Date: Thursday, January 22, 2009 Re:  Clean Truck Program Fee starts Feb 18, 2009 for LA/LB ports As reported by the Agriculture Transportation Coalition (AgTC) Effective February 18, 2009 the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach ports will implement the Clean Truck Fee of $70/FEU and $35/TEU .   The terminal operators have created PortCheck to collect the fee from the cargo owners.  The fee is payable be either credit card or electronic funds transfer and must be paid prior to containers being released or entering the port terminals.  Cargo owners that are already registered in the PierPass offpeak terminal access system will automatically uploaded into PortCheck; however, they must accept the terms and conditions of PortCheck before their account will be extended into the system.    The Clean Trucks Fee is expected to raise about $1 million a day or about $1 billion over the next few years at both San Pedro Bay ports to help finance the replacement of many of the 17,000 trucks that are a leading source of air pollution in Southern California. Pre-1989 trucks have been banned under the Clean Trucks Program. On January 1, 2010, model year 1993 and older trucks will be banned, as will un-retrofitted 1994 to 2003 trucks. By January 2012 all pre-2007 trucks will be banned.  The Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) has filed a lawsuit to block the employee driver mandate as anti-competitive.  The U.S. District Court Judge will not rule until sometime in 2009 so the ports are proceeding with the program.  Cargo owners can visit the PortCheck page at http://www.portcheck.org/ or http://www.pierpass-tmf.org/ for updates.