Marine Transportation System

Posts Tagged ‘airports’

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The Late Senator Frank Lautenberg

In Congress, Environment, Federal Government, Leadership, MTS Policy, New York Harbor, Politics, Ports, Security, Surface Transportation Policy, Water Resources on June 9, 2013 at 11:53 pm
Frank_Lautenberg,_official_portrait

Senator Frank Lautenberg
1924 – 2013

Last Friday was a somber day of steady rain as New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. News reports this past week cited how his passing was notable because he was the last sitting senator of the “greatest generation,” that chamber’s last veteran of World War II. His death came just months after Hawaii’s Senator Daniel Inouye, a wounded veteran of that war, took his resting place among the nation’s noted military and civilian leaders at Arlington.

(They also had a common  interest in the MTS—the marine transportation system. Inouye was a reliable and principal advocate for American shipping; Lautenberg for the landside elements—the ports and intermodal connections. Both were friends of labor.)

It need be said that Senator Lautenberg’s death on June 3, also is notable because it marked the passing of a champion of Federal policy to making communities healthier, the environment cleaner, and industry and travel safer and better. It was a personal agenda well suited to his home State of New Jersey but carried out with no less than the nation in mind.

In his 28 years as a senator he served on virtually every committee and subcommittee that touched on authorizing and funding transportation, civil works and environmental policy. For a period he chaired the Transportation Subcommittee on Appropriations while as a senior member of the Environment & Public Works Committee (EPW).  For a few years after the attack of September 2001 he also was on the Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee. In recent years he chaired the Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine, Infrastructure, Safety and Security Subcommittee of the Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee (CST). In recent years he served on EPW, CST and Appropriations, including the Corps funding subcommittee, concurrently.

As was evident in his committee work his approach to legislating was to cover all the bases, or at least as many as he could. He championed improving airports and the aviation system, expanding the use of transit and passenger rail, modernizing freight transportation, bringing American port infrastructure to world standards, and securing them all from the those who would do us harm.

He was appointed to the President’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism after the tragic downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and returned to the Senate, after a two-year hiatus, to help write and oversee anti-terrorism law after the downing of the World Trade Center towers. In those towers he had served on the Board of Commissioners of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey before being elected senator in 1982. His time with the Port Authority–and his building the Automatic Data Processing Corporation (ADP) from scratch–were credits on his resume in which he took great pride and enjoyed telling people about if the occasion would allow.

Frank Lautenberg put much effort into environmental issues. He gave his attention to the recovery of old industrial wastelands through brownfields initiatives and Superfund legislation and to making the Toxic Substances Control Act more effective. He was protecting the coastline whether the recreation beaches or the nurturing marshlands. In his last year he walked the Jersey Shore in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, secured bi-partisan support for his toxic substances legislation and, from his wheel chair, cast his final vote in support of tighter gun legislation.

He was a tough fellow and could be an relentless advocate.  Just ask the trucking industry that couldn’t budge him from the centerline where he stood in the way of increasing truck size and weight limits year after year after year. Ask the FAA whose employees’ merit increases were at risk while their work was incomplete on the redesign of East Coast airspace in the Newark/LaGuardia/JFK market. Ask Norfolk Southern and CSX who found the Senator immovable on key issues pertaining to assuring competitive rail service for his home port when Conrail’s assets were on the block. Was he always the advocate that some of us wanted him to be? No, but then you rarely find a senator who is that agreeable.

From start-to-finish Senator Frank Lautenberg was an advocate for his New Jersey and his United States, which he strove to make  better by improving the quality of people’s lives and the means of commerce.    Pbea

(A version of this ran on The Ferguson Group blog.)

 
 
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Is Security Going Overboard?

In Federal Government, Security on November 15, 2010 at 10:01 am

With this piece on transportation security we introduce Richard Biter, a new addition to our contributors.  Rich’s many years at the U.S. Department of Transportation gave him a ring-side seat to, among other things, the rise and demise of the Office of Intermodalism and the creation of the Transportation Security Administration…before the Department of Homeland Security was hatched.  Like most of us who shuffle through Federal airport security, Rich has some thoughts to share.


I’ve been reading with alarming interest how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and it’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have been instituting new airport security measures which include “naked” body scanners (approximately 350 are in place now with an estimated 1,000 by the end of 2011) combined with aggressive and personally intrusive “pat-downs” for those that opt out of being scanned or otherwise chosen at random.  These new procedures are inciting major a backlash from the both the traveling masses and the rare coalition of air travel related organizations that represent travelers, unions and business.

While I could get into a whole litany of issues I have with DHS/TSA airline/airport security, here’s just one example of where the kids have taken over school: A pilot for ExpressJet Airlines, recently refused to undergo a full-body scan at Memphis International Airport in Memphis, TN.  The pilot later stated “I was trying to avoid this assault on my person, and I’m not willing to have images of my nude body produced for some stranger in another room to look at either.”  TSA’s response was that “security is not optional” and any person who refuses security screening is not allowed to fly.

Now let’s think about that for a second…here we subject pilots to rigorous, indeed onerous, security checks to prevent them from bringing any weapons onto an aircraft, only to allow those very same pilots to climb into a locked and secured cockpit. From there they can fly their passenger laden planes most anywhere  a tank of fuel can take them.  Frankly, if a pilot wants to fly into a building or the ground there is no way to stop him/her.  Yeah, yeah, yeah…there’s the argument that a pilot could sneak a gun in and give it to someone else on another flight.  And the gun-toting security guys/gals already behind the security barriers can’t do the same thing?  Where’s the adult-in-charge that can bring some commonsense reasoning into this process who can say “Wait a minute people…at some point we have to establish a level of trust into the system and we should start with the flight crew.”

Now here’s another point to ponder.  We all saw and heard about the plight of the people on the Carnival cruise ship Splendor which was crippled for three days at sea after an engine fire.  But did you know that even though it never docked at a foreign port, DHS’s Custom and Border Protection still ran a check of the passenger manifest before it was towed back to San Diego, CA?  Under what authority allows them to do that?  Followed to its logical extension, will marine highway operators and recreational boaters, e.g. deep-sea fishing, at some point be required to submit to inspection or file a passenger manifest with DHS even though they never dock at a foreign port?  Hmmmm.

Richard Biter

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A Decent Man and Industry Leader

In Leadership on September 14, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Bill DeCota (source: www.bigapplegreeter.org)

Bill DeCota (source: http://www.bigapplegreeter.org)

Bill DeCota was not someone you would have met in the MTS world.  He didn’t know ships, but he appreciated that there could be a role for marine transportation at his facilities.  He didn’t know freight rail, but he knew that rail is an essential component in intermodal transportation.  He may have never set foot on a container terminal, but he understood the importance of efficient goods movement.

Bill DeCota knew airports and aviation.

On September 11th, as his colleagues at the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey were re-living the tragedy of eight years before, Bill passed away at age 51.

For nearly ten years Bill DeCota headed the agency’s Aviation Department.  LaGuardia, Newark, Kennedy, Teterboro, and now Stewart.  He joined the Port Authority in 1982 as a financial analyst and well before his untimely death he had earned the respect of his staff and industry leaders.

Like other highly competent persons Bill could have left public service for greater financial reward in the private sector.  Instead he close to work to improve the country’s busiest and highly complex passenger and freight airport system in the high-pressure, floodlit New York metro region.  The region and his employer were prime beneficiaries of his talent.  Anyone who didn’t fully appreciate that fact when he was alive surely will come understand it in his absence.

He had impressive intellectual capacity, lived his work 24/7, had great integrity, demanded no less of himself as he did  of his staff.  He was a national leader  in the industry.  He probably was without peer in his command of the  statistical and financial minutiae.  He was a man of good humor and enjoyed his own, frequent quips.  And as an added gift Bill was a genuinely good guy.  He was friend and colleague to people, myself included, regardless of rank.  Patty Clark of his staff said of Bill: “He had as much concern for the busboy at his dinner, as he did for his long term friends.  The caring and concern which were the hallmark of his life, he eschewed when directed at himself.”

It is the transportation world’s loss that he is gone.   Pbea