7:00am | Following a first term that witnessed major environmental successes and a growing recovery in cargo traffic, Port of Long Beach Harbor Commissioner Nick Sramek has been re-elected by his fellow board members to a second one-year term as president of the commission.
  
Sramek, a lifetime resident of Long Beach’s Westside, was originally appointed to a six-year term on the Harbor Commission by Mayor Bob Foster in 2007.
  
The five-member Harbor Commission sets policy for the port, which with the neighboring Port of Los Angeles comprises the busiest container port complex in the Western Hemisphere. Port commissioners, who can serve up to two six-year terms, are nominated by the mayor and confirmed by the City Council.
  
A long-time community activist focusing on issues impacting Long Beach’s Westside, Sramek served on the City of Long Beach Planning Commission for seven years prior to his Harbor Commission appointment.
  
He is former president of the West Long Beach Neighborhood Association, founder of the West Long Beach Business Association and serves on the board of the Westside Neighborhood Clinic, a provider of free and low-cost medical care.
  
Sramek also has served as a member of the Long Beach Police Chief’s advisory group on Neighborhood Watch, as an executive board member of the Honorary Police Officers Association of Long Beach and as a trustee for the Long Beach Police Officers Widows and Orphans Memorial Trust Fund.
  
In his professional life, Sramek is a senior project leader in system engineering for The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, where he has worked for 25 years, primarily on military satellite systems. He is a senior member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, where he chairs the Computer Systems Technical Committee and is also a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

Focus as Commissioner
During his past year as president of the Harbor Commission, Sramek has led the board in adopting major environmental, business and administrative policy programs that have tried to balance the port’s declared stewardship of the local environment while retaining and attracting additional business to the port.
  
He described his method of leadership shortly after being appointed to the port board in 2007.
  
“My engineering background says I want to learn, take in data and really inform myself before I come to any conclusions,” Sramek told the Long Beach Press-Telegram. “From there, I vote on what my heart and instinct tell me.”

Environmental Issues
Even before taking the reigns as commission president for the first time last year, Sramek was a key voice in one of the port’s major environmental programs–the Clean Truck Program.
  
The program, implemented in October 2008, was originally developed in conjunction with the Port of Los Angeles in 2006 and 2007 to reduce diesel emission from ports-servicing trucks. However, after Los Angeles port official became adamant on including social engineering aspects in the plan, such as mandating that all truck drivers servicing the ports be employees and give up their independent owner-operator status (one enjoyed by more than 80-percent of the ports-servicing drivers), the Long Beach port board parted ways with their Los Angeles counterparts in early 2008.
  
Sramek, along with then-board president James Hankla and commissioner Dr. Mike Walter, were very vocal in moving forward with the clean air components of the truck plan and not getting bogged down in the labor and political issues advocated by Los Angeles.
  
“We need to focus on clean air,” said Sramek during the truck program deliberations in July 2008. “We can not let ourselves get sidetracked from that goal for any reason.”
  
Sramek added that he was “disappointed” in some of the groups, like the Port of Los Angeles, that he felt were losing focus on the main goal of the truck plan.
  
“They have taken their eye off of the ball and are trying to make this program about more than clean air,” said Sramek.

Success of Truck Program
A little over 12 months later, on the one-year anniversary marking the start of the truck program, now-commission president Sramek was able to make a statement that port officials could little have anticipated when first proposing the idea of a truck program in 2006 and 2007.
  
“Little more than a year ago, the ports looked like a graveyard where old dirty trucks came to die,” said Sramek in late August 2009.
  
“By January 1, [2010,] the program will have achieved nearly an 80-percent reduction in trucking air pollution — two years ahead of schedule.”
  
A little over a month later, the board under Sramek’s leadership further distanced themselves from their Los Angeles port counterparts by approving a settlement with the American Trucking Associations that removed the City and Port of Long Beach from an ATA federal lawsuit filed in late 2008 over certain portions of the two ports’ truck plans. Under the negotiated agreement, the Long Beach port agreed to drop minor components of their truck plan in exchange for the ATA sign-off on a modified version of the truck plan. The agreement, according to port officials, allowed Long Beach to continue moving forward with the environmental goals of the program while still providing the port with the ability to oversee, manage and monitor the truck program and its participants. Los Angeles continues to fight the ATA in court–to the tune of millions of dollars in legal fees.

Water Quality Plan
In addition to environmental efforts like the the truck program, Sramek was also at the helm of the commission in August 2009 when it adopted a major recommittment to water quality in the harbor.
  
The Water Resources Action Plan, adopted jointly by the Long Beach and Los Angeles port boards, is designed to identify and target the remaining sources of water and sediment pollution in San Pedro Bay, for example zeroing in on litter, legacy sediment contamination, loose materials and other potential contaminants in the harbor area.
  
Even before the adoption of the port’s omnibus Green Port Policy in 2005 and its predecessor the Healthy Harbor Initiative in 2003, the Port of Long Beach had instituted numerous award-winning and highly effective programs that had reversed decades of neglect by previous port administrations regarding water quality in the harbor.
  
Sramek said upon adoption of the Water Resources Action Plan that, “The [San Pedro] Bay that the two ports share is an important environmental resource. And to protect that resource, we need to take a coordinated approach, just as we do with air quality.”

Community Issues
Under Sramek’s first term as president, the Long Beach port board has also approved several key community outreach efforts.
  
In October 2009, Sramek presided over the approval of scheduling one of the board’s weekly board meetings in the evening, thus providing greater access to the public. In the past these three-times-a-month meetings were always held in the afternoon, with the last week of each month being dark.
  
“Although our 1 p.m. meetings are webcast live and archived on our website, we hope that holding the meeting at 5 p.m. will encourage residents and industry professionals to attend in person,” said Sramek at the time.
  
In December 2009, the port board under Sramek’s lead also approved $1.3 million in port funds for the first phase of the Colorado Lagoon Restoration Project.
  
Earlier this year, the Sramek-led commission also voted to launch a $5 million grant program to address community health impacts from port-related air and noise pollution. The first round of grants will be aimed at schools and related sites, such as day-care centers.
  
“While we continue to work very hard to address port-related air pollution at the various sources, these grants give us additional ways to minimize the overall environmental impact of goods movement on the community,” said Sramek. “These grants are designed to help those in our community who are the most vulnerable to the health risks from pollution.”

Business Focus
Sramek’s first term as president of the commission has also been marked by an increased focus by the port commission on retaining and attracting customers.
  
In September 2009, he led the commission in removing certain administrative hurdles placed on importers and exporters under the original version of the Clean Trucks Program.
  
“This action by the [board] underscores the port’s responsiveness to industry concerns,” said Sramek at the time.
  
“The Clean Trucks Program is on track to realize its environmental goal and today we also made it easier for importers and exporters to move cargo through Long Beach.”
  
A month later, in response to growing economic turmoil in the shipping industry resulting from the global economic meltdown, he led the board in approving changes to port incentives aimed at attracting more ship-to-rail intermodal cargo through the port.
  
The same month, Sramek also led the board in approving a major $40 million Army Corps of Engineers dredging project that will finally see the Pier T turning basin dredged to the same depth as the port’s main channel–a move that will ultimately lead to the largest of oil tankers being able to directly enter and berth at the port’s BP Terminal. The roughly two-year project, which began work last month, will also clear sediments from the Catalina Ferry Basin providing better safety for ferry’s providing commuter service to the island.
  
Bolstered by the apparent success of the truck program to cut pollution well ahead of schedule, the board under Sramek’s leadership also approved modifications in December 2009 to the truck program deadlines, providing impacted drivers with additional time to meet the program requirements.
  
The Sramek-led board also released the draft environmental impact report on the project to replace the Gerlad Desmond Bridge. The estimated $1.1 billion project has been on the port’s wish list of construction projects for more than a decade.

Cargo Recovery
Sramek’s tenure as president of the commission has also coincided with an apparent ongoing recovery in the shipping industry from the dark days of 2008 and 2009.
  
Cargo traffic at the port has steadily increased for the past six months, with several months showing significant double-digit increases in traffic compared to the year-ago monthly periods.
  
The Port of Long Beach, in December 2009, was the first West Coast port to begin registering a reversal in the downward trend in cargo volumes that began back in 2008–a trend that saw cargo volumes drop back to levels not seen since 2003 and 2004. Since December 2009, most of the major West Coast ports have seen monthly cargo traffic volumes steadily increase and industry analysts appear confident that a general recovery in the shipping industry is under way–albeit slowly.  
  
In addition to Sramek’s re-appointment as commission president, Commissioner Susan Anderson Wise, who joined the board in 2008, was selected as Vice President. Dr. Mike Walter, who has served on the commission since 2005, was named Secretary; while Mario Cordero, appointed to the commission in 2003 and re-appointed in 2009, was named Vice Secretary.
  
All new commission terms officially start July 1.