RANDOM LENGTHS NEWS
Kari Gehring/The Denver Post and Diane Sylvain (High Country News)ill.
Here in the harbor, some interesting specifics stand out about this man's growing empire. First, his oil company is one of four who have teamed up to build the new Pacific Pipeline Services Inc. (PPSI) oil pipeline through Los Angeles that follows the Alameda Corridor intermodal transportation project to its terminus on Terminal Island. The pipeline will be equipped, conveniently enough, with state of the arts fiberoptics lines: a selling point to government agencies at the time when it was up for approval in 1996, as they would have access to these lines for their own purposes. The other three oil companies involved in the project are Chevron (the main supplier of petroleum coke for the Los Angeles Export Terminal), Unocal, and Texaco. Anschutz corporation, however, owns 85% of the PPSI, Chevron 10%, while the others are only minimally involved. the project has not escaped charges of environmental racism, and the California Public Utilities Commission's (CPUC) environmental impact review admits that sticking with existing pipelines would be better for biological and cultural resources, would involve less environmental contamination, and would preserve geological resources and soil. However, the CPUC approved the project wholeheartedly. The CPUC was also a major supporter of the railroad merger [see below].
But Anschutz has never been mistaken for an environmentalist. Several years ago, he ran up against a threatened 30 million dollar fine from the EPA in his hometown of Denver for bulldozing protected wetlands to expand his private golf course.
Of greater interest yet, although perhaps a bit speculative, is his role in the sordid affair of the "tangle in the harbor" situation [see "Tangle In The Harbor," R. L. Vol XVIII, No.23, 10/31-11/13/97]. For those who missed it, a little over a year ago, Union Pacific (UP), the West's largest railroad, absorbed the second largest railroad, Anschutz' Southern Pacific (SP). The governmental shenanigans that allowed this clear transgression of anti-trust business standards (it required the shifting of authority on the matter to the three-member Surface Transportation Board) were due in do small part to the influence of Anschutz-funded Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole. Anschutz had run SP into the ground, taking a bad company and making it worse; yet, he made astronomical personal profits by means of clever stock maneuvers even before the merger. Southern Pacific was also a means to an entirely different end for Anschutz: by laying fiberoptic cable along 12,000 miles of SP track, he transformed his Qwest communications from a small local carrier to perhaps the next national communications monolith.
In the aftermath of the merger, we have a massive, basically monopolistic Union Pacific responsible for 90% of the freight west of the Mississippi. Anschutz is in the driver's seat, as the largest individual stockholder and vice chairman of the board. the new company has had its struggles on the front lines, and Standard and Poor's recently demoted the company in its ratings system outlook from stable to negative. It is tough to decipher at this point the specifics of Anschutz' interest in UP, but one can imagine the expanded fiberoptics access which UP's 40,000 miles of track give him.
The UP itself has an obvious stake in the Alameda Corridor whose tracks it will control now that a financial relation to Pacific Harbor Lines (PHL) has been finalized. The contract between this newly created rail operator for the port and the freight train monolith was ushered through by the Harbor Commission last month.
Anschutz isn't about to take over the world. But his subtle presence in the wide variety of projects that are defining the L. A. Harbor's industrial future should probably not be overlooked. His contributions to the Republican Party, at the same time, provide a grim reminder of the overlap between big business and our "civil servants".