Trade, Travel, and Tourism Committee - June 14, 2022 3:30PM
nobody understands and we are live thanks dennis with uh welcome to the trade travel tourism committee i'm chairman i'm joined by mr bonham mr lee with that uh let's kick this meeting off with the roll call council member bruce galino here councilmember bonnen here councilmember lee president three members on a quorum mr chair thank you mr clerk with that like to ask you to read the call and instructions for today's t3 meeting members of the public who would like to offer public comment on the items listed on the agenda should call 1-669-254-5252 and use meeting id number 161 and then press pound press pound again when prompted for participant id once admitted into the meeting press star 9 to request to speak thank you and our city attorney for today's rules thank you mr chairman to members of the public calling in when it's your turn to speak please state which of the agenda items you would like to speak on you have one minute per item to speak two minutes total for multiple agenda items and one minute for general public comment when speaking on the agenda items you must be on topic if you're making a general public comment you must address topics in the jurisdiction of the committee if you're not speaking on topic or if you cannot tell whether you're speaking on topic you will get one brief warning from me or the chairman and if you do not immediately get back on topic or again straight off topic the chairman will cut you off and will forfeit the rest of your speaking time finally for members of the public calling in to speak as soon as you hear someone address you you are live in the committee meeting if you're also listening to the meeting on your computer channel 35 or other device please turn down the volume on those devices immediately to avoid an echo thank you thank you with that uh dennis let's turn to uh callers for today's meeting thank you mr chair first caller with the private number please press star six to immune only [Music] go ahead caller you have two minutes on the item and one minute for general yes i'm so glad the fbi 3 30. how crazy are you and you think you last warning stick to the agenda item last morning what is is that joey bucket that finished fourth place for men his time he's not abiding by the rules so we'll cut him off cut his time off thank you next caller phone number ending in 7706 please press star six to unmute go ahead caller please state your name and the items you'd like to speak on good afternoon my name is allison martinez i'd like to speak on item four go ahead you have one minute again my name is alison martinez i'm with shepard mullin and we represent alliance ground international or agi which provides airline cargo handling services throughout the country and has been at lax since 2013. on behalf of agi i wish to express our disappointment and concern regarding the recent lease extension approved by law and before you today for the property located at 5781 west imperial highway even though this lease has been in place for 38 years this extension was not subject to a request for proposals review process and as such agi believes that law and the city are missing an important opportunity to improve cargo handling services at lax through the competitive procurement of these services egi has been leading nearly 10 years for the opportunity to compete for cargo facilities at lax and without an rfp process competitors cannot present qualifications and alternative cost structures to wawa and the city as such we strongly urge the city council to reject this lease extension and have la la la issue an rfp instead thank you thank you caller uh mr chair those are all the callers in the queue i could ask what that will end public comment uh with that members like to turn your attention to today's agenda and i'd like to recommend taking the following items on consent unless you'd like to hold any of the items um for discussion comments um like to take items two through twelve on consent okay here are no objection we'll take those items on consent and if we can call for a roll call please on items 2 through 12. council member bruce guyno yes councilmember bonnin yes councilmember lee yes those items have been approved thank you members thank you mr clerk let's now return to our discussion item item number one mr clerk can you read item one into the record please item number one harbor department to report relative to motion buscano corrects regarding the backlog of container vessels waiting to enter the port including the causes environmental impacts and actions the department is taking to address the issue and related matters thank you so much here joining us good to see you mike assuming you're gonna be good at presenting on behalf of the port good afternoon uh council members and thank you for this opportunity to give you a little bit of an update of what's going on at the port i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen if that's okay with you there we go um so um i'm not sure if you folks have seen this in the past but this is the activities that took place last year uh the final numbers that have come in for our different lines of business which are autos as well as liquid bulk container scrap metal fruit cruise activity which was no surprise that we had a big decline of cruise because of the covet situation but then the activities with with other with other commodities at the port it kind of shows the volumes that were handled so i thought i'd share this with you again i'm not sure if you've seen this uh but i thought it would be uh useful to share this one of the things on the fruit not sure if you're aware but we get fruit from south america during our winter months so that allows us to get nectarines and plums and grapes and things like that during our winter months and it's their summer down in south america so that season's actually come to an end already and we'll be seeing that come back late december uh early january which is uh those types of commodities and that's done at our outer harbor worth 55. just a little update on that uh what i'd like to show you now is our volumes and you can see these numbers actually were just put out today uh for may uh but for the first five months of calendar year 2022 we've had a 4.5 million to use which is pretty uh similar to what we handled last year uh same time of 4.5 million tu so we're a
little bit down like point 31 or 0.3 i should say uh from where we were last year so very uh strong on numbers the ships are still coming in full uh we're we're extremely busy at uh all of our terminals both la long beach and actually a number of terminals in north america that are quite busy and full i don't like to use the word congested because it is a negative tone there but i like to say that we are busy so we are extremely busy right now and you can see that through the volumes but happy to report that we're consistent with last year this is our our one of our uh all-time high maze this is the third ever in our history as far as a high volume in may that we've seen here at the port of la uh this is a little bit of the lay of the land as far as our shipping lines if you don't mind me just sharing this real quick these are the shipping lines that call it the port of la and actually the the same ones that call it the part of long beach so our main ones are in these alliances we have the 2m the alliance as they call it which consists of four carriers and then we have five carriers which is called within the ocean alliance so these are our main character carriers these are the shipping shipping terminals that they call it so you can see they have the different terminals that they they send their ships to but what was interesting in 2021 at the end of 2021 is that new shipping lines have entered the market and these are the names of some of the shipping lines and some of these were brought on by home depot uh target we have alibaba that brought in their own shipping line and these are ones that are ad hoc type shipping lines that have come in uh they really didn't have a container terminal to come to when they arrived but they were fit in at various terminals both in la and long beach to help service these ships the interesting thing was that they came in they had a home for able to discharge the containers but didn't have a home to bring back the empties to and that's why you probably saw a lot of empties that were accumulated at the port but we have seen where they are taking back empties at a number of terminals and also going to the off dock yards that we established and i'll give you an update on the off dock yards as we go through this but those are our new shipping lines that have now entered the market and have come into the port of l.a port of long beach this slide here what i'd like to show you here excuse me the reason i'm showing this one here is to show you there's not a huge group of ships that are on their way from origin so origin we define that as being somewhere in asia coming to 150 nautical miles and as you know there's a new queuing system with the ships and you can look out your window and you can see that there's no ships at anchor close by they're going out to 150 nautical miles and the reason is that that queuing system changed was that everybody was rushing in coming in to go sit at anchor at the 40 nautical miles and we could see them outside our window just to get the labor allocation so now they're getting the labor allocation much sooner they're getting it as soon as they leave asia so there's no need to rush in so they're going to the 150 mark but as you can see here we're not seeing a huge uh of ships that are coming in it's been pretty stagnant coming in and even with china opening back up we're not seeing the big surge and the reason is that china other ports in china were open and other ports were servicing the volume that was coming out of china so we don't anticipate a big clut of ships coming out of china after the reopening after covid because the the ships are full all the ships are in use and there were other ports like ningbo that were servicing other ports out of china and shipping out to the us so numbers have been consistent but we'll keep an eye on this and we'll make sure that the numbers are not jumping up all of a sudden which we don't think it will now at the 40 nautical miles 150 nautical miles we've seen a dramatic drop 73 dropped from january 3rd where we had 102 at one time out there uh waiting at the 40 and 150 nautical miles now we're down to 27. so you can see that the numbers have declined um since you know the biggest part being in in february of this year and it's been staying at a consistent number at the 40 and 150 nautical miles so to answer your question about you know are we going to see a big glut of cargo coming in from asia we don't think so we think that all the ships are full you have those new shipping lines that are still coming in and bringing in full ships and you have our our common uh other carriers that we have uh that used to call here on a regular basis so we don't see a big a big shift or a big uh cloud of ships coming in now what we post on our website every day is our operations report and this kind of gives everybody what's going on at the port of la how many vessels are in port how many are at the 40 nautical miles it also gives their sizes and you can see that we have some smaller ships you know 65 percent or 10 000 and older and over um at the 150 nautical mile mark and we break it out by what's going into the port of l.a port of long beach and how
long they're waiting at uh anchorage at the 40 nautical miles to come into port so you can see the numbers are not are not huge as i pointed out earlier in the other graph as well as what's coming in between uh origin port and 150 nautical miles we also look at gang counts and this is the labor gangs that are working the vessels and a lot of the gang cuts are related to just space in the terminals not being able to discharge the sh the the ships quickly so the terminals meter how many gangs they order and then they they cut accordingly if they don't have the room within the terminal to unload it so we have been seeing that number gangs cut low very recently in fact yesterday it was at zero gang's cut so it's a good sign uh as far as keeping the momentum going and working the ships we also look at dwell time on the terminals and this is a key factor as far as space within the terminals looking at how long local cargo stayed on terminal to be delivered and right now it's at four and a half days which is not out of the ordinary we used to see three and a half to four days even pre-covered as far as containers sitting on terminal the biggest one is the on-dock rail cargo that's sitting waiting to load on dock trains and we are struggling right now in getting rail cars into the la area and long beach area to load out intermodal cargo and you can see we're at 7.8 days we really should be at a three-day mark on that one so we are working constantly with the railroads we even have white house involvement in calls with the railroads to see what we can do to to keep the supply chain fluid the other issue is containers off terminal and this is where you know you've seen some containers that are stored in the wilmington area as well as any surrounding areas of the port that's at 8.7 days on an average and the chassis pool that's used at the port is built for four days so it's interesting we've doubled how long containers are out on the street so that does put a strain on the chassis situation and so we have shipping lines that are calling up customers telling them to bring back their containers bring back the chassis uh once the containers are empty but what is happening is because warehouses are so full they're using containers as storage storage facilities and that's what we're seeing out there that containers are being used to store goods that are not needed in the warehouse we also look at what's waiting to load on dock rail and this is a high number for us as well we should not have 28 000 containers waiting to load on the on dock rail and as i pointed out because we're waiting for rail cars that number should be about 9 000 and as far as uh nine days and over there's four over fourteen thousand containers waiting to load on the train that are nine days and older that should be at zero so the rail carriers are doing all they can but they have the same situations inland like we do here people are using their containers as warehouses and they're not unloading they don't have room in the rail terminal to unload the trains because people are using the rail ramp as a storage facility and then we look at the total containers on terminal uh both for all containers and all that are nine days and older and then we look at our empties and how many are um on our off on dock yards as well as our off deck yards and number of empties and actually that 49 000 is a comfortable number um we've seen that as high as 90 000 so it's it's come down considerably uh with the amount of empties that are waiting so in relation to the empties the flex properties that we've created we created 221 acres of property to store these empty containers and and some of this is for brake pump as well but most of these are for containers and the storage of containers at the off dock yards in order to relieve what we saw out in wilmington um with containers that were parked or stacked in certain locations and we're going to try to activate some additional property we're working on on the former laxg loop uh adding some additional acreage out there as well as the west basic container terminal and then something over on water street so about 48 acres due to be activated in the near term so that kind of gives a little bit of what's going on at the port um i thought i'd share this with you and happy to answer any questions thanks mike i want to start with that last slide very impressed with the um the leadership effort there of increasing the capacity of the acreage thank you to make up uh for those empties and stores of those empties as they're waiting to get shipped back out so you know that's been a significant improvement because of the land that you've made available to the impacted neighborhood in wilmington so thanks for that for my work you're welcome um happy also to see uh the reduction of ships that are waiting to anchor i know that's due in large part of your work and gene's work and the entire team uh and the the president's administration um also want to point that we welcomed the president uh last friday to the port and he too recognized the uh the work of of the whole supply chain um efforts from the truck drivers and launch foreman to our shipping companies and of course the both ports uh leadership so to work on that was happy and what what a moment for us to welcome president biden at our port um it was a historic moment um that is all i have i know we have a motion that um looking forward to agendize uh hearing committee on the potential impacts of shanghai recent news of potentially seeing an increase in in the cans coming through which want to be able to be prepared for it but you just mentioned that we shouldn't be too concerned about what's taking place in shanghai shanghai and what to expect here in our port yeah and and that is true and and we also have a a port the port optimizer which gives us a 14-day view of what's coming in and i've actually looked at those numbers this morning and the numbers container numbers are not out of the ordinary they're actually a little bit down so we're not seeing that as i said that big push to get carter out and again there were other ports that were open in in shanghai the deep sea port was open as well as ningbo and they were moving out to ships and that's why you've seen the ships that we do have and that are full so that port optimizer it exists uh for the sole reason right exactly to see what's what's coming in and out exactly but we're going to keep it right and i like that one chart that i put together that shows what's origin to 150 nautical miles and we haven't seen that big shoot up of that that's that's going to be the indicator if there is going to be a problem so we're keeping an eye on that again i appreciate the report turn over to members if they have any um questions comments concerns from item number one you're the king of the ports [Laughter] but i appreciate your time today thanks so much thank you very much all right dennis we are going to continue this item uh just to keep our pulse on um the impacts of the goods movement and the the backlog or at least now we can say the improvement of the backlog as we're moving forward so there'll be no action it will just continue to sign up for the next month or two it's funny i give out presentations when i tell people i i hate to use the word congested because you know somebody were asking how you doing today you don't say you're congested unless you're sick you're like hey congestion you just say you're busy so that's what we keep saying here we're busy and still uh these record-breaker record-breaking numbers that come in every month yep so again debt of gratitude to the port and also the men of work men and women working around the clock yep absolutely and you and i both have relatives that are out there yes working like crazy so their bus they're doing a great job so thank you thank you okay with that um that is our only discussion item um we'll continue item number one mr clerk i believe that clears the task that's correct very good we're in our adjourned thank you so much thanks jim
2022-06-21 16:30
