METRANS congratulates Dr. Geraldine Knatz, Professor of the Practice of Policy and Engineering, a joint appointment between the USC Price School of Public Policy and the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, on being awarded a research grant of $49,117 from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. The grant will be managed by the Price School.

The Haynes Foundation issues up to $3 million each year in grants and scholarships for social science research in the Los Angeles region, in fields such as economics, demographics, local governance, safety, natural resource use, and transportation. The foundation has been distributing grants since its founding in 1926, favoring studies that are likely to influence future policy. 

Knatz plans to use her grant funds to compile, in her words, an “authoritative history of the evolution of the Port of Los Angeles, focusing on strategies used to set policy, confront and overcome hurdles (at times with only partial success)” over the course of its first sixty years, 1907 to 1967. Each thematic section of the work will introduce direct ties between past and present issues.

Strong political leadership within both port and city governance in its foundational years were behind the Port of LA’s tremendous success as a global freight hub from the mid-twentieth century to today. But no single paper source exists to comprehensively document the lessons learned from past port administrative decisions. 

 A thorough understanding of the governmental history of the Port of LA is a necessity for modern-day decisions about port management; as Knatz states, “the challenges faced today…are no bigger, nor more significant and possibly even the same as those faced in the past.” This new research can hopefully eliminate redundancy in future policy creation and in turn inspire innovative, sustainable solutions to age-old challenges.

 Dr. Knatz has ample career experience to inform her on this project. She served as the executive director of the Port of Los Angeles from 2006 to 2014, and before that was the managing director of the Port of Long Beach, since 1999. She also served as the 2008-09 Chair of the American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA). In Fall 2014, she taught a Special Topics course in the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy on Seaport Policy and Management. 

 All winners of the Haynes Foundation transportation research grant since 2003 have been professors from UCLA and USC. METRANS researchers USC Price Professor Marlon Boarnet and former USC Price Assistant Professor Jenny Schuetz (now Economist, Consumer and Community Development Research Section, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System) were recipients of this same grant in 2012 and 2013, respectively. 

Griffin Kantz

Griffin (no relation to Dr. Knatz) is a third year undergraduate studying Sustainable Planning in the USC Price School of Public Policy. He can be reached at [email protected]