Los Angeles City Council member Tim McOsker, who was born and raised in San Pedro, now represents his hometown as well as the rest of the city's 15th District, which includes the Harbor Gateway, Harbor City, Wilmington and Watts.

Known to locals as “the one-five”, the diverse 15th District is home to more than 265,000 residents. It’s also home to the Port of LA, which has been the busiest container port in the country for more than 20 years.

Workers processed almost 2 million containers in the first three months of 2023. McOsker addressed concerns about the need to clean up emissions from the port while maintaining the jobs there and its other economic benefits. This includes the Clean Air Action Plan, which will cut emissions from trucks.

“In the Council District 15, we have the Port of Los Angeles, which is this amazing economic engine for the region and the world, really," he said. "But it also is a place that creates an undue amount of environmental damage. And those environmental damages range from the large-scale damage of just burning fuels that steam across the ocean, but also traffic through our neighborhoods. And so it's critically important for us in the Port of Los Angeles that we protect great jobs, that we make sure that we protect those jobs, we make sure that we keep goods moving, but we need to keep working with the port and working with our communities to bring down the environmental harms.”

McOsker is also involved in a proposal to speed up response times for 911 calls in an effort to improve public safety and staffing of city services.

“When folks pick up the phone and they call 911, they expect someone reasonably to be able to answer the phone and to competently send out that dispatch," he said. "If we don't have enough operators, we can have delays. And a 20-second delay or a 30-second delay can mean life or death, of course. We also know that that job is going to get more complicated as we move from what are called armed responses to unarmed responses because that's the intake system for all of those public safety service requests. And so what we have done is we have asked the personnel department and the police department and those operators to get back to give us the mechanisms, the ways that we can recruit, train quickly and get folks at those desks.”

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