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Clinton Quarterbacks for Port

Ever since President Clinton emerged as the quarterback in the huddle over how to get the Port of Oakland's 42-foot deepening project out of the muddy midfield and down to the end zone, everyone's been riveted on the ensuing play. "The President said accelerate, and we're trying to accelerate, but we've yet to reach agreement with the port on how much we can accelerate," says Arijs Rakstins of the Army Corps - one of multiple agencies now scrambling to catch the President's passes.

As a result, the Corps is now negotiating hard with Oakland to try and trim some time from a project review and environmental impact documentation process currently slated to take 19 months. The port thinks August 1995 is just too long to wait to start dredging.

A second result may have been the Corps' and EPA's quick turnaround last month of a preliminary data review on the quality of sediments to be dredged. What would normally take a month took a matter of days, and the news was good for the port. EPA now estimates that the total amount of dredged material too contaminated for disposal at a soon-to-be designated ocean site is less than everyone thought: down from 2.2 to 1.6 million cubic yards (mcy).

The data, based on recent acoustic probing, gave "a definitive three-dimensional picture of where the soft holes are," says the port's Jim McGrath. Soft spots - where muds from old shipbuilding areas may have accumulated in channels dredged long ago - are more likely to be contaminated than hard spots. McGrath says their new data show more hard spots than he anticipated, which may reduce the disposal need even further.

Where to dispose of both the clean and the contaminated dredged sediments is still a ball very much up in the air, and so is whether and how the Administration may intercept. In the meantime, the President's new California task force - launched in part to take the sting out of Oakland base closures by supporting economic growth in areas like the port - is now in the midst of high level discussions "to find ways to both solve near-term problems and to reinforce LTMS," according to local rep Melinda Yee. (LTMS is an existing regional effort to develop a Long Term Management Strategy on dredging.) Yee says the Bay Area team will be getting an earful on their quarterback's next play around December 1.

Contact: Arijs Rakstins, Corps (415)744-3258; Brian Ross, EPA (415)744-1979; or Melinda Yee (415)705-1298

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