs borne by the truckers who want new rigs.

“There’s no question the Port Authority must act in the public interest and implement a long-term and sustainable plan to improve air quality in our region,” Teamsters International Vice President Fred Potter says in a statement. “The problem is that polluters in the trucking industry expect their workers and taxpayers to foot the bill, while we believe it should be the responsibility of trucking companies to make those investments in new technology and clean trucks.”

You can read the full report here.