The Brief

As diesel trucks idle in line at a Port of Long Beach terminal, a big-rig electric truck pulls into a lot beneath one of the port’s towering bridges.

The lot will be the site of one of the largest electric truck charging depots in the state, charging up to 500 trucks a day by summer. The truck belongs to Jennie Abarca, owner of King Fio Trucking, a company based in Long Beach that moves shipping containers from the ports to Southern California warehouses.

Eight of the 32 trucks in Abarca’s fleet are now fully electric.

But a pause on a major California rule to phase out diesel trucks has left her feeling “betrayed” and uncertain about what’s next for the industry.

The past inspiring the future

Abarca grew up in Whittier, where her dad was a mechanic and auto shop teacher.

“So I've been around engines and trucks and grease and oil pretty much my whole life,” Abarca said.

Jennie Abarca, owner of King Fio Trucking, based in Long Beach.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

She started in the trucking industry in her early twenties, working as a dispatcher for warehouses. Eventually, she met her husband while doing logistics for companies working the ports. A truck driver, he came from El Salvador to Southern California to build a better life.

As the saying goes, every trucking company started with one truck — about 15 years ago they bought their first and founded their own trucking business together.

“And King Fio was born,” Abarca said.

They named the company after Abarca’s grandfather, Fiorevanti Gianinno, the child of Italian immigrants, a World War II veteran and the man who moved her family from South Boston to Southern California.

“Talk about the American dream,” Abarca said.

Diesel trucks helped Abarca and her husband build their American dream, but she thinks it’s electric trucks that will sustain it long-term.

“I am very nervous about the climate, the air that we breathe, what my children are going to have to deal with,” Abarca said. “I feel it is my responsibility as a business owner, especially one who's causing the pollution, to do as much as I can.”

Political tug-of-war

Abarca dove into figuring out how to transition her fleet after the California Air Resources Board unanimously passed a diesel truck phaseout rule in 2023. Among other things, the “Advanced Clean Fleets” rule requires all big-rigs serving the ports to be electric or hydrogen-powered by 2035 — the fastest timeline for trucks under the purview of the rule.

“Throughout my career I've seen other businesses go out of business because they weren't willing to change, and I don't want that to happen,” Abarca said. “We're in the beginning of our journey.”

On some days more than 1,000 diesel trucks an hour pass along shipping routes between distribution warehouses and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

(

Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice

)

Now, the state has pulled back on that rule.

California needed a waiver from the federal government to enforce the rule, which went into effect last year, requiring all new trucks registering to work the ports to be electric or hydrogen-fueled. But a week before President Donald Trump took office, the state Air Resources Board abruptly dropped its waiver request, citing the Trump administration’s opposition to previous waivers, such as one for the state’s clean car rules.

Abarca said the surprise shift made her feel “a little bit betrayed.”

“I feel like policymakers make these policies, but I have the hard job, right? I'm the one that has to actually make it a reality,” Abarca said.

Future funding unclear

The Trump administration is also seeking to end Biden-era legislation that provides incentives to build electric and hydrogen infrastructure as well as funding to help companies transition their fleets — potentially further disrupting the trucking industry.

In Southern California, home to the two of the largest ports in the nation, there’s a long way to go. Of the more than 15,000 trucks working the ports every month, about 430 are electric or hydrogen-powered. And while there are now more charging depots along major local trucking corridors and at the ports, a lot more are needed.

 "Without shipper customer support, this [transition] is almost a non-starter. Without incentives, it is a definite non-starter,” said Matt Schrap, chief executive of the Long Beach-based Harbor Trucking Association, which represents the industry and opposes the rule as it's currently written.

He said if shippers are willing to pay more to trucking companies that invest in cleaner trucks, and financial grants and incentives remain, “then people will still look at [electric and hydrogen trucks] as a potential pathway here in the interim.”

To be clear, the effort was never just riding on federal funding. And state incentives remain, such as the greenhouse gas reduction fund, the state’s Carl Moyer program that provides grants to purchase cleaner engines and the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which will now direct more money to medium and heavy-duty trucking.

A future electric truck charging depot at the Port of Long Beach will be able to charge up to 500 heavy-duty trucks a day.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

Local incentive programs, such as a rule from the South Coast Air Quality Management District, fine diesel trucks entering warehouses and reward the use of cleaner technologies. And both the ports of L.A. and Long Beach say they are committed to a primarily electric and hydrogen future.

 "Not much changes for us,” said Gene Seroka, executive director at the Port of Los Angeles. “These are multi-decade approaches. We just gotta chart the steady course. The difference being there probably won't be as much financial support from the federal and maybe state government.”

However, none of these programs actually mandate the switch to electric or hydrogen, like the Advanced Clean Fleets rule.

A new heavy-duty truck charging depot in Lynwood has 65 chargers for up to 200 trucks that serve the ports.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

Uncertainty is bad for business

Schrap said the abandoned waiver request has led to relief for many of his members, who say the high cost of buying and running these trucks today makes the timeline unrealistic, and that infrastructure and range is not yet at the point it needs to be for the rule’s mandates to be achievable.

“I'm not going to sit here and say that the technology doesn’t work or that the technology is not evolving,” Schrap said. “It's just not evolving fast enough to keep up with the regulatory guidelines. If anything, this is a pause to go back to the drawing board.”

Trucks at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach often idle while they wait to be loaded and unloaded, adding to the pollution.

(

David McNew

/

Getty Images

)

But the unexpected shift has pulled the rug out from other companies he works with.

For example, Schrap said some shippers who agreed to pay a premium to trucking companies with electric or hydrogen trucks in order to meet their sustainability goals are now backtracking on those agreements.

“The unfortunate thing that I'm hearing now is that some of these same customers have come back and said, 'Well, we don't have to do this now, right?'" Schrap said. " They want to talk a big game about sustainability, but they don't want to pay for it. We need certainty to be able to plan our businesses. ... We're just trying to help people understand that this is a break in the action.”

Choosing the path forward

Even for trucking company owners like Abarca who actually want to invest in electric trucks, the road hasn’t been easy.

Abarca said it was tough to find a lender willing to finance her electric trucks, which cost $300,000 to half a million dollars or more — as much as three times the cost of a diesel truck. Ultimately, Abarca was able to cover the upfront costs with state grants and financing through Volvo.

Abarca said her drivers love the trucks: they run great and have almost no maintenance. But so far the change isn’t helping her bottom line.

Southern California's busy ports complex at San Pedro and Long Beach is the source of significant pollution.

(

Mario Tama

/

Getty Images

)

Some of the reasons include: The few existing charging depots are still expensive, costing the same or only a little less than diesel fuel, and the trucks take longer to charge, so she can’t run them as often as her diesel trucks. Despite local and state incentives, shippers and warehouses often don’t want to pay a higher fee to use her electric trucks, instead choosing to pass higher costs on to consumers.

“There's a disconnect between me who's doing the actual work and owns the vehicles, and then the bigger client,” Abarca said.

Jonathan Osorio Aparicio, a King Fio Trucking driver, stands in front of a new Nikola electric truck that he drives from the ports to warehouses.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

Osorio Aparicio wears the company's official sweatshirt. The company has two electric Nikolas and six electric Volvos.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

She does expect significant savings down the line, especially once she builds her own charging station at one of her truck yards in Lynwood. She expects to break ground on that project this summer.

“Then I will be able to apply for carbon credits and turn that energy, my own energy use, into actual physical dollars,” Abarca explained.

The state dropping the waiver request is likely to slow the transition for the industry as a whole, but Abarca said she’s committed to this path for her company and believes the momentum is still there.

“I feel like trucking as an entire industry is poised for an amazing technological advance, and I think this is just the first step,” Abarca said. “I  mean, at one point, we were in carriages and horses. We've graduated from that. This is just another graduation. ... It is not a political thing for me. It doesn't really matter who's president. This is where we're moving.”

It’s about the size of a park bench and made of steel and wood. The bench’s arm rests are formed by the letters “L” and “A” in a design that’s unmistakable to any sports fan. But the welder-artist who created it says it’s not a Dodgers bench.

“This is about civic pride, L.A. pride. I made a design statement saying that it has nothing affiliated with the Dodgers,” said Steve Campos.

Campos grew up near Dodger Stadium, raised by parents who were die-hard Dodgers fans. So much, that they named him after Steve Garvey but that legacy doesn’t keep him from confronting how the Dodgers benefitted from the mass displacement of working-class people from Chavez Ravine after World War Two. That’s why he calls it an L.A. Bench, and not a Dodgers Bench.

The logo may be synonymous with the city's beloved baseball team, but the design of the interlocking letters was used by the L.A. Angels minor league baseball team before the Dodgers moved to L.A. in 1958.

“The monogram was here before the Dodgers,” Campos said.

A second-generation welder

Welding is the Campos family business. His father created gates and security bars for windows and doors for L.A. clients. That was the foundation for the work Campos has done for two decades since graduating from Lincoln High School, L.A. Trade Tech College, and enrolling in a summer program at Art Center in Pasadena.

The inspiration for the L.A. Bench came last year while he was playing around in his shop creating versions of the L.A. logo. A friend he hangs with at Echo Park Lake asked Campos to make him a piece of furniture.

“I was trying to figure out what my friend Curly wanted. He liked Dodgers and drinking and getting into fights, so I was like, 'Let me make something with the LA monogram,'” he said.

Welder-artist Steve Campos created whimsical steel sculptures with the LA logo.

(

Courtesy Steve Campos

)

It didn’t design itself. He said he had to lengthen the legs on the “A” and lean the back of the “L” in order to make the bench functional. In the process, he’s made a piece of furniture with a ubiquitous logo that he’s embedded with his own L.A. pride, as well as city history past and present.

LA civic pride travels to Japan

Campos vacationed in Japan the last week of April and took advantage of the trip to reach out to people who may be interested in the L.A. Bench. He was caught off guard by people’s reaction when he showed them pictures of it.

“They look at it and they go, 'Oh, Ohtani bench,'” he said.

For them, it’s still a bench embedded with pride, he said, but centered around Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, an icon in his native Japan.

Campos has made four L.A. benches and is selling them fully assembled, he said, for $2,500 each — taking into account his labor and how costly the raw materials have become. For now, he’s offering the metal parts as a package for $500, which requires the buyer to purchase the wood for the seat and the back — an easy process, he said.

While he has no plans to mass produce the L.A. Bench, he does have one goal in mind that shows how hard it is for him to separate L.A. civic pride and the Dodgers.

“I would love to get a couple of them installed at Dodger Stadium,” he said.

The Venice Boardwalk after sunset has generally been a no-go zone for tourists and locals alike, as the beachside bars and restaurants close on the early side and safety is often an issue. Now, a group of artists is out to bring some vibrancy to the creative neighborhood with a series of new installations that will include live evening performances – and even a “Venice Opera House.”

“Let's play with light and let's play with sound and give people a reason to come to the Boardwalk after sundown,” said artist and entrepreneur Stefan Ashkenazy, who is curating the project and owns the buildings housing them. “I mean, let's just be open 24 hours a day.”

The concept doesn’t have an official name yet, but he’s been calling it “See World.”

Artist James Ostrer's space looks out from a bed through the fence to the ocean at Venice Beach.

(

Laura Hertzfeld

/

LAist

)

William Attaway, a longtime Venice artist, created a gallery space filled with various paintings and sculptures.

(

Laura Hertzfeld

/

LAist

)

The pair of modern buildings on the Venice Boardwalk at Thornton Ave. – with their big balconies, floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and seven open garage-style retail spaces – have sat mostly empty since Snapchat vacated their beachside offices in 2019. Ashkenazy recently bought the building and recruited artists to fill those front-facing spaces with creative work until a full-time tenant comes in.

Over the past several weeks the installations have been created in real-time, in public.

All of the projects are loosely along the theme of “home,” with each artist claiming a “room” in the two buildings that stretch across a full block on the Boardwalk. Several local Venice artists are featured, including William Attaway, whose intricate mosaic work is recognizable on the Venice public restrooms along the beach. Attaway’s space features a floating larger-than-life-sized statue and various works in a mini-gallery. In the next room is Robin Murez’s pieces, featuring carved wooden seats from her beloved neighborhood Venice Flying Carousel.

Ashkenazy is no stranger to wild (and wildly successful) art ideas. He’s the owner of the Petit Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood, a longtime haven for visiting artists, and the founder of the decade-old Bombay Beach Biennale, where artists install all kinds of work in an annual event near the Salton Sea. Many of the artists from that community are featured at the Venice project.

A "Venice Opera House" will host pop-up music events throughout the summer.

(

Laura Hertfeldz

/

LAist

)

New York-based artist Greg Haberny's paintings on the wall of his Venice space.

(

Laura Hertzfeld

/

LAist

)

New York-based artist Greg Haberny and London-based artist James Ostrer have brought some of their work in the Bombay Beach Biennale to the Venice project. Their windows on the Boardwalk both speak to a child-like sense of wonder and creativity.

“I think it's just kind of exploring and playing a little bit, to have the freedom to be able to do that,” Haberny says of his imagined child’s bedroom space, which includes a fort made out of puffy cheese balls. “It's a big space, too.
It's beautiful.”

Ostrer is experimenting with a performance art idea where he sits in bed amongst a room full of his own artwork, which he describes as “happy art with an edge.” Looking out at the ocean from the bed, he’s invited passersby to sit and have chats with him about his work or anything else they want to talk about.

“It’s a very intimate space, so you have a different kind of conversation,” he said. “I use art to channel human creativity, and [talk about] dark things.”

While there are open fences that block off the spaces, they aren’t sealed up at night. Both Ashkenazy and the team of artists seemed open to the idea that anything could happen and that the installations are a conversation with the public – and with that comes some risk.

Greg Haberny (right) works with his assistants on an installation featuring kid-inspired graffiti art and a "cheesy puff" fort.

(

Laura Hertzfeld

/

LAist

)

“I don't really know if I [would] say worried, but I guess it's just the cost of doing business,” Haberny said. “I don't really make things to get damaged or broken, sure. But I have done [things like] burned all my paintings and then made paint out of ash.”

While he’s felt safe – and even slept overnight in the installation – Ostrer has been collaborating with a local female artist who performs in a pig mask in front of his installation some nights. Watching her perform, he said, has taught him about the vulnerability of women in public spaces like the Boardwalk. “I've started to, on a very fractional level, have seen how scary that is. Because I've sat in the bed behind her performing at the front here… the way in which men are approaching her and shrieking at her … it's shocking.”

Ashkenazy says he will keep the artists in the space, potentially rotating new ones in, until a fulltime tenant takes over.

“This is an experiment … and after acquiring the building, the intention wasn't, ‘let's open a bunch of public art spaces,’ he said. “It is kind of …what the building wanted and listening to what the Boardwalk needed. Let's play, let's have the artists that we love and appreciate have a space to play and engage and give the locals and the visitors to the Boardwalk something to experience.”

A new trail across the beloved natural area of Elephant Hill in Northeast Los Angeles is officially opening this weekend.

The route is years in the making, and it's a big milestone in the decades-long conservation efforts to preserve this local jewel in the community of El Sereno.

The hiking trail connects one side of Elephant Hill to the other — from the corner of Pullman Street and Harriman Avenue all the way across to Lathrop Street.

It's 0.75 miles in total, but packs a punch.

"It's a pretty straight shot, but because of the terrain — the trail is kind of twisty and curvy. There's switchbacks — and great views," Elva Yañez, board president of the nonprofit Save Elephant Hill, said.

People have always been able to access the 110-acre green space, but Yañez said the new trail provides a safe and easy way to navigate the steep hillsides.

The El Sereno nonprofit has been working for two decades to preserve the land. Illegal dumping and off-roading have damaged the open space over the years. And the majority of the 110 acres are privately owned by an estimated 200 individual owners.

Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) joined the efforts in 2018, spurred by a $700,000 grant from Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District, in part, to build the trail. The local agency received some $2 million in grants from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to add to the 10 acres of Elephant Hill it manages and conserves. This year, MCRA acquired an additional 12 parcels — or about 2.4 acres.

And the spiffy new footpath — with trail signage, information kiosks and landscape boulders — is not just a long-sought-for victory but a beginning in a sense.

"We know that it means a lot to the community," Sarah Kevorkian, who oversees the trail project for MRCA, said. "We're wrapping up the trail, but it really feels like the beginning of all that is to come."

A hint of that vision already exists — for hikers traversing the new route, courtesy of Test Plot, the L.A.-based nonprofit that works to revitalize depleted lands.

"They're able to see at the end of the trail, at the 'test plot' — exactly what a restored Elephant Hill would look like," Yañez said.

Here's a preview:

A coalition of residents from across the San Gabriel Valley are mobilizing over a battery storage project and possibly more industrial development in the City of Industry they say could pollute communities next door.

A protest is scheduled today in neighboring Rowland Heights, targeting a 400-megawatt battery energy storage facility sited on about 9 acres that was approved by the City of Industry leaders in January.

Such Battery Energy Storage Systems, or BESS, are used to keep the power grid stable, especially as output from renewable energy sources like solar and wind fluctuate. But fires involving lithium batteries at some sites have heightened environmental and public health fears.

Because of the City of Industry’s unusual, sprawling shape stretching along the 60 Freeway, it borders on more than a dozen communities, meaning what happens there can have far-reaching impact.

“Pollution does not end right at the border,” said Andrew Yip, an organizer with No Data Centers SGV Coalition. “Pollution travels.”

Some local activists with the Puente Hills Community Preservation Association have challenged the approval of the battery facility under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Beyond environmental concerns, locals have also been frustrated with how decisions are made by officials in the City of Industry, a municipality that’s almost entirely zoned for industrial use and has less than 300 residents.

Organizers say they’ve struggled to get direct responses from city officials whom they say have replaced regular meetings with special meetings, which under state law require less advance notice.

A city spokesperson has not responded to requests for comment.

The so-called Marici Energy Storage System Facility would be run by Aypa Power. The fact that the battery storage developer is owned by the private equity giant Blackstone, a major investor in AI and data centers, has only fueled concerns that a battery storage facility would lay the groundwork for data center development.

A request for comment from Aypa was not returned.

Today’s protest is taking place at Peter F. Schabarum Regional Park in Rowland Heights across the street from the Puente Hills Mall, a largely vacant “dead” mall, which activists fear could be redeveloped into a data center and bring higher utility costs and greater air and noise pollution.

Yip pointed out that industrial developments make a lot of money for the City of Industry.

“But none of these surrounding communities receive any of those benefits,” Yip said. “Yet we have to put up with all the harmful effects and impacts from this city that does all this development without really reaching out.”