Today we break from reporting on the Beltway gridlock that has temporarily stalled Southern California’s green-growth plan to move up the East Coast, where a powerful elected leader has planted the policy seeds to help an ailing New York industry thrive again.

With an eye to the West, Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a senior member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, penned an op-ed in the New York Daily News under the headline “Keep on Truckin’: An Overhaul of New York’s Port Rules Would Bring Vital Jobs to the State.” The highest-ranking Democrat in the Northeast co-authored the piece with Andrea Batista Schlesinger, the influential executive director of the The Drum Major Institute. (The non-partisan, non-profit think tank placed the Los Angeles Clean Trucks Program on the top of its “Best of Public Policy” List for 2008.)

The pair praises LA’s emissions-reduction plan as the comprehensive model for sustainable growth and good job creation (hurry, please) in the article that was also picked up on the popular blogs Huffington Post and Open Left. Opining just two days after the swearing in of the 44th president, Rep. Nadler and Batista Schlesinger wrote:                                                                                             
    With President Obama’s administration urging Congress to pass an economic stimulus quickly, local leaders should waste no time pointing to a smart, stable source of middle-class jobs: port trucking in New York’s regional economy. If we reverse years of dangerous deregulation, thousands of new low-paying jobs could quickly become sustainable middle-class jobs…That deregulation enabled bosses to dispatch cargo through so-called independent contractors. Treating these drivers as small businessmen rather than employees has prohibited the drivers from joining unions - and essentially enabled the companies to cheat on payroll taxes.
    A majority of these port truckers are recent immigrants with no negotiating power or workplace rights. Their lives are dictated by ocean shipping lines and trucking companies trying to get maximum productivity at minimal expense. These drivers have to pay for their own truck maintenance, fuel, road taxes, tire insurance and tolls. They are covered neither by workers’ compensation nor by any labor legislation that protects fair wages, hours, occupational safety or health…
    …Port truck drivers operating with such low profit margins are most likely to use the least expensive trucks available, older and far more polluting than newer, cleaner trucks. The cheapest trucks emit the most dangerous fumes in neighborhoods closest to the ports, making the air increasingly toxic and causing severe spikes in asthma rates.
    The trucking industry should no longer be allowed to get away with forcing truck drivers and taxpayers to shoulder this burden. The Port Authority, along with Gov. Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg, should push for new regulations that would require the trucking industry to absorb the total labor and environmental costs of doing business in our region.

Those new regulations, the authors continue, must include the employee-provision as backed by President Obama in the LA Clean Trucks Program, so port drivers can haul goods in clean, maintained company-owned fleets and bargain collectively for higher wages and benefits to boost the regional economy.

The Road couldn’t agree more. As is the case in Southern California (and in Oakland and in Seattle and so on), poverty and pollution goes hand-in-hand in the Northeast trade hubs. Last month, the Coalition for Healthy Ports, the sister organization of the Coalition for Clean & Safe Ports, even took to the Newark streets and counted all the dirty diesel trucks to demonstrate the scope of the environmental crisis to the Port Authority.

Check out TV coverage of their wake-up call event here, and don’t forget to read the full op-ed too!