A shipshape bill

State Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) has spent three years struggling to win approval for an important bill that would go a long way toward fixing Southern California’s pollution and traffic problems. After hitting opposition from interest groups on every side of the issue, the bill has been revised more times than an Etch-a-Sketch doodle. Now that SB 974 is on the verge of making it to the governor’s desk, it’s clear that this trial by fire has forged a remarkably strong piece of legislation.

Under SB 974, shippers and retailers would have to pay a fee of $60 on every typical-sized container passing through the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland. The money would be used to clean the air -- the ports being the No. 1 source of air pollution in Southern California -- and build infrastructure to speed goods from the harbors to their destinations (while also relieving traffic stalled by slow trucks and trains).

Local officials had a legitimate beef with past versions of the bill, which would have directed state transportation and air-quality boards to distribute the money. These boards tend to care more about regional equity than about distributing funds where they’re most needed: In other words, they would be likely to spend container-fee money on projects far from the areas where the majority of the container traffic goes. The new bill creates a board made up of appointees by local mayors, transit agencies and the ports to allocate the local funds; a separate board would handle the money from the Port of Oakland.

The new fee also complements container fees recently approved by the two big Southern California ports as part of their clean-air plans. The proceeds from those fees can be spent only on port projects, while money from the state fee could, for example, pay for grade separations in the Inland Empire so railroad crossings no longer block traffic on surface roads.

It’s a bit worrisome that all these fees will hit the industry during an economic downturn, when import traffic is slowing and shippers already are being hammered by soaring fuel costs. The $60 state fee would be added to a $70 port fee to pay for cleaner trucks, and an additional $30 port fee for infrastructure projects. Yet the fees still will make up only a small fraction of the cost of shipping goods, and without them there is simply no way to clean up the port-related pollution that is costing thousands of lives. The bill has passed both houses of the Legislature and now just faces some housekeeping issues in the Senate before it makes its way to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He should sign it.