newsworthy
Lytle leaves Long Beach for larger pastures at Oakland
In the end, the allure of running the whole shooting match
at the Port of Oakland was strong enough to persuade J.
Christopher Lytle, the executive director of the Port of Long
Beach, to jump ship.
Lytle, 67, surprised virtually everyone when he announced
in May he would leave the nation’s second busiest port in
late July to run the Port of Oakland,
Oakland International Airport, and
the facility’s real estate operations.
For Lytle, a maritime veteran, this
represents his first crack at running
an airport. The added responsibility was a key factor in taking the
Oakland post, he said. Lytle said he
was approached about the position
and wasn’t seeking other employment. “I wasn’t out there looking for a job,” he said.
Lytle’s last day at Long Beach is July 19, and he expects to
be running Oakland on July 22. In mid-June, Al Moro, chief
harbor engineer and assistant managing director of engineering, was named acting executive director. The port is
searching for a permanent successor to Lytle.
Lytle worked in Oakland from 1992 to 1995 when he ran
then Sea-Land Service Inc.’s West Coast operations. When
Lytle leaves Long Beach, he will have been there nearly seven
years. He was named executive director in November 2011.
In an interview, Lytle said he would work to convince
businesses that Oakland should be the first West Coast port
of call for import traffic. To do that, he will push for
improvements to on-dock rail service, he said.
Lytle said one of his priorities will be to lessen the port’s
near total-reliance on containerized traffic by diversifying
into areas like break bulk and even dry bulk. Oakland is one
of the few U.S. ports that processes more exports than
imports, a trend Lytle wants to promote. Oakland benefits
from its proximity to California’s verdant Central Valley, a
mecca for foodstuffs that are in increasing demand overseas.
Lytle will move from a port that handles slightly more
than 6 million 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) a year to a
port that handles about 2. 4 million TEUs annually. At the
same time, Oakland’s smaller size means its terminals are
less congested than Long Beach’s, giving Lytle and his team
more room to be agile, he said.
Lytle said he has no plans to turn Oakland into the Long
Beach of the north. Instead, he will, among other things,
promote Oakland’s capabilities to customers whose cargo
requires specialized handling.
Lytle said he is looking at converting a nearby army base
into a distribution center to encourage the practice of
transloading that has gained popularity down the coast. At
the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation’s
busiest complex, fewer containers are being loaded on
intermodal trains for direct transit inland. Instead, they are
trucked to a distribution center in the nearby Inland
Empire to the east, where they are transferred to 53-foot
domestic boxes for delivery to a local DC and then onward
distribution to the customer.
On the labor side, Lytle, like other West Coast port managers, faces the specter of contract
talks next year with the
International Longshore and
Warehouse Union (ILWU), a
59,000-member union that represents virtually all of West Coast
waterfront labor. The contract
with West Coast ports expires June
30, 2014, but talks are expected to
begin in early spring.
Lytle got a taste of the ILWU’s influence late last year
when a skilled clerical unit of the union struck at the Los
Angeles/Long Beach port complex for eight days. The picket lines were honored by ILWU dockworkers, paralyzing
operations at the Port of Los Angeles and dramatically curtailing business at adjacent Long Beach.
LONG BEACH AT CROSSROADS
Lytle’s departure comes at a critical time for Long Beach. The
port faces increased competition for Asian imports from
Vancouver, British Columbia’s Port of Prince Rupert, and
Mexico’s Port of Lázaro Cárdenas on the country’s Pacific
Coast. Prince Rupert touts itself as the fastest way to deliver
goods from Asian producing markets to U.S. consuming
points in the Midwest and mid-South. Lázaro Cárdenas is
promoting itself as a better alternative to Long Beach for getting Asian goods into the vast Texas market. This is especially true after Kansas City Southern, the exclusive rail provider
between Lázaro Cárdenas and the United States, made track
improvements that promise shippers and beneficial cargo
owners (BCOs) equivalent reliability at lower costs.
Long Beach also faces lingering concerns that the opening
of the expanded Panama Canal in 2015 will divert Asian
import traffic from West Coast ports—where goods are
railed or trucked inland—to the canal as part of an all-water route to Eastern ports. Lytle believes that most of the
diversion from West to East has already occurred and any
further shift will be incremental, if it happens at all.
Long Beach is in the second year of a multibillion-dollar
program to upgrade its facilities. It is spending $1 billion to
expand and improve its on-dock rail capabilities. It is nearly two years into a nine-year, $1.2 billion project known as
the “Middle Harbor” container terminal, designed to renovate and combine two aging container terminals into one
modern facility. ;
—M.S.
