Tacoma Port to Drop Blair Waterway Condemnation Suits

Now that the Port of Tacoma has canceled the redevelopment of the Blair-Hylebos Peninsula, including a major new terminal for NYK Line, the port is seeking to drop condemnation lawsuits against property owners still remaining on the peninsula.

When first announced in 2007, the Blair Waterway redevelopment project, including the NYK Terminal, was originally estimated by the port to cost about $800 million. By the time the project was canceled in late 2009, the cost of the development project had risen to $1.2 billion. In the end the port wound up spending $190 million into the deal– $146 million on the purchase of real estate along the peninsula and $38 million for design, planning and staff time.

As the development project got underway, the port aggressively tried to buy up just under 140 acres of property on the peninsula, eventually approving the use of eminent domain to obtain some of the needed parcels that were in private hands.

In all the port wound up filing condemnation suits against all of the 23 landowners on the peninsula. While it settled with 19 of the landowners, four holdouts remained including owners of the former CleanCare site, owners of Graymont Lime, owners of the former Occidental Chemical site and owners of Philips Environmental Services. These four properties cumulatively total 70 acres, or nearly 60 percent of the port's desired redevelopment project property.

The port commission voted last week to dismiss the four outstanding condemnation lawsuits, though the port's Real Estate Director, Jack Hedge pointed out that the port is in final negotiations with all four property owners to purchase their properties.

Bellingham Port Ready to Search for New Top Exec

File this under "the first step is the hardest."

Washington state Port of Bellingham commissioners have decided to move forward with finding a replacement for Jim Darling, who resigned from the $126,000 per year post more than eight months ago.

Port officials said that 12 executive search firms have bid on a contract to conduct a search for the new director. Commissioners are expected to trim the list of bidders down to three to five finalists during their regular public meeting on Feb. 16. Following interviews with the finalists, a winner will be named with the search beginning shortly thereafter.

At least one member of the port commission is hopeful that a executive director could be hired by May.

Others are hesitant to pick a new director when two of the three commissioners face elections in November.

LA/LB Ports Get New Security Tools

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department unveiled several new pieces of technology Wednesday that it claims will help protect the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

The new tools, being paid for by the United States Department of Homeland Security, include a cargo-screening ship, a radiation-detecting helicopter module and a chemical/biological agent-sniffing dog.

The $3 million ship, thought to be the first of its kind, is outfitted with special sensors to inspect cargo through the hulls of cargo vessels being escorted into the harbor. Also equipped with sonar and an underwater robot to search the hulls of incoming vessels below the water line, the new Sheriff vessel is staffed with explosives experts and can transmit sensor data in real time to shore-based enforcement agents.

The new $220,000 helicopter module fits on existing Sheriff helicopters and can detect radiation material aboard cargo vessels before they enter the harbor.

The new tools will not replace the more advanced inspection techniques that already exist on-dock, such as radiation portal monitors at terminal gates.

The Sheriff is just one of the agencies responsible for homeland security in the port area. Others include the police forces of both ports, police forces from both port cities, the US Coast Guard, and the US Customs and Border Protection.

NOL Reports Record Loss In 2009, Likely Down Through Middle Of 2010

Singapore-based Neptune Orient Lines Ltd., parent to ocean carrier APL, Ltd., said that instability in rates, sluggish volumes and higher fuel costs may make the firm unprofitable in the first half of 2010. 

NOL Chief Executive Officer Ron Widdows told reporters Thursday that unless the market turns around dramatically it is likely the firm will see losses in the first six months of the year.

The prediction came as NOL reported a record annual loss for 2009 and a fifth straight quarterly loss. NOL reported a 30 percent drop in revenue for 2009, ending the year $741 million in the red. The firm reported an $83 million net profit for 2008.

During the fourth quarter of 2009, NOL saw revenue fall 12 percent to $2 billion, with a net loss of $211 million compared to a $149 million loss in the fourth quarter of 2008. This was just over $80 million more than Wall Street analysts had predicted.

Widdows noted that it was too early to tell if the firm's 28 percent fourth quarter jump in cargo volume will sustain.

“It is early days and we have had a dramatic development in the market,” said Widdows. “If you had bet your pay check a month ago, you would have had a hard time predicting that demand would be as strong as it has been.”

Widdows said that NOL's losses were mainly the result of a 25 percent drop in the revenue per container vessel as falling worldwide demand and a glut of capacity drove rates below operating costs.

During 2009, NOL traffic fell to 4.6 million TEUs.

The firm's core shipping business accounted for the vast majority of the annual losses and NOL reported that the firm's terminals and logistics businesses remained profitable.

Guam Port Writes Off $1.5M Spent on Scrapped Wharf Plan

An abandoned plan to construct an $83 million deep water wharf at the commercial port of Guam wound up costing the United States federal government $1.3 million and the Port Authority of Guam $200,000 in preliminary work, according to a 2009 audit released Monday by the federal government.

While port officials still remain open to the idea of building the wharf, the project became untenable as the port was forced to reevaluate and redirect available funds toward the impending US military buildup on the island.

The port is undergoing a rapid expansion as it prepares for US government’s transfer of all military operations and personnel from Okinawa, Japan to Guam set to start this year. In May 2009, Guam’s Governor Felix Camacho signed an estimated $195 million 2007 Master Plan outlining the PAG’s long-term modernization plans in light of the impending military buildup. The $13 billion relocation of 8,000 US Marines and 9,000 dependents from Okinawa is expected to increase traffic through the Guam port by more than 100 percent, an increase that many fear the current infrastructure at the port will not be able to handle without the modernization efforts.

While the deep water wharf project, first contemplated in 2002 and set to be located near the commercial Guam port, was envisioned to service large vessels like aircraft carriers, the US military now prefers such a wharf to be located in the inner harbor away from the commercial Guam port.

Once the decision to focus on the military buildup was made, the PAG was forced to write off the $200,000 in port revenue already spent on the deep-water wharf project. The $1.3 million in federal funds spent on the project were allocated in 2002 from a $1.5 million grant award from the Economic Development Administration of the US Department of Commerce.

The audit also found that the PAG is currently waiting for nearly $100 million in federal grants and loans required to begin the $200 million in upgrades called for in the commercial port modernization plan.

tags: Port Authority of Guam, Guam

DOT Chief Addresses First National Port Summit

The nation's top transportation official, speaking to a gathering of United States port officials on Friday, said that the agency believes the nation's maritime hubs can play a central role in the overall economic recovery.

US Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood also announced a $600 million investment grant program aimed at helping port authorities and other local entities achieve the goal.

"I consider the ports to be the real economic engines all over America," said the Secretary.

LaHood's comments came at the first National Port Summit, a two-day event, organized by the federal government, which drew nearly 100 officials from more than 50 domestic port authorities.

The goal of the summit was to figure out ways to create and fund a national port system, much like the domestic system for ground freight movement.

"People have got to be willing to set aside their own agendas and own egos and work together," said LaHood.

Port of San Diego President/CEO Charlie Wurster told the attendees that while the 361 ports in the US compete with each other for market share, they have a collective interest in a national port system.

"We're talking about the infrastructure to make the goods flow better across the wharf and into our transportation networks of either rail or highway," said Wurster.

Attendees at the summit will submit recommendations developed at the event to the DOT for further consideration.

tags: DOT, Port of San Diego

NRF-Led Coalition Urges DOT to Block F4A Changes

A confederation of 31 retail, shipping and business industry groups has urged the United States Department of Transportation in writing to oppose moves by several port, labor and environmental groups to change federal trucking de-regulation laws.

"While we strongly support efforts to improve air quality and port security in and around America's ports, the effort to undermine federal preemption of interstate commerce is an attempt to overturn losses in the federal courts restricting local regulation of truck drayage services," the National Retail Federation, writing on behalf of the other industry groups, said in the letter. "If successful, these efforts will not improve air quality or port security in and around the nation's ports, but will re-impose a fragmented, local patchwork regulatory structure on foreign and interstate commerce, contrary to the US Constitution and acts of Congress."

The National Retail Federation, writing on behalf of the other groups, urged DOT Secretary Ray LaHood to resist Congressional lobbying efforts by several ports including Los Angeles and New Jersey/New York to change the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (F4A) of 1994, which give the federal government sole authority when it comes to motor carrier routes, rates and services. As part of the federal government's de-regulation of the trucking industry that began in the late 1970s, the F4A language was passed to prevent the creation of a patchwork of local regulations much like that which existed prior to de-regulation.

The national lobbying effort to change F4A was started by the Port of Los Angeles last year after several federal court decisions prevented port officials from imposing employee-only labor regulations on local drayage truckers. The regulations were part of a truck program that began development in 2006 as an effort to upgrade the drayage fleet and cut diesel emissions. Political intervention soon morphed the truck program from a clean air program into a social engineering effort that sought to completely transform the labor component of the local trucking industry and in doing so make it easier for drivers to be unionized. Two federal courts later determined that the port could not mandate such regulations, citing federal preemption of interstate commerce.

"The Port of Los Angeles, the National Resources Defense Council, and the [International Brotherhood of] Teamsters seek to expand the exceptions to federal preemption legislatively in order to accomplish by statute an objective that the Courts found to be currently unlawful," said the NRF letter. "In fact, the Court of Appeals recognized that federal preemption of interstate trucking services was designed to prevent a patchwork of burdensome state and local trucking rules as would be created by the Port of Los Angeles’ concession plan."

Proponents of the lobbying effort, such as the NRDC, the Teamsters and the ports, believe that the sixteen-year-old F4A is "archaic" and "outdated" legislation and should be changed to allow local authorities to set environmental, labor, and safety/security regulation for locally-servicing trucks.