“The negotiations for this contract were some of the longest and most difficult in our recent history,” said ILWU International President Robert McEllrath. “Membership unity and hard work by the Negotiating Committee made this fair outcome possible.”

The release continued:

The new agreement provides approximately 20,000 good-paying jobs in 29 West Coast port communities. The contract will maintain excellent health benefits, improve wages, pensions and job safety protections; limit outsourcing of jobs and provide an improved system for resolving job disputes.

Jonathan Gold, vice president for supply chain and customs policy of the National Retail Association, issued a statement saying shippers and retailers can now “rest a bit easier” with improved stability in West Coast ports over the next few years. However, he also noted that it will not be “long before we go through this process all over again.”

“The past year was fraught with disruptions, slowdowns and partial shutdowns. This is something we will no longer tolerate. The world is changing, and our ports must adapt to ensure they provide shippers with the predictability and stability they need. We can no longer accept last-minute negotiations and months and months of talks while slowdowns and stoppages disrupt the global supply chain and international trade.

 

“Negotiators need to begin their talks early enough to have an agreement in place well before another contract expires without active or passive threats to the economy and the millions of jobs dependent on our nation’s ports and supply chain. The current process is impractical and unsustainable and fails to meet even the most basic requirements of a modern, global supply chain.

 

“A new process is needed for labor and management on both coasts. Stakeholders cannot afford to go through this process every couple of years. We need a new system in place that benefits all parties and provides for the efficient transportation of the nation’s cargo and commerce.”

The agreement comes on the heels of a longtime dispute that caused severe congestion for several months in the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland and other major gateways.

Part of it may be these agencies don’t get the same scrutiny as City Councils and county Boards of Supervisors. But a lot of it is also a sense of insulation from consequences. The larger, more important special districts are run by political appointees from member city governments who face heavy groupthink pressure to conform and not make waves.

In San Diego County, this mindset is evident in two of the pettiest, low-rent scandals you’ll ever see. The CEOs of both the Port of San Diego and the San Diego Convention Center engaged in blatant nepotism.

Really? In 2014?

Really.

In the first case …

Port of San Diego CEO Wayne Darbeau is already under a lengthy personnel review for obtaining his son a summer job with Pasha Automotive, a major port tenant with whom the port was negotiating significant business deals.

Now, it turns out, Darbeau’s son’s best friend got a job there, too.

 In the second case ….

The son of the San Diego Convention Center’s president and chief executive was hired — and promoted — by the organization even though his primary work experience was in dance.

CEO Carol Wallace’s daughter-in-law also is employed by the convention center.

Wallace declined to be interviewed about the employment status of her son, event coordinator Earnest Wallace, or her daughter-in-law, convention services manager Gerrica Gray-Johnson.

Both stories are from the U-T San Diego.

But when it comes to obliviousness/indifference to opinion, nothing will ever top the actions of the biggest special district of them all: the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which supplies water to 19 million customers of special agencies from Santa Barbara to Riverside to the Mexican border.

The MWD not only attempted to spike the pension formula for all its nearly 2,000 employees in 2009 — long after concerns about pension sustainability had emerged. It also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for a PR campaign to try to grease the path to approval of its insane proposal. It did so at a time it was imposing massive rate hikes on its clients.

But the Los Angeles Times didn’t think it was news.

Special districts deserve at least as much media scrutiny as City Councils and county supervisors. Those government bodies are actively watched by community activists, at least for the most part. But the folks providing water, sewage service, vector control, etc., often operate in the dark — which they like.

This isn’t just the media’s fault. The government agencies that appoint officials to these districts’ boards are often indifferent to their behavior.

The agency — which has 500-plus employees and a $97 million annual budget to oversee maritime cargo and cruise ship facilities in a coastal area covering San Diego and four smaller cities — has turned the permitting process into a way to pad its coffers and ease its financial woes. The U-T San Diego Watchdog team had the rationale and the amazing details:

Amid budget problems last June, the port decided to impose fees to cover staff time spent processing paperwork and issuing approvals for new developments, improvement projects and lease negotiations.

The agency is charging up to $300 an hour or more for some staffers’ time, including salary, benefits and an apportionment of port overhead costs.

This adds up quickly. It’s like lawyers scavenging for billable hours:

Navy ship repairer BAE Systems was told it would cost $30,000 in port approval fees for a project that was only going to cost $50,000.

BAE wanted to replace two underground diesel storage tanks with one that was smaller and less environmentally above ground on its leased port property. After removing the older tanks, BAE decided not to put the new tank on port land after getting the bill in September. …

Mitsubishi Cement Corporation received a $586,385 bill on July 8 for its project to convert an old transit shed at the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal into a cement import facility.

The overall estimate was later reduced to $446,000 to correct an error, port officials said.

San Diego port collects 15 times as much as Oakland port

The “cost recovery” program has no parallel at other California ports, the U-T noted.

The fees are more far-reaching than those at other ports in the state, according to an agency consultant. San Diego budgeted $1.5 million of revenue per year from such fees, compared to $100,000 typically collected for similar services at the Oakland port.

And the results are predictable.

GB Capital refused to pay at least $303,000 in port “cost recovery” fees and backed away from its plans to build shops, restaurants, a luxury RV resort and eventually a hotel at the National City marina.

“Cost recovery did influence our decision to back away from the project,” said Greg Boeh, general manager of GB Capital. “We believe in the project that we proposed and certainly would be willing to move forward if we could resolve the entitlement concerns.”

National City is a struggling blue-collar town with sky-high unemployment and a dearth of economic prospects. It could have used the GB Capital project.

But the port is sticking with the story that what it’s doing is reasonable.

Feel free to snicker. At least after you feel sorry for the businesses in the San Diego area that have to put up with this lunacy.