The Supreme Court’s decision earlier this month striking down
state laws prohibiting interstate shipment of wine is a
bitter-sweet development for local wineries.
Editor,
The Supreme Court’s decision earlier this month striking down state laws prohibiting interstate shipment of wine is a bitter-sweet development for local wineries. Since there is no intermodal facility on the Central California Coast region, those wineries, who can now legally ship into states previously closed to them, face the logistic hurdle of unaffordable trailer-load rates quoted by truck brokers. If, however, they had an intermodal option in this region, new markets would be open and new sales achieved.
Like Union Pacific’s announcement two years ago this week that they are spending millions of dollars to purchase 500 new refrigerated box cars equipped with satellite tracking devices, giving UP a total of 5,500 reefer cars, local government transport planning failures give us bitter news for San Benito County’s ag shippers. Thanks to the Council of Government’s near sightedness, with the closest team track located in Watsonville, SBC’s shippers of ag commodities who order a car to load, must truck their tonnage over local highways to the loading point in Watsonville, with all the extra expense of hauling it over the road.
Not only does this place local ag at a competitive disadvantage, it increases highway congestion, air pollution and road maintenance expenses. With Congress getting ready to relax the freeze on long combination vehicles, loosen hours of service limits on commercial truck drivers and harmonize gross vehicle weight at one of our NAFTA partner’s level, one can easily picture what this means to highway safety advocates and motorists.
COG’s directors spend millions of taxpayers’ dollars on such things as bike paths and empty transit buses, but they ignore the benefits that a team track and an intermodal facility could yield. Just imagine the jobs that COG’s directors could save our county. COG’s directors rather that we have more empty buses and bike paths than jobs for our residents at local shippers and SBC’s no. 1 employer, agriculture. Caveat Viator!
Joe Thompson, Tres Pinos
