06/22/04

LC040622

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Charging California truckers a premium to drive during rush
hour. Is that the ticket for cleaner air and smooth sailing on
the freeways?

Patty Senecal>> To do nothing is not a choice. We cannot
continue to put trucks on freeways at peak hours and let them do
ten miles per hour. It makes no sense.

Val>> And then, pictures from Orange County's past and present.
A look at the good, the bad and the ugly south of the Orange
Curtain.

These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

Val>> If you ask the average Southern California motorist to
pay a fee for driving during rush hour, they'd say get lost.
But that's exactly what may happen to truckers who haul goods
out of the area's two major ports. As Toni Guinyard reports,
it's all part of a new plan to reduce traffic and air pollution
in one of the most congested parts of Los Angeles.

Toni Guinyard>> It's a freeway dance that happens five days a
week. Trucks coming into and out of the port of Long Beach
maneuvering for position with passenger cars on the 710 Freeway.
The result is gridlock. The situation is already bad. Traffic
projections predict it's only going to get worse. The volume of
truck traffic from the port is being blamed. Many cargo
containers that arrive by ship are transferred to trucks and
transported to destinations on the same freeways you drive every
day. In 2003, five and a half million containers moved through
the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

Don Snyder>> Well, most of the cargo is moving at the same time
as most of the people going to and from work, so you have
congested periods of time on the 710 Freeway, the 60 Freeway,
and then you have times in the middle of the night and the
weekends when those freeways are wide open.

Toni Guinyard>> Port of Long Beach Marketing Manager Don Snyder
says most container truck pickups and deliveries happen week
days during the peak hours of eight in the morning to five in
the afternoon. The industry is being pressured to get trucks
off the road during the day by moving cargo during the less
congested drive times overnight and on weekends, but doing so
would require extending the gate hours of operation at each
terminal.

Don Snyder>> I think what helps is that sometimes you need a
threat to get people motivated to action.

Toni Guinyard>> The motivation to change the way the port
operates comes in the form of financial pressure. A bill
proposed by State Assemblyman Alan Lowenthal calls for a so-
called premium fee to be charged for moving cargo by commercial
vehicle into and out of the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles
during peak hours.

Don Snyder>> One of the considerations is that there's also
considerations on making appointment systems, but whatever the
solution is, it has to create a behavior change in when people
pick up the containers at the port.

Patty Senecal>> All the other sectors in transportation are
working almost 24-7 and yet, when we come into a marine
terminal, we're still operating in this eight to five window.
So it's a choke point, you know, for this goods movement and
that's why again we need to look at changing the hours of our
port complex.

Toni Guinyard>> Senecal warns the cost of doing business
overnight or on weekends could be substantial. Her company,
Transport Express, is a warehouse distribution center for goods
exported and imported through the ports.

Patty Senecal>> Our customers are concerned about changing
their work hours. Again, we're looking at -- it just sounds so
easy. Open the gates, you know. Why can't you just open the
gates and move all this cargo at night? But it's impacting a
lot of different people who have to compromise and we're all
going to have this new cost. As a transportation provider, yes,
my trucks would have to work at night. The dilemma for us is
can we deliver the cargo? So if the warehouses aren't open to
receive cargo at night, off-hours in the morning or even on the
weekends, companies like mine have to figure out what to do with
the cargo.

Toni Guinyard>> And there is a lot of cargo to consider. The
Port of Long Beach is one of the busiest ports in the United
States. In terms of volume, it's second only behind its
neighbor, the Port of Los Angeles. In 2003, more than five
million containers moved through both port complexes. They're
classified as landlord ports and that designation makes it
impossible for port administrators to dictate the hours of
operation.

Don Snyder>> We develop the terminals and then we lease them on
a long-term basis to terminal operators and they operate the
terminals in the manner they feel is most effective and
efficient, so they can choose when to open and close their
terminals.

Patty Senecal>> As an industry, will our drivers want to switch
to night? You're asking people to change their way of life.

Toni Guinyard>> Michael Brecht is a driver for Transport
Express. He welcomes the idea of extending gate hours and the
thought of not only getting out of bumper-to-bumper commuter
traffic, but also the prospect of avoiding long lines at
terminal gates.

Michael Brecht>> Every day it's a wait to get in and out of the
harbor, so it's a line and you can't get that many loads out of
there because you are in line a lot. The off-hours would
probably be better for everybody else too, you know.

Toni Guinyard>> In what way?

Michael Brecht>> Well, there would be less traffic on the
roads, you know, less people, less cars and stuff to worry about
and less trucks for the cars to worry about during the day.

Toni Guinyard>> But that's only part of the problem. Members
of nearby communities have complained for years about
environmental and health concerns related to port operations.

Noel Park>> Part of it is just the standard "I'm mad as hell
and I'm not going to take it anymore" response. You know, we've
brought these issues forward over the years. Some members of
our community -- I mean, I'm like a second generation port
environmentalist in San Pedro. People back to the seventies and
the eighties were addressing these issues and the port has
traditionally ignored us.

Toni Guinyard>> Noel Park is with the San Pedro Peninsula
Homeowners Association. While he supports extending gate hours,
--

Noel Park>> We've always said that assets should be utilized
and the truck traffic should move at night.

Toni Guinyard>> -- he does not think it's going to have a great
impact.

Noel Park>> Many people will say that running the trucks at off
hours will help air pollution because they'll be running in less
congested traffic and they'll be able to move more quickly and
so forth. That's certainly true up to a point, but the problem
is that it's all sort of a temporary fix.

Toni Guinyard>> Consider this: An estimated 35,000 commercial
vehicles go into and out of the ports of Long Beach and Los
Angeles on any given day. That number is expected to more than
double to 83,000 vehicles by the year 2020.

Noel Park>> It just makes you angry. I mean, the other problem
is that, when we found out that diesel exhaust causes cancer and
looked around at the huge concentration of diesel equipment in
the two ports, we suddenly realized that our health and our
lives were at risk.

Toni Guinyard>> To reinforce his argument, Park simply points
to a week-long series of special reports on pollution at the
port published in the Long Beach Press-Telegram.

Noel Park>> When we see the action at the level that it's
required to deal with the problem, then we'll be the first to
applaud.

Toni Guinyard>> For now, there is no applause, but there are
ideas on how the trucking and shipping industries can better co-
exist with communities impacted by port operations.

Don Snyder>> We all choose to have good consumer goods and
those need to come in from Asia into the consumer markets, and
we're a conduit for that. Those things also have to be
considered.

Patty Senecal>> To do nothing is not a choice. We cannot
continue to put trucks on freeways at peak hours and let them do
ten miles per hour. It makes no sense to congest the freeways,
add more pollution, and my industry is more than willing to try
and find new ways to do business.

Val>> Some freight handlers and trucking companies aren't
waiting to shift their hours of operation. About fifteen
percent of the port's cargo in Southern California is already
moving overnight and on weekends.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts
and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most
interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life
and Times".

Val>> Imagine spending millions of dollars to tunnel beneath a
city in order to extend a freeway. Well, that's the plan on the
drawing board for the 710 Freeway. It calls for tunneling
beneath the city of South Pasadena in order to avoid destroying
any neighborhoods. We talked with Norman Mineta, the
President's Secretary of Transportation, about the plan. We
caught up with Mr. Mineta at Town Hall Los Angeles where he was
a featured speaker before a downtown audience.

Philip Bruce>> In looking at some of the projects that may be
coming down the line, one of the ones locally at least that's
bound to spark a lot of interest is this plan for the Long Beach
Freeway and some study at least on whether or not it's possible
to tunnel under South Pasadena and extend that freeway. That
freeway has been a bone of contention since your days in
Congress.

Norman Mineta>> Absolutely, and even longer before than that.

Philip Bruce>> Is it possible that we may be looking at a
solution to this now that's going to make everybody happy?

Norman Mineta>> Well, it seems like Highway 710 has been there
forever and ever, but now Pasadena, South Pasadena and Alhambra
are all coming together. I've met with the mayors of those
communities and it's progressing. I don't know if they've got
the final solution yet, but it seems to me the ball is advancing
down the field.

Philip Bruce>> Of course, South Pasadena has opposed any effort
to extend that freeway through their city limits forever and it
would have wrecked a lot of those historic homes there. But
this plan to tunnel under the city, is that feasible? I mean,
that sounds like the Boston dig.

Norman Mineta>> Well, no one has really eyeballed the total
amount of costs that are involved in this tunneling project, but
at least in looking at it as a solution, whether it really is
going to be dependent on how much is it going to cost, how long
will it take, how does the property get impacted, and it is like
the Boston project. You know, it brings back a lot of memories
about the process that went through.

Philip Bruce>> Why go through that expense and that time? I
know that politically it's tough to tell the folks in South
Pasadena that we're going to plow through there. But, I mean,
when you're looking at dollars and cents, that would be the
cheapest way to deal with this, wouldn't it?

Norman Mineta>> It would be, but there is a residence that's
right in the pathway that's a designated historic landmark.
We've made offers to move it, to relocate it to other locations
within South Pasadena, but all of those have been rebuffed
because part of that is the National Historic Preservation
designation that property has.

Philip Bruce>> Mr. Secretary, you're in a unique position to
know how bad the freeways are in Southern California, being a
native of California. What things are in the highway bill that
may make life better for all of us here trying to get around?

Norman Mineta>> Well, one of the things is, first of all, the
increased amount of funding that President Bush submitted in his
proposal to Congress last May. It's a twenty-one percent
increase in funding over the last adopted surface transportation
legislation in 1998. So it's not only increased funding, but it
also gives states and local government more flexibility to be
able to use their funds in, I guess you might say, block amounts
rather than specific programmatic areas. So it gives them more
flexibility to move the funds around.

Philip Bruce>> California gets the lion's share of all the
federal highway dollars and that's especially true this year, is
that right?

Norman Mineta>> It is true.

Philip Bruce>> Can we build our way out of these problems? I
mean, have we gotten to a point where we're at the max? We're
at the absolute peak of what we can do with freeways here?

Norman Mineta>> Well, that's why the Bush administration is
taking a new look at the whole issue of transportation and also,
not only as it deals with passenger traffic, but also in terms
of freight movement. So we have this new transportation agenda
for America where we're looking at rail, air, highways, transit,
and trying to figure out what are the alternatives to just more
freeway lanes. Because we know that that's not an unending
resource, you might say, so we've got to find other ways to
accommodate, especially when we know that freight traffic is
going to increase some fifty percent in the next twenty years.

When we try to accommodate all of these, because transportation
is the foundation of keeping our economy moving and being able
to keep a person getting to work and getting back to their
families, we're looking at the whole picture of transportation
and how do we carve out different answers for different regions.
Transit and public transportation has to be a vital part of
that.

Philip Bruce>> From your days as a congressman from up in
Silicon Valley, you were on the transportation committee and had
a lot of involvement with these kinds of issues. Has it gotten
tougher to deal with those things now and, from your vantage
point as Secretary, is it tougher to have to look at the whole
picture versus the districts that you used to represent?

Norman Mineta>> It is because, from a national perspective, the
financial resources that are available are shrinking. The
gasoline tax revenues that's always been going into the highway
trust fund are going down because you have more fuel-efficient
cars, you've got hybrid engines, you've got hydrogen coming in
the future. So that means the revenue from the gasoline tax is
going to be going down in the future and yet the needs are not
going to lessen.

Philip Bruce>> And that's an amazing irony. As we try to clean
up the air and boost the mileage, we're actually cutting into
the taxes that will generate money to build these freeways.

Norman Mineta>> Yes, that's correct. So we've got to look to
other innovative financing methods, get more players to the
table so that we can still support all the infrastructure needs
we have to accommodate people and the movement of goods as well
as keeping the movement of our economy strong.

Philip Bruce>> When you come back home and you look at the
situation we're faced with here on these freeways getting more
crowded and the projections that we're going to nearly double
our population in the next decade or so, are you optimistic in
any way that we're going to be able to deal with this stuff?

Norman Mineta>> Well, by nature, I'm an optimistic person, so
I'd like to think that, no matter what the problems are, all of
us working together will be able to bring out collective minds
and innovative thinking to be able to bring solutions to these
programs and problems.

Philip Bruce>> Mr. Secretary, thanks for talking with us.
Enjoy your trip back to California.

Norman Mineta>> Thank you. Great to be with you, Phil.

Philip Bruce>> Nice to see you.

Val>> Secretary Mineta was a guest at Town Hall Los Angeles.
If you'd like to learn more about future speakers, you can go to
their website or give Town Hall Los Angeles a call.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or
contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val>> There's a saying that not all motion is forward and not
all change is progress, and nothing shows change more clearly
than putting a photograph of the past right next to a photograph
of the present. That's what one photographer has done to
document change in Orange County. George Jezek took sixty-three
photographs from decades past and went to the exact same
location to capture the scene today. The result is a pictorial
history of Orange County that speaks volumes. First of all,
when people think of Orange County, they think of Newport Beach
and Laguna Beach, but you've done everything. You've done Santa
Ana, Costa Mesa, some of the less glamorous spots as well.

George Jezek>> You know, I really tried to include everything.
I think the town or Orange County really has a lot of life
beyond the beaches. You know, you really maybe even go to, you
know, Yorba Linda and you look at the most famous guy that
really came out of Southern California that everybody forgets
about.

Val>> Richard Nixon.

George Jezek>> Richard Nixon, the farm town kid.

Val>> You did a before and after of the Nixon Library.

George Jezek>> His house where he actually grew up with all his
kids. It's just a tiny little house.

Val>> Some of the most dramatic changes can be seen from the
air.

George Jezek>> From the air. That would be the most, yes.

Val>> And there's one in particular that has amazing
development that occurred. It was where?

George Jezek>> It's in the Newport Beach Peninsula. This is
what I've heard. They couldn't give the land away, so if you
bought a house in Pasadena, you got a piece of land on Newport
Beach Island.

Val>> (Laughter) This is back in the turn of the century?

George Jezek>> I would say, you know, probably the early teens,
1914, 1920.

Val>> Now a lot of places, surprisingly, haven't changed that
much. It's amazing to see the hotels that are still there.

George Jezek>> Yeah. I tried to find stuff where I know the
exact spot is, so you have to go with what exists. So I tried
to look for some other stuff which would show a little bit more
change, but then I couldn't really honestly say that that was
the right spot.

Val>> You actually are very careful about this being
historically correct. You want to match up shot for shot.

George Jezek>> As close as I can get.

Val>> Now you have some that are really memorable. You say
Dana Point was really fun to do. Why was that?

George Jezek>> You know, Dana Point was kind of a place that
was an open ocean beach area. In the early twenties, they tried
to get everybody to come down and buy land there. I think they
used to bring booze in there and unidentified drinks to try to
get people to buy land. Then in the early sixties, the Army
Corps of Engineers came out and built a huge seawall and now I
think there's probably 150 boats there, so it's gone from really
a fishing village to now these, you know, million dollar yachts
in this area.

Val>> Another place we're all familiar with is Knott's Berry
Farm and apparently it started literally from a little store or
something?

George Jezek>> It's a pretty interesting story where they had
so many acres and then they had to get more acres and nobody
would loan them any money and then they opened this store up and
saved enough money to buy the land without the bankers. Then a
sister or the mom wanted to cook pies, so they went into a
restaurant. The amusement park started from so many people
waiting in line to get into the restaurant, so they had to
entertain them and that's how that started.

Val>> This is Brea. A lot of people think, well, Orange County
had orange fields, but it also had oil fields.

George Jezek>> It had oil fields. I really think that actually
oil fields probably brought in more money than the oranges did
at the beginning. They really don't have a lot of oil there
anymore, but it's still enough to keep it rolling, I guess.

Val>> So when you find the original archival photograph, where
do you look? How do you find it? How do you choose?

George Jezek>> It's really -- with this Orange County book, I
was lucky enough that there's this one place, First American
Title. I don't know if you've heard of them. They're a title
company, one of the biggest in the country now. They started in
Orange County.

Val>> And they have a photo archive?

George Jezek>> Somebody back in the day said we'd better keep
an archive and they have an archive of over 10,000 photos that's
privately held.

Val>> What a goldmine.

George Jezek>> It was really a goldmine.

Val>> Then the question is how do you choose which one because
you have so many choices. You must have a criteria.

George Jezek>> Yeah. Well, most of it is making sure that you
can get those photos.

Val>> In the present day.

George Jezek>> Yeah, in the present day. The first book I did,
San Diego, I would get all excited and say, oh, man, that's a
great shot and then I would run around and couldn't get them.
So over time, I've kind of --

Val>> -- now why wouldn't you be able to get them?

George Jezek>> Mostly trees. Growth. You've got to think this
was a desert eighty years ago and then now the trees have just
all grown up. So sometimes you can kind of slide in between the
trees and get the shot, but most of the time, it's just too
much, so you really can't do it from the ground shots.

Val>> You know, we see so much development and sprawl that a
lot of change like this can be really depressing. Did you get
the sense that things are not as beautiful as they used to be or
were you encouraged? What was your emotional view of your
story?

George Jezek>> You know, in Orange County, I was a little
depressed. You come from San Diego where they kind of preserved
what they had downtown. In Orange County in the seventies or
so, they just leveled stuff and they didn't really try to save
it. I don't know if it was economical difficulties at the time,
but they just leveled it. So a lot of the stuff is gone and
it's gone forever, except for the coast. The coast, they did
preserve, so you go to Laguna Beach and you go to those other
places, they did preserve that stuff, but anything inland was
just leveled really.

There was one that really stood out to me and that was the Santa
Ana Courthouse. It had a cupola on top which was one of the
tallest buildings and they took a bunch of granite or stone out
of Temecula and it cost, I think, over $100,000 to build.

Val>> A lot of money back then.

George Jezek>> A lot of money, probably in 1905. But it's an
amazing piece of architecture and history too. Kind of like Los
Angeles was a boomtown. Orange County, in some areas, was
really just a boomtown.

Val>> This is actually from the book you're working on now,
which is Los Angeles, and this is how it starts. You make a
Xerox.

George Jezek>> Make a Xerox.

Val>> So you have to find the exact shot.

George Jezek>> And there it is today.

Val>> Wow. George Jezek, thank you for preserving a little
history through your camera. We really appreciate it.

George Jezek>> Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Val>> And by the way, George Jezek uses a film camera, not a
digital camera, and he doesn't believe in touching things up
with PhotoShop. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For
everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you
next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.