Clean Trucks Are Not A Choice Between Money or Life

Your money or your life?  That's how one observer summed up the truck clean-up rule that the California Air Board bravely voted to adopt last week.  After an intense two-day hearing, the Board grappled with the competing concerns of the 200 plus people who testified: The cost to business versus the health affects of pollution to millions of people from diesel trucks.  Well, this isn't a mugging and we don't have to choose one over the other.

The Board was heroic in its adoption of one of the more powerful measures to protect public health in tough economic times.  And the state has backed up these landmark truck clean-up rules with $1 billion in funding to help out truck owners.  If more funding is needed to keep small businesses afloat with clean trucks, I know I speak for all supporters of this rule in saying that we'll be there to help raise these funds.

The Air Board took a giant step towards our climate goals and towards clean air goals, bringing relief to millions of Californians whose health has been negatively affected by diesel truck pollution.  Every Board Member should feel proud that they had a hand in saving, literally, thousands of lives. 

It's a different scene here in Oakland however, where the Port has been overcome by financial misfortune, using that as an excuse to dismantle every environmental program.  For the last minute withdrawal of a critical port truck clean up program, I debated giving the Port Commissioners gas masks, but instead gave them lumps of coal for the holidays.  I hope they hang on to their black lumps to remind them of all the extra soot that drivers and impacted residents are exposed to due to their delay in cleaning up port trucks.

In a community where lives are on average ten years shorter and one in five children suffers from asthma, the stalled truck clean up program is an expense too great to bear.  With two newly appointed port commissioners, who may be well aware that we cannot continue to sacrifice lives for money or vice versa, I'm optimistic that the Port of Oakland will reverse course in 2009 by moving forward with life-saving clean truck programs.  As the Port counts down one year until the Clean Port Truck Standards phase in, I hope the Commissioners have the mettle and courage to take responsibility for the broken port trucking system and fix it.