Circuses, We Must Have Our Circuses

By Jock O’Connell

At a time when the indispensable role the nation’s seaports play in supplying the needs of American industry and consumers has probably never been more manifest to the general public, public officials in two of California’s port cities are stumbling toward decisions that could impose crippling burdens on two of the state’s most economically vital transportation assets.

Such is the allure of circuses and carnival barkers. Never mind that our ports are struggling to handle unprecedented volumes of containerized cargo, while simultaneously complying with ever more strict (and costly) environmental regulations. We must have our diversions, especially diversions that are seen to flatter municipal pride.

Who will rid us of this queen?

In Southern California, the Port of Long Beach, North America’s second busiest container port, is in danger of being saddled with the responsibility for maintaining a rusting relic of a bygone age.

In a blog posted earlier this month, longtime California political affairs columnist Dan Walters cited former Long Beach mayor Ernie Kell’s line about the Queen Mary, the famed cruise ship the city acquired in 1967, as “a tombstone in a cemetery no one wants to visit.”

Unfortunately, city leaders in Long Beach continue to whistle past that same graveyard.

Linking the fabled and then still seaworthy ocean liner to the city’s identity must have seemed like a great idea at the time. Postcards displaying the city’s numerus oil wells were not likely to induce either tourism or business investment as much as an object of nostalgia for a time and place that could not have had less to do with the reality of a fast-growing port city at the end of the 710 freeway. It was if Lake Havasu over in Arizona foolishly imagined around the same time that acquiring a crumbling bridge over the River Thames would bring a bit of London’s panache to the desert.

Fast forward through decades in which the Queen Mary project was serially mismanaged and in which maintenance was endlessly deferred. Now the city is eager to divest itself of the dilapidated amusement by foisting it off on the Port of Long Beach before it (the ship) goes hull up, the logic apparently being that the Queen Mary is a ship and that ports should know something about ships. Whether the Port of Long Beach has either the personnel or the depth of financial resources to manage what would likely be a half billion-dollar restoration project with no precedent for profit is much less apparent.

The move is drawing sharp opposition from the shipping lines that use the port, fearing, with ample reason, that funds needed to keep the port competitive will instead be siphoned off to keep the Queen Mary afloat.

The latest assessment of the Queen Mary’s condition is that it may well founder before anyone has a chance to end its long embarrassing sojourn among the Southern Californians. Stephen Payne, who designed the Queen Mary 2, Cunard’s current flagship, has reportedly warned that the liner could sink if attempts were made to tow her to a dry dock.

That evidently has not deterred Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia from his desire to keep the ship in town. As he insisted to a reporter for the Long Beach Post last week: “The Queen Mary is bringing people from across the world to Long Beach…we must preserve it, honor it, and live up to the promise that we made 50 years ago.”

However, he also conceded the city was sailing into a very stiff wind. “The city has been trying to get the Queen Mary right for 40-plus years, certainly since it’s been from one leaseholder to the next, and for all of us that want that preservation to happen, it’s hard to see,” he told the Post’s Kelly Puente. “There’s been attempt, after attempt, after attempt, including currently, and it has not succeeded to the point where there has been the right partner and the right preservation plan in place.”

Whether post-pandemic tourists from around the world or even from Pacoima are driven to visit Long Beach to view an artifact of an era in which dinner attire involved ensembles more elegant than ripped jeans and ballcaps perched askew is a question the mayor might usefully ponder.

In a development reminiscent of a Marx Brothers comedy, the city’s cavalier treatment of the Queen Mary also seems to have kicked off a diplomatic ruckus with Scotland, where the vessel was built in 1934. It seems the notoriously tetchy Scots have taken umbrage at the dishonor being accorded to what they regard as a prime example of Scotland’s past accomplishments as a shipbuilding powerhouse.

The emerging consensus of nearly everyone who has studied the ship’s condition is that decades of mismanagement and deferred maintenance have left the Queen Mary without an economically or structurally viable future. As a profitable investment opportunity, there is no there there.

Baseball at the Scrap Yard

Which brings us to Oakland, where Major League Baseball has lately adopted a variation on the gimmick rule of putting a runner on second base to start extra innings, the ostensible objective of which is to hasten the game’s conclusion. What MLB has done – in hopes of stampeding local leaders into approving the Oakland A’s bid to build a new waterfront stadium – is to direct its East Bay franchise to explore other municipalities to which the team may move if the locals aren’t forthcoming. The list of alternate sites would presumably be comprised of cities not yet fleeced by the billionaires who control Major League Baseball.

One obvious problem is that each time the team’s designated huckster (DH) has a public statement to make, the share of the ballpark’s cost to be borne by the taxpaying public goes up. Those keeping score at home will recall that the A’s DH began his pitch some years back with a solemn cross-my-heart promise that any new ballpark would be built entirely with private financing. We’ll do it the way the Giants did across the Bay, he said back then. Yup. Just like Oakland is indistinguishable from San Francisco.

Anyone needing a reminder of how poorly a public stake in a sports palace can turn out does not have to look very far. Desperate to retain the National Basketball Association franchise it had pilfered from Kansas City back in the 1980s, the City of Sacramento committed its taxpayers to a $273 million investment in the construction of the fancy-schmancy Golden 1 Center, the high-tech home of the Sacramento Kings. That $272 million, according to a report in the May 19 Sacramento Bee, represented about half the costs of the $558 million arena. The city borrowed the money in 2015 against future city parking revenues, which not surprisingly tumbled during the pandemic and which may never return to pre-pandemic levels. As the Sacramento Bee has previously reported, the city owes $18.4 million annually on the arena. With the take from city-owned garages and parking meters down sharply, there are genuine fears the city will have to dip into the general fund to cover its obligations to bond holders. And that means less money available for basic city services to its residents, who have meanwhile been souring on a franchise that has failed to make the play-offs the past fifteen seasons. (For non-fans, making the NBA postseason playoffs is only slightly more exclusive than the participation trophies handed out to Little Leaguers.)

Other critics have addressed the Oakland ballpark financing scheme in great detail, while they and others have been highly dubious about the problem of safely getting fans to the stadium. Unlike the A’s current homefield, the waterfront venue is not well served by public transport or even parking lots. Much of the discussion, though, involves the question of whether the A’s proposal is compatible with maritime operations at the Port of Oakland. That issue can be viewed narrowly or broadly. A 2019 report commissioned by the A’s and conducted by Mercator International found that the port’s container handling activities could continue to grow despite the presence of the proposed new neighbor. In effect, the argument was that future TEU volumes could be met at new and existing terminals without the use of Howard Terminal. That report, of course, was prepared prior to the pandemic and therefore before surging imports engulfed ports up and down the West Coast.

But the real issue is decidedly not whether Howard Terminal is an expendable port asset. Nor is it really whether the Port of Oakland can accommodate itself to the ballpark per se. The key issue instead is whether those presumably well-heeled and probably well-connected folks who will move into the thousands of luxury condos the A’s are planning to build next to the stadium could ever accommodate themselves to the presence of a major working port. How much homeowner litigation does it take to hamstring a port? That question, rather than whether there will be enough acreage available to grow the port’s container business, constitutes the most direct threat to the port’s viability.

But perhaps a compromise benefiting both Long Beach and Oakland can be found. Maybe, with regular subsidies from the City of Long Beach and the Government of Scotland, the A’s can be persuaded to moor a refurbished Queen Mary at their Howard Terminal colosseum.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in Jock’s commentaries are his own and may not reflect the positions of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association.