Port of Stockton Settles With Environmentalists Over Expansion

STOCKTON, California, September 4, 2007 (ENS) - Stockton residents, environmentalists and Port of Stockton officials have settled three years of legal battles over new commercial shipping and hundreds of acres of industrial development at the former naval base of Rough and Ready Island.

Under the settlement announced Wednesday, the plaintiffs dismissed the last of their lawsuits and the port will pay the plaintiffs more than $1.65 million in legal and environmental monitoring fees.

The port agreed to establish a $5 million air quality mitigation fund, an amount that will be reduced if the port requires its tenants to utilize clean trucks in their operations. The port also will provide reduced dockage fees to ship operators that use cleaner fuels, impose mandatory idling restrictions on tugboats and trucks, and require use of electrical hook-ups for tugs, among other initiatives.

These measures are expected to reduce diesel emissions from port operations, which have been associated with increased cancer risk, premature death, and asthma.

The Port of Stockton is a deep water port located 75 nautical miles due east of San Francisco Bay at the confluence of the San Joaquin River and the Stockton Ship Channel.

Baykeeper, the Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC, and the Friends of Riviera Cliffs, a local group of homeowners in the Riviera Cliffs neighborhood, sued the port in July 2004 after it approved the West Complex expansion on Rough and Ready Island.

The plaintiffs objected to the port's plans to develop 1,400 acres of land and use seven inactive berths to increase port calls from 20 to 150 large commercial ships at the facility. They fear air pollution from the ships' diesel exhaust.

They complained that in a fragile, impaired area of the the port increased industrial shipping activities on the island without completing the Environmental Impact Report as required by California State law.

"This agreement shows that the port can serve the economic interests of Northern California while mitigating its public health and environmental impacts to our air and water," said David Pettit, director of NRDC's California Air Program. "It also establishes a model that could be followed by other ports around the country."

"We are very pleased that all parties were able to reach mutual consensus regarding this matter," said Port Director Richard Aschieris. "Not only will we be contributing benefit to the local environment that in many areas exceeds current regulatory standards, we will now be able to move forward with business developments that will ultimately provide family-wage jobs for the residents of Stockton and greater San Joaquin Valley."

"With this agreement, we've been able to provide additional environmental protection for the already critically impaired Delta," said Robert "Perl" Perlmutter, a partner with the San Francisco law firm of Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger and lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the case. "The port will now be held responsible for protecting and improving the quality of local degraded waters in the San Joaquin River."

To reduce water quality impacts, the port will provide additional oxygen critical to survival of endangered and threatened species, and will take steps to ensure that sediments removed through the dredging process will be safely reused or stored.

The port and Baykeeper will monitor dredge material placement sites for adverse environmental effects.

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