News

The Port of Oakland shut down operations Thursday as longshore workers attended a union meeting instead of showing up to work amid a protracted labor dispute with shippers.

As employers at the ports along the West Coast on Monday refused to unload ships for the sixth day out of the past 10, their nine-month contract dispute with port workers is becoming a significant business problem.

About one-fifth of the city’s water pipes were installed before 1931 and nearly all will reach the end of their useful lives in the next 15 years. They are responsible for close to half of all water main leaks, and replacing them is a looming, $1-billion problem for the city.

Atkins’ colleagues from San Diego to Sacramento said last week they share her worry over how to pay for the state’s aging and overburdened roads, bridges and highways. But they also said her idea could be in for a long, difficult ride in the Legislature given the public’s disdain for new fees and the lack of a clear connection between state government and the potholes on local parkways.

You can debate what’s causing gridlock at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach; The dockworkers’ union blames the shipping companies, and the shippers blame the dockworkers. But this much is for sure: increasing delays in moving cargo are getting costly for California exporters, especially for growers, which are experiencing the worst delays they have seen in 13 years.

California water agencies are on track to satisfy a state mandate to reduce water consumption 20 percent by 2020. But according to their own projections, that savings won’t be enough to keep up with population growth just a decade later.

Oakland port officials have said the labor dispute “needs to be settled … quickly” to avoid further economic harm as businesses suffer from cargo delays. “Central Valley farmers can’t ship their produce. Small business owners can’t get goods to put on the shelf. Harbor truckers can’t do their jobs. Everyone is suffering,” the port said in a statement on Wednesday. “If the situation worsens … if West Coast ports shut down, the U.S. economy and the global supply chain will be jeopardized.”

With well over 300 billion vehicle-miles of pavement-pounding travel each year, our highways and local roads and streets are in sad shape. California not only has the nation’s worst traffic congestion but the nation’s second worst pavement conditions.

An extra $2 billion annually over five years would help fill the gap under Atkins’ plan, with about $1.8 billion of it flowing from a new fee on all drivers. Atkins said she has not yet determined how the fee would be assessed but estimated it would amount to roughly a dollar a week.

As California enters its fourth year of a historic drought – rung in with record dry spells this January in many regions across the state – water conservation becomes more important than ever.

A panel created by the Legislature to review state parks operations will report Friday that the Department of Parks and Recreation is underfunded and mired in outdated bureaucracy, and that the parks system is out of reach for many poor people in urban areas.

The responses fell into two broad categories – anger that existing gas taxes and other transportation revenues had been diverted into non-transportation uses, and skepticism that the Department of Transportation could be trusted to do the needed work.

Sometime in the next few weeks, the lead contractor for the Bay Bridge’s new eastern span will finally declare that the most complex public works project in California history is done — and state and local authorities will be solely responsible for a landmark beset by problems that trace back more than 16 years, to the day a handful of experts picked a design that bordered on the experimental.

Looking ahead, we should be spending at least $100 billion more on maintenance, repair and reconstruction over the next decade.

Federal spending on such side projects has increased 38% since 2008, while highway spending is flat. Here’s what the politicians won’t say: Simply using the taxes that are supposed to pay for highways to, well, pay for highways makes the HTF 98% solvent for the next decade, no tax increase necessary.