Bellingham port hopes to reactivate its cargo terminal

Port of Bellingham commissioners hope to revive their long-dormant deep-water shipping terminal to create both jobs and port revenue, Bellinghamherald reports.


The cargo terminal at the end of Cornwall Avenue isn't deep enough or spacious enough to accommodate the kind of vessels and cargoes envisioned for the Gateway Pacific terminal at Cherry Point. It could, however, handle smaller, specialized shipments such as structural steel products or even wind turbine components.


But getting Bellingham back into the shipping business after years of absence will be complex and potentially expensive.


"We're back at ground zero," said Darren Williams, a spokesman for Local 7 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, at a recent port commission meeting. "We don't have anything to ramp up. What we do have is a facility."


In the 1980s, that facility at the end of Cornwall Avenue bustled with outgoing cargoes of Georgia-Pacific Corp. wood pulp and Alcoa Intalco Works aluminum. G-P also shipped in barge loads of salt for its chemical processes, and logs were exported, too, at times. The activity generated port revenues that helped subsidize other port operations for decades.


But then the shipping world changed. The U.S. was importing increased volumes of manufactured goods from Asia, and those shipments arrived in truck-and-rail-ready cargo containers handled at big, specialized ports. Shippers offered cheap rates to fill those containers on the return trip to Asia, and the local cargoes began to bypass Bellingham.


In any event, G-P's pulp mill shut down in 2001, and in 2005 the port took over G-P's real estate and began to work with the city on plans to find new uses for both the G-P land and the adjoining cargo terminal area.


In the early phase of the planning process, some talked as though the entire area from Roeder Avenue to the end of Cornwall might blossom into a new urban neighborhood within 20 years. Port and city officials also had high hopes that they could get the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to move its regional home port here and base its big research vessels at the shipping terminal.


But NOAA chose Newport, Ore., instead, and in the wake of the real estate bust, it appears unlikely that the acreage around the shipping terminal will be ripe for redevelopment within 25 years. Instead, port and city officials are focusing redevelopment efforts on the northeastern section of the old G-P property, closer to downtown.


That means there's no alternative use now on the horizon for the shipping terminal, and port commissioners and Dan Stahl, marine services director, are focusing on finding cargo again.


Stahl said he's been prospecting for cargo business all along, trying to pick off the occasional special-purpose cargo shipment that might find Bellingham convenient. But in recent years, there have been only near misses.


At their Tuesday, May 3, meeting, commissioners agreed to spend $25,000 to hire an economic consultant, BST Associates, to identify local shipping opportunities that would be worth pursuing.


In the short term, Stahl said he's had to try to find inbound cargoes that could be unloaded here using the vessel's onboard gear, since the port has no cargo-handling equipment of its own.


But competition for cargoes is intense among the 14 deep-water ports in Washington and Oregon, Stahl said, because most of those ports, like Bellingham, have seen their traditional cargoes disappear. That means they are all hungry for business.


The ideal cargo might be some product that would also undergo some manufacturing after it arrives here. Stahl said a few years ago, he had hoped to lure a steel coil importer here. The company would unload the steel here, then use local workers to cut the coils to custom lengths for customers. But that deal never materialized.


In the next year or two, Stahl said he expects to be able to improve the rail link between the pier and the BNSF main line by constructing a new rail spur. Half the cost of that project will be covered with state pollution cleanup money, because the spur is being built to enable tainted sediments to be loaded on rail cars for shipment to the approved landfills as the old G-P property is cleaned up.


Once the cleanup work is done, the spur will be available to serve marine cargo.


At this point, that project is still in the study phase. The port is spending $80,000 to develop that design and estimate costs, with the state money covering half the amount.


As of today, the port still gets some revenue from the terminal because Horizon Lines is paying more than $900 a day to park an idled vessel there. That covers day-to-day expenses, but the terminal needs millions of dollars in piling replacement work that won't be available unless more revenue sources can be found.


"We're not hemorrhaging on a daily basis, but we've got some deferred maintenance we need to get at," Stahl said. "We need to find a user for the terminal."
(Source:http://en.portnews.ru)