Port of LA Wants Local Colleges Teaching Zero-Emission Repair

POLA TEACH, paid for by a federal EPA Clean Ports grant, aims to add zero-emission repair to the diesel mechanic classes schools already teach.

College program directors rode a harbor tour boat, then visited Yusen Terminals at the Port of Los Angeles to see machines their students may someday fix.

The outing was the first in-person meeting of POLA TEACH, the port's new effort to get schools teaching people how to run, maintain and repair zero-emission trucks and cargo-handling gear, Random Lengths News reported Wednesday. L.A. Unified, the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office, Los Angeles Harbor College, L.A. Trade-Tech, Long Beach City College and El Camino College were all there, along with terminal operators and labor. The group had only met online before, at a kickoff in October 2025.

The money comes from the port's U.S. EPA Clean Ports Grant, according to the port's own workforce page. The plan is simple: schools already run diesel mechanic courses, so add zero-emission repair to them. The port also says getting to the harbor keeps a lot of would-be workers out, which is why it wants community colleges across the state carrying the training.

This isn't the port's first try at schooling its own workforce. In 2017 the state gave it one of California's first High Road Training Partnership grants, and with the longshore union and the Pacific Maritime Association it built a simulator to teach workers how to lash shipping containers. The port says that partnership kept going after the grant ran out.

The catch this time is that the classes are being written for a fleet that's barely here. At the ports' clean-air update this summer, 559 battery-electric trucks made up about 3.1% of trucks registered in the Clean Trucks Program, Random Lengths News reported in August. Hydrogen fuel cell trucks were under 1%.

That's a small fleet to learn on. It's also a reason to start now, before thousands of these machines need somebody who knows how to open them up.

Next come quarterly meetings, each built around one kind of zero-emission equipment. At each one, the people who build, run, own and already fix that equipment will brief the educators. The bigger classroom comes later: a 20-acre goods movement training facility the port is developing with the longshore union, the Pacific Maritime Association and the California Workforce Development Board, which Random Lengths News described as a joint project with Long Beach projected to open in 2029.

Source: randomlengthsnews.com, retrieved October 29, 2026. Other sources: portoflosangeles.org, randomlengthsnews.com (2).